Knowing Me, Knowing New
Ruth Silver, University of East London
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players…”
William Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’
Knowing me, knowing who?
The world of academic education has been described as “a site for self-transformation” (Tamboukou, 2003:39), and I personally came somewhat late to university, at the age of 37, with a very confused sense of identity. I had spent the best part of 20 years struggling to be a ‘good’ mum against the odds while working to bring up my three children as best I could without the support, either financially or emotionally, of their father. My children had always been told that I wanted to study eventually, once they had all finished school, but I think that they, as I did, felt ambivalent about the implications of such a potential change. Unfortunately our geographical whereabouts necessitated certain relocation in order to achieve this goal, creating an uneasy, distant dimension to my long-nurtured desire.
While publicly expressing themselves inordinately proud of my aspiration to ‘make the most of myself’ and move on in life, my children privately remained profoundly antagonistic about my need to be more than ‘just a mum’ within the stagnant (for me) but stable (for them) environment they had grown up in. I too struggled internally with this particular conflict of interest through many, many sleepless nights, agonising over what to do for the best, chastising myself for not knowing the answer. Was it best for me to do the ‘best’ thing by my children, or was it best for my children if I did the ‘best’ thing by me? Could I live with myself if I chose to favour my needs over theirs; what kind of leaden dream-state half-life would I continue to lead if I didn't? In due course, after much deliberation and soul-searching, I did eventually choose to study full time for a three-year Bachelor of Arts in Psychosocial Studies, graduating at 40 with First Class Honours and with the mother of all guilt complexes: I felt as if I had abandoned my family. As my newly self-supporting teenage children had stayed in Scotland, and I alone had moved to London to complete my degree, I was no longer ‘just a mum’. I was, and am, a defiantly absent mum with a good degree and a much stronger, and constantly evolving, sense of self.
Over my three years of studying I have not only learned a great deal about my chosen subject, an amalgam of psychological and sociological perspectives, but in applying those ways of knowing have also discovered a language of multiple new ways of thinking for and about myself. I may always have ‘known’ that a ‘good’ mum would have put her children first, sacrificing her own needs for the sake of others; but then I have also ‘known’ that maternal martyrdom leaves much to be desired into the third millennium and that feminism would have it ceremoniously burned at the stake.
Even before coming to university, and without having the theoretical vocabulary for me to describe it coherently, experience proved to me that a surfeit of ways of knowing exist within each of us. What constitutes knowing and knowledge, then, appears to be far from straightforward: “We need to be aware of what it is to begin to know and to claim the right to produce knowledge, what is involved in this and what is the nature of our relationship to knowledge” (Gray, 2003:9).
This potentially rambling piece of writing posits an autoethnographic exploration of my newly found academic relationship to knowing and being. I am pondering the innumerable ways in which my individual experience of higher education has ultimately impacted on my sense of personal identity through the acquisition and appropriation of specific knowledges of the self. These knowledges, in the plural rather than the singular, are founded on theoretical groundwork as understood during my period of undergraduate study, interwoven with my past and present experiences to create what feels to me like my own unique variations on a theme. Indeed
“the act of knowing is an extremely complex endeavour; not only do different human beings know different things, bringing different values, beliefs and perceptions to what they know and how they know it, but the act of knowing and what is known are often irredeemably fused” (Oakley, 2000:291).
If, however, “as knowing subjects we are intimately a part of any understanding we have of what counts as knowledge” (Smith & Deemer, 2003:428), I don’t see how we can clearly demarcate “the knowing subject from the object of knowing” (Smith & Deemer, 2003:429). It seems to me that if I cannot separate what I know from who I think I am, then the ways in which I think of myself, although ultimately my own, cannot ever be free from external intervention. Continuing along this vein of thought, it stands to reason that these external interventions, these ways of knowing, cannot simply be plucked sui generis from the ether. “Knowledges of the self… do not, as it were, fall from the sky: rather, they are produced and reproduced in specific relations of social and political power, and in response to specific social and political preoccupations” (Lawler, 2000:3). Knowledge, then, is neither something definitive that resides internally nor externally of its own volition, waiting, fully formed, to be 'discovered'. Knowledge is necessarily contingent, is both socially constructed and personally adapted. That I know and what I know, are somehow linked inextricably not only to how and why I know something, but also to when and where I have come to know it. It would seem that in many ways “context is everything” (Cole & Knowles, 2001:22).
