This book compiles findings from a study based on personal testimonies and extensive interviews. The two authors, drawn to disability issues through family and professional experience and long committed to women's concerns, conducted these interviews through a feminist lens with a specific aim: does mothering a "different" child—an experience that upends a mother's life entirely—also shatter the traditional frameworks that ordinarily shape how she lives as a woman? (By traditional frameworks, they mean the subordinate role toward husband and society, confinement within domestic walls, self-consumption for children's sake, even blind willingness to sacrifice, and suppression of her own desire for rest and pleasure—all experienced not as free, personal choice but in obedience to the expectations of her surroundings.)
The study's conclusion is stark: mothering a "different" child does not alter a woman's adherence to these frameworks. If anything, it intensifies and exacerbates them.
The authors argue the cause lies not primarily in the exceptional family situation created by a child with disabilities, which demands extra reserves of "feminine qualities." The deeper reason is more universal.
The violence of suffering and the weight of problems that crash down on the mother render her peculiarly insecure, fragile, desperate for help. Her very identity is threatened; the image she holds of herself fractures. Yet this mother will receive little genuine support, and whatever she gets comes with conditions—she must remain faithful to others' expectations. By forcing down the urge to rebel against those frameworks and stepping fully into her traditional role, she manages to mend the relationship with her husband (itself teetering), according to the conventional script: the strong, protective man and the weak woman in need of protection. In this one relationship, she gains help and the normalcy, the regularity, denied to her everywhere else—though she senses, dimly or sharply, how hollow and deceptive this arrangement truly is.
The book aims to expose the harm this neurotic, inauthentic situation inflicts on both mother and child, and it urges readers—acknowledging the extreme difficulty of these circumstances—to find courage, to search harder, even at the cost of further suffering, for their own authenticity. That authenticity, the authors argue, will ultimately bring peace to everyone involved.
What to make of all this?
We cannot recommend this book as one that strengthens or encourages, nor is it easy to endorse wholesale. Yet some of its central claims are not only true but vital, and they deserve serious discussion. Not only among women, but across society—because society must shift if we are to deepen the bonds that hold us together.
- Lucia Betolini, 1988