Ideal, good enough and failed motherhood: how disabled Canadian mothers manage in hostile circumstances

Introduction This chapter draws on narrative interviews with 44 disabled women from the province of Alberta in Canada regarding their experiences as disabled mothers. The interview approach is firmly situated in narrative studies and feminist standpoint theory, inviting women to tell their stories in loosely structured ways, based on the understanding that women are best situated to speak to the workings of power in their own lives (Toole, 2021). Although these stories come from one province, they reflect broader experiences of disabled women in Canada, as research nationally indicates that the issues disabled mothers face are depressingly similar across provincial boundaries (Track, 2014; Burlock, 2017). The stories presented here were selected to illustrate commonalities and key differences among the original research participants; a brief biography for each of the seven women whose stories are presented is provided at the end of this chapter. Ideal motherhood and disability Feminists have exposed the purportedly private and natural experience of motherhood as a political and social institution. Starting with women themselves, feminists have built a strong body of research that characterises ‘ideal motherhood’ as a socially constructed set of normative expectations that place mothers under increasing demands to be knowledgeable experts on childrearing, limitlessly focused upon and available to their children, and fully responsible for any ills or imperfections that may befall them (Hays, 1996; Malacrida, 2009; Lankes, 2022). Thus, on the one hand, ideal motherhood is characterised as next to sacred, with the future of nations and generations resting in the hands of an omniscient, endlessly nurturant and selfless woman. On the other, ‘bad’ mothers are often characterised as the architects of social, economic, psychological and moral problems, not only for their children but for the nation state, when their mothering fails to live up to those heroic expectations (Ladd-Taylor and Umansky, 1998; Ramsay, 2016). These expectations and anxieties privatise and individualise the work of childbearing and rearing to individual women, while simultaneously providing minimal collective or public support to women in accomplishing that work. The expectations of ideal motherhood are such that any woman will struggle to satisfy them. However, for disabled mothers, living up to these normative demands is particularly fraught, not because disabled women cannot mother superlatively, but because the barriers to parenthood begin for women long before conception, and are challenged thereafter in multiple and systemic ways (Malacrida, 2007).

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