Myra’s Predicament: Motherhood Dilemmas for Migrant Care Workers

In this article, I examine the struggle of East European female migrants to reconcile their deeply held values about good mothering practices with the imperative of leaving their families to work abroad. Over the last 20 years, the concept of intensive motherhood has gained significant traction as an ideal and a norm, not only in Western care worker receiving countries, but also in post-socialist Eastern European migrant sending countries. This is surprising given that, during state socialism, the co-breadwinner model in combination with state support from cradle to grave was favored over the “bourgeois” male breadwinner and housewife model. With the case study of a Ukrainian shuttle migrant to Poland, I demonstrate that the emerging motherhood ideal has become a growing problem for circular migrants who leave their home, children, spouses and elderly parents behind. These workers are caught in dilemmas as the necessity of leaving their children behind to generate an income for their families is incompatible with an ideal of good motherhood that emphasizes the primacy of the mother–child bond, requires physical closeness, and condemns long absences from home.