I am curious as to how we “nurture our own individuality and at the same time lay claim to ‘knowing’ something” (Richardson, 2003:502), when the availability of and access to that ‘knowledge’ must always inevitably be socially and historically situated? How much of an individual self am I, have I ever been? How much of what I know truly belongs to me, is me? How intimately do the particular academic theories I have learned interweave with my particular experience to heighten my understanding? Exactly how has my mental manipulation of this educational experience ultimately transformed the way I 'know' myself into the future, and where do I now go from here?
The subject of subjectivity – the discourse of discourse
Learning to place my own experience in socio-historic context was my first real academic revelation – to be allowed, to be encouraged to question the accepted 'truths' of modernity I had grown up with was an utterly engaging liberation. I found myself formally introduced to the amorphous concept of postmodernity, also defined as second modernity (Beck, 2002), or alternatively as liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000), depending on your preferred point of view. Part of the fascination for me is that all postmodern ways of thinking refuse to be fixed, are always necessarily pluralistic and contested. “The core of postmodernism is the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the ‘right’ or privileged form of authoritative knowledge” (Richardson, 2003:508).
I particularly struggled hard to understand the revolutionary work of French Philosopher Michel Foucault, whose unique perspective on knowing and being opened up for me the intriguing language of discourse. Discourse, in describing the way in which a role is performed, simultaneously informs the way in which to perform that same role, setting a societal norm, ostensibly giving us a ‘script’ to follow in order to recognisably ‘play’ that part. For example, the current, western discourse of 'good motherhood' describes how a 'good' mother sacrifices her own needs for the sake of her children. This not only describes how contemporary 'good' mothers are actually behaving, but also sets the parameters for others, prescribing how to behave should they too wish to regard themselves as 'good' mothers. One simple definition is to say that "Foucault uses the term ‘discourse’ to elaborate the ways in which meaning and practice coalesce” (Lawler, 2000:21).
Importantly, there is no simple binary opposition of discourses, of good or bad, accepted or excluded, but "a multiplicity of discursive elements that can come into play in various strategies" (Foucault, 1976:100). Discourse ultimately has no political affiliation, maintains no exclusive territory, and can therefore be utilised effectively by different groups in multifarious ways, including as a form of resistance. We can each interpret the script in our own way. Power is consequently produced and transmitted through discourse, at times being reified and at others being rendered impotent. Foucault describes this multi-layered, multi-faceted and constantly moving reality as a "tactical polyvalence of discourses" (1976:100), effectively setting the stage for the possibility of societal disruption and change.
Continuing in this train of thought, it would seem that “Our experience of self, others and the world more generally is tied up inextricably with our use and understanding of the linguistic and moral resources made available to us in the cultures we are brought up in” (Crossley, 2000:46). In other words, what we know and what we do is intimately bound up with our particular use of available discourse. In this sense, then, I am not an internally formed self but a socially constructed subject; I do not possess an innate and timeless identity but rather occupy variable subject positions dependent on whatever discourses are available to me at that particular time. I am an integral player in the “postmodern discourse of identity-as-performance” (Corbett, 2001:21). I realise with nothing short of relief that the cultural conflict between performing the discourses of patriarchy and feminism clearly explains my own personal conflict from the past; the two different ways of ‘knowing’ how to be a woman that has caused me so much distress. The discrepancy is not only my own after all: the deficiency is not just within me.
It has been said that “In the face of debates about the ‘fragmentation’ of identity or ‘multiple identities’, with discussion more in the realms of abstract theory rather than based on ‘lives’,” (Roberts, 2002:170), it becomes even more important to consider 'real' identities described through 'real' experience. I myself have kept a personal diary of one sort or another for as far back as I can remember. In its own inimitable way my current journal, covering my three years of study and beyond, is a written reminder of how I recorded, however simply, how I felt at any given moment of that time. Each individual journal entry, written in the present, is inevitably “sedimented into a particular moment in time” (Plummer, 2001:48), and as such offers me an invaluable montage of ‘moments in time’ to complement, and sometimes correct, my retrospective memory. Reading a diary produces “an oscillation between the past and the future” (Lejeune, 2001:102), and so I use certain lengthy excerpts from my journal entries here not to provide data for analysis, but to keep my present thinking grounded in my own past reality, and to let my unfolding, as yet untold story tell itself…
I start off my experience of higher education very cautiously, socially numb. During my first few weeks at university I seem somewhat stunned by such an incomprehensible, drastic, all-encompassing change to my circumstances. I write that:
‘I feel so displaced and lost and not really belonging anywhere… Coming to uni is so much more than just a change of occupation for me, it’s a whole new life in every way… I’m here… to learn to be myself without my family around me’.
