Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Nicole Cooley (bio) and Pamela Stone (bio) On a warm fall afternoon last year, we sat on small wooden chairs in the hallway of an elementary school. It was the end of a school day. In a corner, a large fish tank bubbled and glowed. Young children ran up and down the hall with backpacks, lunchboxes, juice boxes, and library books. The school hallway was loud but joyful—children shouted, sang, and played around us. And everywhere there were mothers. Moms in exercise clothes pushing strollers, women wearing business suits holding their Blackberries, babysitters and nannies, as well as an occasional dad. In the middle of this, in the hallway, we sat together with our notebooks and pens to draft the call for papers for this issue. We were here, at this elementary school in northern New Jersey that Nicole's daughters attend, with the work of mothering happening all around us, to work on this special issue titled Mother. The moment marked one of the many synchronicities and ironies that have imbued this issue. We sat together in the elementary school hallway because Pamela had been in the area giving a talk on mothering at a local university and Nicole could not secure child care for her young children that afternoon. Meeting at the school allowed us to have time to discuss Mother. Indeed, reflecting on this experience, we realized that this elementary school was the perfect setting to mark the beginnings of this special issue. We are accustomed to the constant blurring of boundaries between home and work; between mothering and teaching/writing; between, ultimately, our personal and professional identities. In fact, as we look back on our work on this issue, we are aware of the irony of our writing and thinking about mothering being constantly interrupted by mothering and, in general, by care work. This ranged widely, from comforting a five-year-old with a fever to helping a college student son find an internship to single parenting while a partner is traveling abroad to seeing a husband through emergency surgery. In her famous study about women writers, Silences, Tillie Olsen describes the constant interruptions of mothering [End Page 13] and notes that "habits of years—response to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters—stay with you, mark you, become you" (1978, 39). Yet, as professors/writers who are mothers, we both found ourselves used to—even expecting—such boundaries to be disrupted and called into question. The interruptions and disruptions had become an integral part of our lives as professional working mothers. We were not surprised that they became part of the experience of editing this issue too. We embraced coediting this issue because of our shared sense of having entered a "motherhood moment" in both our personal and professional lives as well as in the culture at large. From celebrity mom baby-bump sightings to recent televised debates between "stay-at-home moms" and "working moms," from "welfare mothers" to "Alpha moms," images of motherhood are circulating in our culture as never before. Motherhood, we felt, demanded a new look. Our call for papers elicited a record-breaking number of submissions, testifying to the vigor and energy of scholarship in this area. While we didn't receive papers on all the topics on our wish list, the work we received spanned a broad spectrum of subjects, disciplines, approaches, and methodologies, highlighting the cross-cutting nature and interdisciplinarity of scholarship on motherhood. Furthermore, the volume and quality of creative writing submissions we received reveals that questions about mothering are being raised by many writers across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose memoir. For several reasons, for the title of this WSQ special issue, we chose Mother. First and foremost, mother is both a verb and a noun. One can be a mother. One can also mother, as an action. "Mother" invokes the Virgin Mary at the same as it is an expletive—and we enjoy that irreverence. When thinking about our title, we considered the term alongside other possibilities, namely, Motherhood and Mothering. But neither captures the sense of the word that most intrigues us here. Feminist theorists like Adrienne Rich have observed that there...