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13. Maternally Yours: The Emotion Work of "Maternal Visibility"
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171 Maternally Yours the emotion work of “maternal visibility” Anita Ilta Garey Sharon Baker was poised and articulate as I interviewed her about her experience of being a “working mother,” and, after telling me about her work, her future plans, her husband, and her children, she summed up by saying: Those are the things I feel good about. All of them. It’s like I want to give 100 percent to every aspect. I want to be 100 percent nurse, 100 percent community health nurse, 100 percent neighbor, community person, 100 percent wife, 100 percent mother—and that’s hard. But that’s what I want to do. And I feel like I do bits and pieces of it, enough to make a difference. I naturally feel like I make a difference in my kids’ life. I hope my husband enjoys marriage as much as I do [laughs]. And I like having a job, having a family and having my husband. They’re all interactive. I mean it’s a triangle.1 Sharon, a thirty-four-year-old African American registered nurse with a fulltime job, a husband, and three children, ages one, four, and seven years, thus presents herself as successfully balancing all the parts of her many roles: professional , citizen, wife, and mother. I’ll call this “version 1” of Sharon’s presentation of herself as a working mother. When we came to the end of the interview, I asked Sharon if there was anything she wanted to add. At that point, she presented version 2: No, sounds like you hit all the points, all the major points anyway. [Long pause.] I don’t know. I was just thinking as I’m talking about everything, I don’t know how it sounds when it sounds like everything is just going along. But I go crazy half of the time, and I try not to. There are some times when I have to sit down and tell myself: “It’s gonna be okay. It’s gonna be okay.” c h a p t e r 1 3 v Almost as if my brain is slipping out of my head and I’m trying to tell myself and talk to myself: “It’s gonna be fine.” Paying the bills is added into all that. There’s just all these little things, folding the clothes and five people in the house, there’s a lot of clothes. Going grocery shopping and the weekends and the beeper. . . . It’s not just the money to pay the bills, but actually physically sitting down and siphoning through and which one, juggling and—I don’t know. It feels crazy sometimes. In version 1, Sharon portrays her life as organized, efficient, well run, and happy; and she presents herself as a competent, in-control, and contented working mother. This was not an invalid image, but it was not a complete image either. In version 2, Sharon added something she had suppressed, or even misrepresented, in her first version: how she feels as she juggles the demands, tasks, and people in her life. It should not be surprising that, until the end of the interview, Sharon’s story did not include her feeling of “going crazy” trying to do everything. In the case of women with children, to suggest that something is not going right is to question their performance as mothers, and the feeling of “going crazy” is not in line with social expectations about what mothers are supposed to feel. In this chapter, I explore how employed women manage emotion in presenting themselves as mothers. Maternal Visibility Women use various strategies to indicate to others that they are “good” mothers—that is, that they are doing what mothers are supposed to do. They perform certain mother-appropriate actions; they attach to those actions meanings that validate themselves as mothers; and they tell other people about their actions (Garey 1999). Mothers who are employed feel particularly vulnerable to criticism of their performance as mothers because, in the United States, employment and motherhood are portrayed as detracting one from the other (Garey 1999). One of the ways that mothers deal with this implicit criticism is by what I define as “maternal visibility.” Maternal visibility is the attempt to call attention to or emphasize one’s performance of motherhood (Garey 1999, 29). It can be accomplished in a variety of ways: by the public performance of certain activities , such as being the “field-trip mom...