I spent my entire first year of 'student-hood' living on campus in Halls of Residence. I was given a singe study bedroom within a corridor of 12 such rooms in two sets of six, and so I came from having a self-contained family home to living on my own in one small room with the usual shared use of communal facilities. To begin with, living 'alone' was an alien concept; I had no idea how to function outside of a familial household situation. I had gone from living with my parents, to getting married and living with my husband, to living autonomously with my children in our own house. Suddenly finding myself at 37 transported beyond a family environment for the first time in my life proved a difficult and unsettling place for me to be, I lost proximity to all my previous points of reference, and that intangibility defined how I felt about everything at that moment. I felt isolated, desolated, on the outside looking in to everything – to life, to knowledge, to theoretical debate, to my family and to myself.
I have since recognised myself in the experiences of historical pioneers of women in education, in an environment where “female subjects strive to cross their space boundaries and thus recreate themselves, drawing on experiences and aspirations that are opposed to what is generally considered ‘proper’ and ‘natural’ (Tamboukou, 2003:61). As a mother I still felt I was supposed to content myself with my family, my home, my working to fit around school timetables within my small rural environment: “place has been associated with the feminine, since women are expected to be more attached to places, both socially and psychologically” (Tamboukou, 2003:57). But as well as transgressing the 'familiar' perimeters of 'women's space', by coming to university I also dared to transcend the wider boundaries of geographical place, in moving from village to city, from North to South, from Scotland to England. And as the piece de resistance of going against the cultural maternal norm, I left my family behind in order to do it.
Paradoxically, I had less physical room to manoeuvre than ever before, but far more emotional space available to me. Closing the door on my own tiny study bedroom, having the ability to temporarily shut out the rest of the world, was uncharted territory for me. "The right to privacy is bound to the right to freedom" (Tamboukou, 2003:64). For the first time in my adult life it felt that nobody else was present demanding emotional sustenance from me, implicitly or explicitly. 'Freedom', however, is a strange and elusive concept to try to live with.
‘Part of what I’m supposed to be doing right now is learning to be a person in my own right… I think this is what I’m finding hardest – discarding the other-people-ness of my world, having to face up to having to be me. Part of what I’m finding so difficult is being with myself, without any of the distractions or routines or compensations involved in having other people around… I’ve been a daughter, a wife a mother and an employee. I’ve never ever just been me, in a place on my own, and what I’m resisting as much as anything is facing being with only myself.’
The adjustment to studying was for me the easiest part of university life – what I most struggled with was my own inner incongruity. This initial period of self-conscious distraction lasted through until that first Christmas, when I went back home to Scotland, for the first time since coming to university in September, immediately after the birth of my first grandchild. Although unable to be present for his grand entrance into the world, I was at least there to take him home from hospital, was there as 'mum' again to help my eldest daughter take her first tentative steps into motherhood.
It was in many ways a very difficult visit, emotionally charged and exquisitely painful, to somewhere that was no longer my home, to changeling children I could no longer claim authority over, with a whole new generation beginning without me, but it proved to be a defining visit nonetheless. I knew that I no longer 'belonged' in the same way: Our family dynamic had altered irrevocably. I realised that there was no going back to how things were before I left for any of us, no easy answers to the many difficult questions raised by the consequences of my actions, and no respite from the guilt I carried with me back to London. Yet in spite of the guilt there was still no way I felt able to give up my dream of an education for myself. I felt myself to be a 'bad' mum, but nevertheless I hurled myself headlong into being the best student I could be.
‘I still have that little voice in my head that monitors how a ‘student’ should be, or a mum, or a grandmother for that matter! And that always seems to be my reference point, either to be aiming towards or to be rebelling against. It’s all to do with how I rate myself in the world – I see myself as the representation of a label of my interactions with others. What I want is to be free of that, to be free within myself to be just me, whatever that means?’
My entire knowledge of myself was tied up in myriad labels and social roles, as if I could conjure up no sense of personal identity outside of those allotted roles. It was as if it was the only way I knew how to be, and I just could not think outside of my own limited experience of those narrow, definitive labels.
‘I think I try too hard to ‘make’ myself into a new person, and get too caught up in what I think a student should be like, or what a grandmother should be like, and mould myself to that shape – somehow I never seemed to get my head around what a ‘Ruth’ should be like…’
But by the end of my first year, I began to settle in to my plural existence. Although still not completely comfortable with the disharmonious clash of different discourses, neither did I seem quite so perturbed by my ambivalent internal inconsistencies.
