Writer's statement

Abstract

My maternal journey, like others’, is complicated. I come from an immediate matrilineage that bears witness to disrupted maternities. Mothers leaving their children, children sent away in the wider context of poverty, loss, abuse and trauma. I was one of six children, the second child born to teenage Irish parents – a Catholic father and Protestant mother in the mid-1970s. My maternal journey started with my own mother, a relationship that, although primary, has been at best consistently fraught, at worst destructive or nonexistent.