Good mothers, bad mothers, housewives, angels, witches...
"Internally, a woman feels totally responsible for the physical and psychological well-being of her children. She has been conditioned by a lifetime of socialization to feel this way and she does not easily give up or alter such responsibility."
(Anita Spencer, Mothers are people too, 1984)
The model of motherhood as the one and only activity of a woman, an activity always full of warmth, kindness and compassion, is relatively new in our culture. Motherhood - as Adrianne Rich points out - became an institution rather than an experience. Our individual joys, worries, troubles, achievements are named and classified before we are able to notice them as individual experiences. Professionally, we work too much or too little, we are overprotective or rejecting, we pamper our children too much or we do not know how to set limits. We try to walk the fine line of contradictory expectations… But we allow it to happen: we let others create the image into which we will try to fit.
We would like to invite you to discuss the issues of motherhood with us. Our goal is to stir up creative and conscious reflection on what it means to be - and not to be - a mother today. We want to invite all the voices: the quiet, the shy, the loud one. Amongst the imposed prescriptions and expectations we want to rediscover our own experiences - our own dreams, longings, anxieties, happy feelings, anger and power, so that we can become more genuine in our relationships with children, mothers, fathers and partners.