‘I’m still feeling really torn as to who I am a lot of the time, but not as constantly or as completely as before. Breaking away from being the mum first and foremost is so difficult, it’s still a part of me and always will be, but is not the same ‘driving force’ any more crowding out everything else.’
‘I’m definitely getting better at choosing the way I want to be rather than just accepting (however grudgingly) the social role expected of me. I’m still a mum and a nana, a partner and a student, but now at least I’m learning to be ‘me’ too.’
‘My aim for my degree seems to be an expansion of my knowledge of, and understanding of, myself and others… I suppose I’m using gaining my degree as a means to my own personal enlightenment in life.’
The more I learned about theoretical debate, the more involved I became in analysing what I knew, in questioning that knowledge. I no longer felt outside of the theories I studied, learning was no longer an abstract process but became fused with my sense of self. I seemed to be creating myself out of the synergistic process of studying, and I truly found that “women seeking to reinvent themselves find in education the transitional space that is essential for reflection upon themselves and their lives” (Tamboukou, 2003:150). The idea of 'transitional space' comes from psychoanalytic theory, is a boundary-merging conceptual space neither fully internal nor external. It is the creative place we inhabit when we become 'lost' in a good novel, where children become engrossed in make believe, the intense dynamic fusion of self/other we feel when making love; all experiences that take us emotionally far beyond our bodily reality. Ultimately, transitional space is the chimerical "place where we live" (Winnicott, 1971:104).
In spite of accommodating the promise of the all-pervasiveness of power and the possibility of endless resistance, taken to its extreme Foucault's theory of subjectivity denies us this personal agency with which to create our particular sense of being. “The postmodern vision of the individual is one which defies any sense of development, order or progression. It is in this sense that the ‘subject’ is pronounced dead” (Crossley, 2000:26). A theoretical ‘dead end’ is not my idea of the reality of my existence, and so I felt it was time to move on to find another perspective from which to look for my self, without losing sight of what I had already learned. “We need to find some way in which we can appreciate the linguistic and discursive structuring of human psychology without losing sight of the essentially personal, coherent, and ‘real’ nature of individual experience and subjectivity” (Crossley, 2000:32). The answer for me came in the form of contemporary feminist writing.
Storying my gendered self – feminism and narrative
Not surprisingly, “the emergence of feminist theory and practice and the search for the female self have occurred at the point of crisis of rationality and the shattering of the unity of the subject” (Tamboukou, 2003:2). Out of the demise of the universal rationality of modernistic man came a new metaphor to add to 'theory as architecture' and 'theory as combative', that of “Theory is story” (Richardson, 2003:506). Feminists were one group of theorists to start using “narrative as a source of empowerment and a form of resistance to counter the domination and authority of canonical discourses” (Ellis & Bochner, 2003:226). I too have found a 'natural' affinity with qualitative rather than quantitative forms of knowing, in common with many other women who had long felt quantified and categorised and compartmentalised to within an inch of their sanity. For too many years, holding on to the reality of my own self-narrated experience in letters and journal entries has been the only thing that has stopped me from feeling completely invisible, a nameless, faceless statistic of late 20th Century single parenthood.
However, this apparent 'gendering' of forms of knowledge and methods of knowing through the modernistic qualitative/quantitative dichotomy led us to a point where theoretically "Women’s knowledge may be called by others, hopelessly ‘subjective’ – this term being intended as an insult” (Oakley, 2000:295). The pejorative 'subjective' slur I can live with, but not the 'catch 22' feminist perpetuation of binary opposition. How can I possibly argue against modernistic 'either/or' demarcation from what is inherently an incorporated standpoint? Ann Oakley argues that feminist subjectivities are set up as the antithesis to patriarchal gendered identities, find meaning through positively re-defining the self as 'other', but yet always in relation to, as a resistance to, the historically situated, culturally expected societal norm. Feminism can therefore only be seen here as one half of an 'antagonistic pair', paradoxically shaped and defined by the thing it so despises, useless without its mate. I understand this theoretical dilemma, appreciate the tangled predicament, but for the moment the lure of privileging subjective experience over objective impartiality beckons me forward nonetheless.
