“I Wanted It to Be Flowers and Sunshine, but That Was Not It at All”: A Relational Dialectics Theory Analysis of Black Motherhood

Abstract

ABSTRACT Research on motherhood in family communication scholarship has traditionally focused on White women’s experiences in the U.S. Few communication studies have reported the experiences of Black mothers in their findings. However, there is still a dearth of scholarship in studies that centralize the voices of Black mothers. While the paths to becoming a mother might be fairly similar, the experiences of mothers differ based on many factors. African American women exist on the margins of race, gender, and the legitimacy of “how they became mothers.” Centralizing the voices of Black mothers in communication scholarship, this study analyzed the stories of 31 African American mothers. Using Relational Dialectics Theory as a theoretical framework, the discourse of intensive mothering (DIM) and the discourse of motherhood as distressing (DMD) emerged from the data. The DIM and DMD interplayed through diachronic separation, synchronic interplay, and dialogic transformation (discursive hybridity).