A Child on Her Mind: The Experience of Becoming a Mother

by Vangie Bergum

Overview

Stories of women who mother are central to this book. The women come to mothering through birth and adoption, as birth mothers, placing mothers, adopting mothers and teen mothers. Woven between the women's narratives, the author offers reflective commentary intended to show the mothering experience in its complexity—bodily, culturally, and as the rootbed of relationship. Using phenomenological research, Bergum brings the mothering experience to light—as it is lived—exploring themes of love and pain, responsibility, belonging, choice, transformation, and quickening of the moral impulse to attend to the child. Bergum's intent is to encourage thoughtful reflection about what is learned through mothering—by women and by society—in order to create and sustain a society that is good for children and the women who mother them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780897894470
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	01/14/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.44(d)

About the Author

Vangie Bergum, PhD, is Professor in The Bioethics Centre and the Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta. She is principal investigator of the Ethics of Nurturance Research Project which produced the video and, they want a child (University of Alberta, 1996). She is the author of numerous works, including Woman to Mother: A Transformation (Bergin & Garvey, 1989).

Table of Contents

Introduction
Becoming Mother
Mothers Giving Birth
Adoption's Two Mothers
Teen Mothers
The Way of the Mother
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Dr. John B. Dossetor

Vangie Bergum explores [the mother/child] relationships through the narrative voice of the women in her research—a methodology for the "science of wisdom," distinct and different from the reductionist science of reproduction and obstetrics . . . Seen from this perspective, our whole health care involvement in the birthing of children takes on a very different slant. The technology of delivery is diminished... by the horizons of this broader vision. The narratives challenge us to reflect about this self/other relationship and the light it could throw on those other complex relationships that concern us in delivery of health care, as well as how it should inform and transform our thinking about our still largely patriarchal society.

Jeffrey A. Nisker

A Child on Her Mind is an important compassion conveyer for health care professionals, especially those who cannot approach true empathy with being pregnant, birthing, or placing, either because of being male or being a woman who has not yet or has chosen not to experience mothering.

Professor Lesley Page

This book will be of interest to...all who care about the moral imperative which mother love provides, to those thinking of adopting or giving up for adoption, for those who care for women and their families around the time of birth, and parents, midwives, doctors, nurses, social workers, and health care leaders. In short, the book will be of interest to all who care about the state of the world, and the crucial foundation of human caring, espcially mother love.

Sally Gadow

I know few researchers as deeply respectful of women's experience as Vangie Bergum. She describes mothering as a moral posture of being-for-the-other, as a life in which at least a corner—if not the center—of a woman's consciousness is irreversibly turned toward her child. The originality of Bergum's work is the proposal that mothering is an archetype of moral experience in which responsibility and reciprocity are linked. Reading the stories here and Bergum's delicate interpretations is itself a moral 'quickening.' I am profoundly grateful that she keeps wondering and worrying and writing about mothers and moral relationship.

Editorial Reviews

The voices of a rich diversity of women who share the transformative experience of becoming mothers are the basis of Bergum's intensely emotional contribution to parenting literature. The themes of mothering as choice and responsibility, as love and pain, and, ultimately, as transformation emerge from accounts of mothers who give birth, two mothers connected by adoption, and teen mothers, as well as from consideration of the universal mother. . . . [A] lyrical, moving essay. . . . [Bergum's] writing is provocative and compelling.” —Booklist

“Bergum shines brightest in her final chapter, The Way of the Mother. Here she does an artful job of drawing out the commonalities in the varied experiences of motherhood described by the diverse group of women she has interviewed, and she makes an eloquent case for motherhood as the basis of a morality of responsibility.” —Jourbanal of the Association for Research on Mothering

From the Publisher