For me, the 'storying' of my self allows me to create myself both through available societal discourse and personal choice: “Using narrative, the ‘self’ can be located as a psychosocial phenomenon, and subjectivities seen as discursively constructed yet still as active and effective” (Andrews et al., 2000:1). Importantly, “as a way of knowing, narrative implies a relational world” (Sparkes, 2002:218), where “Individuals have to develop their own biography and organize it in relation to others” (Beck, 2002:203). If we use our personal stories to make sense of our world, then that 'sense' will inevitably require adjustment and adaptation depending on the intended audience.
The story of my 'self' I begin to write here as a fledgling academic is a very different story to the one I would write as a mother; or rather, it is the same story but with a different slant, written from a different perspective. Yet both would be an equally 'true' reflection of 'me' in their own way. This contextual nature of the storied self allows theoretically for different facets of the same being to co-exist simultaneously in one person. The apparent holistic essence of narrative finally gave me permission to 'own' my subjective plurality. It offered me a working theoretical voice, in much the same way that feminism had in the past provided for others "a vocabulary to talk about it, a set of motives to legitimate it, the power to accomplish it, and an audience with which to share it" (Katz Rothman, 2000:400).
Using my new powers of articulation I cautiously began re-thinking my own past experience, pulled suddenly into the present in the midst of already heightened emotions amplified at the prospect of my eldest daughter's impending wedding, some 600 miles away, to the father of her beautiful baby. It brought back many painful memories of my own early, disastrous marriage, but from a very different perspective. I saw in her the ghost of my former self, saw myself as others had seen me, yet from afar in some impotent nightmare, unable to utter a sound as I watched the old patterns replay in slow motion. The old internal conflict I had felt so strongly before coming to university, the raw, visceral tension between being 'good' mother and 'good' woman, reappeared with a vengeance.
'I don't even know how to begin to say how I feel. I want to scream at her not to be so stupid. But it's simply not my call, and as a parent I just have to support her whatever she chooses to do with her life, whether I like it or not. It tears me apart but I know she'll get married with or without my support, so all I can do is go to her wedding with a big smile and a sinking heart. My 'mum' head, the responsible parent in me, knows that being married should be the best state for the three of them to be in - it's the 'respectable' way to be, and I know I should be pleased that she's choosing such a 'traditional' route in life. But the feminist part of me abhors the possessive social role of 'wife' that at her age and level of maturity is an inevitable consequence of the lifestyle in that part of the world.'
Being able to differentiate theoretically between those two main discourses running in tandem in my head, both explained and validated my apparent 'split personality' when it came to resisting gender roles yet abiding by maternal expectations. Rather than agonise over which was the 'real' me, arriving eventually at an inescapable impasse, I tried to concentrate instead on accommodating both as smoothly as possible. Resigned to the inevitability of her intractable determination to see this wedding through regardless, I began to contemplate the social requirements surrounding the occasion from a hybrid point of view, neither letting my daughter down as her mother nor fully giving up on my own beliefs as myself. It was a surreal experience, a melee of mixed thoughts and feelings commingled through the emotion cocktail of life: I was definitely shaken, not stirred.
‘I can do ‘mother of the bride’ my way, but still be appropriately dressed for my daughter’s wedding. As much as I fight against traditional labels, I was brought up with labels being important, and for me they count a lot. I’m a mum, and a nana, and a student, and soon I’ll be a mother-in-law too, all labels with associations that sometimes seem to contradict the reality of being.’
‘Labels, labels, labels… this is bringing up something interesting for me, to do with social roles, defining my own way around them. And it’s not just to do with social norms in general, but my mum’s versions of them in particular. For years, I’ve tried to be the sort of wife/mother my mum would approve of, and now I’ve changed my goalposts to fit my own versions of those roles… I suppose what I’m doing is learning to adapt each role for myself, not for my mum’s requirements, creating my own ‘different’ yet ‘equal’ parameters. I think that being ‘mother of the bride’ has caught my thinking because its such a public statement to me of how I am different to my mum, a public validation of me in my own right and not just as a shadow of my mum. I’m not so much following in her footsteps as forging my own path along a different route to the same destination – the universal truth of modernity is as inappropriate for social roles as it is for the wider world. There is no one correct way to be a mother, or a grandmother, or a mother in law, for that matter.’
Or, I might have added at this point, no one correct way of being a daughter. I have in the past had a very ambivalent relationship with my own mum, and the more I thought of me as a distinctly gendered self, the more I began to consider that particular relationship too.
“Knowledges around selfhood and subjectivity, around being a daughter, around being a mother, are interlinked, drawing upon each other to produce a set of seemingly intractable truths around the person, the mother and the daughter. These sets of knowledges, though always contested and never finalised, are a means through which power works on the human subject. Mothers and daughters situate themselves in relation to these knowledges and (in however contingent and fragmented a way) forge identities in relation to them” (Lawler, 2000:4).
The realisation of just how much my mum's ways had always inadvertently influenced my own life choices, of how impressionable and susceptible I was, even as a grown woman with children of my own, was still a shock.
‘I find it hard to differentiate between stereotype, rebellion and just ‘me’, and I’m too easily led astray, more by accident than design, by embracing or denouncing ‘oughts’ or ‘shoulds’, by other’s opinions… I want to feel confident enough in myself to alternate effortlessly between all my variations of being with a smooth transition at all times… to go from broke coach-travelling student with a backpack on Friday to an elegant mother of the bride on Saturday with minimal effort, emotional or physical. Because I am always all of my labels all of the time – whichever facet is showing does not negate the others, but simply obscures it temporarily. Being me is not being one thing, but a multiplicity of conflicting ‘me’s’ all at the same time. This was what my identity essay was all about, being constantly in crisis rather than stasis, always on the move, never standing still’
I remember the strange feeling of personal transmutation, of shape-shifting, that accompanied me that weekend. Like so many other students, out of financial necessity I travelled by coach, giving me thirteen mind- and bottom-numbing hours to while away on each one-way journey. I travelled as light as possible on that trip, wearing my usual student garb of jeans and casual tops, and taking only a rucksack with me. Inside my rucksack I had packed a classic-styled linen dress and simple corsage, fine wool and silk wrap, elegant heels, matching bag but no hat – my quietly unassuming 'mother of the bride’ self, my style. The eventual transition between student and mother of the bride and back again was indeed surprisingly seamless, however personally bittersweet the rest of the wedding day proved, and I passed the return coach journey contemplating this fact. The feeling of simultaneous incongruity yet naturalness of that experience has constantly stayed with me. In many ways it was an epiphany, the first time I had truly felt comfortable with being both mother and self, and mother and daughter in my own right all at the same time.
‘I just feel more confident about what I’ve learned and understood in my course so far, and also about what I feel and believe within myself. I think its beginning to unfold quite clearly that I’m different from my mum as much as anything because we’re the children of completely different eras. Mum, like her mum before her, was a child of the British Empire, of pure Enlightenment ideals and a belief in one ‘truth’. But as a child of the ‘60’s my world has always been one of Civil Rights, gay Lib, Women’s Lib, of freedom of choice and diversity and pluralistic belief systems. The generation gap between us could hardly be greater, what separates us is much more than a few years, but is an entire era. My ‘failings’ as perceived by my mum in her world are my ‘successes’ in mine. Our value systems rarely cross paths, and in order to understand me, mum has to understand that I live in a post-colonial, post-modern, post-industrial Britain, not the empire she remembers from her early years. Every day that passes leaves me feeling a more complete person, that its OK to be a human kaleidoscope – always moving on, always changing, but always remaining true to myself.’
Of course, the reciprocity of that crucial statement was still hidden from me at this point – I had yet to see that in order for me to understand my mum, I had to learn that she is also from a different world to mine. I came to appreciate this later, through the eventual writing of my dissertation, which was a highly personal narrative exploration into four generations of childbirth stories within my own family.
‘Writing is very much at the forefront of my mind at the moment, and maybe academic writing is what I should start to concentrate on? The skills I’m learning through doing my degree are invaluable, and I’m developing a noticeably distinct style of my own, which hopefully will refine and improve as I go on…’
When I first read that “Writing is also a way of knowing – a method of discovery and analysis” (Richardson, 2003:499) I was initially puzzled, but nevertheless felt immediately drawn to the idea. It may well be that in the scientific, modernistic world of rationality “Knowledge is constituted as ‘focused’, ‘problem’ (hypothesis) centred, ‘linear’, straightforward” (Richardson, 2000:506). But yet my multifarious, multivalent knowledges and how I ultimately think and write about what I 'know' have always been anything but linear and straightforward. Having to organise so many complex thoughts into some semblance of coherent grammatical sequence, further snarls the threads of an already convoluted process. For me, writing several conflicting discourses into one cohesive self-narrative, or at least attempting to, has so far proved impossible.
I was brought up in the shadow of reading Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', where the then futuristic threat of technological advance and the original Big Brother heralded the obsolescence and enforced extinction of paper, pen and ink. Like Winston Smith, the beleaguered protagonist of this brooding dystopia, I too covet my paper journal, my closed, intimate space for self-reflection and contemplation. But yet I have learned to write creatively electronically, as I am writing here, not simply to word process hard copy drafts written, scored out, revised and re-written in longhand, but to think directly through the textually generous medium of the computer screen in great experimental swathes of ideas. The unfettered feeling of freedom this brings to my thinking has been immeasurable – the opening up of the possibility of endless permutations of ostensibly the same text, cutting and pasting and deleting and undoing, changing of fonts and layouts, all allowing for a much more ‘unguarded’ way of thinking. I no longer need to be so mindful to turn my concentration inwards to dredge the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain for the exact word before committing myself to ‘paper’. Indeed I often deliberately use the electronic thesaurus to find me alternatives to a word I already know to be incorrect, but nevertheless somewhere within the grand scheme of what I want to say. Several tangental mouse clicks later I am frequently rewarded with a flash of brilliance in a word I'd never have come up with left myopically to my own devices.
I find that I play around a lot more with the text, no longer faithfully sticking to my original script but often experimenting with copying and saving countless different versions of the same document in some licentious cornucopia of textual prostitution. Word processing for me provides a site par excellence for what is ultimately a very postmodern fluidity and flexibility of thought. There is no mess, no fuss, no commitment, and unless you save it somewhere, no hard evidence to bring you down later. One keystroke is all it takes, and the screen is immediately pristine, unsullied, reputation restored, in virgo intacta once more.
Of course technology has added to the initial literature research process also, I can now use ‘search’ and ‘find’ tools to access articles, ideas and books over the internet with relative ease, or even find specific keywords within those texts. It seems that, in the academic sense at least, the mountain can come to Mohammad after all. I am no longer confined by the binding constraints of distance or time. My computer, my portable laptop to be exact, has in many ways become an extension of myself in providing me with an unprecedented polyglot of technologies of thought – nowadays it is as if "I link therefore I am" (Guardian, 6/11/03) - I become just another 'node in a network'.
According to Donna Haraway, one way of feminist theorising across the boundaries of modernism while avoiding binary opposite extremes is to deliberately position ourselves as 'cyborgs', as mythical hybrids of organism and machine on the fringes of humanity, actively creating ourselves with "the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not" (Haraway, 1991:159). In merging my creativity with my keyboard and beyond I am potentially blurring any notion of bodily integrity, plugging myself into the network, dissolving the static boundaries of human/machine, self/other, distance/proximity, public/private, nature/culture, and masculine/feminine.
In a similar vein Margrit Shildrik writes of the ambiguity and liminality of 'monstrous others', where the threat to humanity of monsters is not in their difference, but in their hybrid sameness; the nightmarish fear that they are not so different after all. The monster is "the marker… not of the successful closure of embodied identity, but of the impossibility of securing such boundaries" (Shildrik, 2000:309). Judged by those criteria, all women must therefore be considered to be capable of monstrosity, not only through giving birth to potential monsters but also in that it is "the very fecundity of the female, the capacity to confound definition all on their own that elicits normative anxiety" (Shildrik, 2000:311). Women's bodies in themselves defy rational boundaries through menstruating, gestating, or lactating autonomously, biology giving the lie to the modernistic illusion of bodily integrity. It seems impossible, then, for women to try to be either definitively or discretely defined. So why do we set ourselves up for failure by continuing to try?
The labels of cyborg and monster appeal to my creativity and to my sense of humour, I like the idea of crossing the boundaries of bodily integrity, and I love the idea of these particular feminist writers breaking the establishment code by giving literary birth to such outlandish imagery. The elision of feminine with monstrous other lifts my spirits immeasurably, and I hold on to that thought with unrefined pleasure.
‘Much of the time I still feel quite uncomfortable left purely to my own devices… With other people around me I can comfortably fulfil my own self-appointed roles, being mum, or partner, or even student. But being 'only me’ I still struggle with. I realised the other day that I still think of myself ‘relationally’ rather than ‘individually’, I seem to relate to myself best through my relations with others?
I seem to be saying that I cannot comfortably think of myself outside of my relationships with others. Even as an 'independent' student, my thinking is not purely self-contained. I read what others have written, I discuss these issues with friends, and I write my opinion on what I have read with a specific audience in mind. I always think of myself as linked to others, and indeed for me “the female self is constituted in its relation to others, it is a dependent social self… [and] there are always conflicts with everything that relates to the unfolding of this female self, starting with the very act of writing” (Tamboukou, 2003:32).
If narrating the self is seen as a method of 'composure', a way of both telling the self and creating a coherent, cohesive sense of personal integrity, a way of both saying and being, then why do so many personal stories achieve the effect of discomposure of both the narrator and narrative? (Summerfield, 2000). Rather than presenting one rational, linear voice, women's stories are often a disjointed patchwork of inner tensions, interruptions, and contradictions, as a multiplicity of different discourses simultaneously vie for attention. "Finding the words to enunciate the self is a process of accommodation and conflict for the political and physical subject" (McElroy, 2000:255). As I have found from reading my own journal entries, “women’s writings of the self appear discontinuous, incoherent, irregular and full of personal concerns” (Tamboukou, 2003:32). It would seem from analysing textual evidence that for women there is no “unitary core self, but rather a matrix of subject positions for women ‘writing themselves’ to inhabit, not in a permanent way, but rather temporarily, as points of departure for going elsewhere, becoming other” (Tamboukou, 2003:7). This text is no exception, my position remains elusively unanchored, omni-directional, causing me immense discomposure in attempting to accommodate, to validate, my relational maternal self and my daughterly self, both fundamental roles for my sense of being, within the highly individualised discourse of education.
Soliloquy and semi-separation – autoethnography and individualization
When I first began studying, I remained very much on the outside of theory, playing the role of the traditional objective academic, commenting supposedly neutrally on the ubiquitous 'other'. But as time passed, I became drawn in to 'hanging' my theory-based essays on the 'hook' of particular examples from my own subjective experience. By my final year, I was fully immersed in using my own experience as an empirical basis for study, taking what is known as an autoethnographic approach. "Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural" (Ellis & Bochner, 2003:209).
One common criticism of autoethnographic writing is that it is inherently self-indulgent (Sparkes, 2002). However, in a postmodern world bereft of hierarchical structure and its concomitant automatic status through seniority, we have moved instead towards soliciting advice from our peers, seeking 'counsellors' not 'leaders' and communicating societally through a sharing of intimacies (Bauman, 2000). Viewed from this alternative perspective, autoethnography can be construed as a valuable form of communication in such a society, providing a new framework for social bonding. Although considering only your own situation, as an intrinsic part of the society in which you live you will also hopefully be touching on the experience of others. Perhaps your insights can offer a different perspective or shed more light on a set of circumstances that they too may benefit from understanding a little better. In this sense autoethnography appears less self-indulgent, which suggests something furtive and self-absorbed, and more “self-luminous” (Sparkes, 2002:212), a contemplative soliloquy, an inclusive thinking out loud, a practice of enlightened disclosure not reclusive enclosure. In a postmodern fog of uncertain identity, I feel that autoethnography can provide a potential beacon for others as well as yourself to be guided by.
“Autobiography is, to be sure, a literary discourse, a discourse of fact and a discourse of fiction, but even more fundamentally, it is a discourse of identity” (Eakin, 2001:124). Analysing my own journal entries, I wrote a very personal and poignant piece on my own conflicting identities as a short 'life history' assignment, proving to me that deliberate discomposure can often spectacularly highlight societal or paradigmatic inconsistencies, bringing a curious semblance of internal equilibrium to an otherwise untenable position. This painfully honest assignment ultimately provided me with a solid introduction to autoethnographic knowledge, and afforded me sound guidance for later writing up my slowly evolving family history dissertation.
My family has always played a strong supporting role in my life story, and I wanted to make use of our particular familial experience of having four generations of women in direct line descent, all with personal tales of childbirth, as a subject for research. I transcribed the tape-recorded childbirth stories of my grandmother, my mother, my daughter and myself, covering the 62-year period from 1939 to 2001. Taking a narrative approach, I analysed not only our different experiences but also the ways in which we told each story, the type of language we used, and the particular discourses we utilised and resisted, all with the gendered thread of socio-historic context running through the different generations. It was, for me, a deliberate link forged between my two worlds, an attempt to explore my place both within my family and in education, and it affected me greatly.
‘I’ve been feeling really strange lately, in limbo but not, in transition, but from what to what I have no idea. My dissertation is playing a big part in all of this, in order to do justice to it I’m writing it up in the first person, with reflexivity throughout rather than just contained within one section, which is very unsettling. But as Bochner and Ellis say, to show vulnerability is to show strength, not weakness? I like words, and creative writing, and to be writing an important academic assignment so personally is huge challenge, but one which is growing on me daily. It feels so much like this is the culmination of my years of letter-writing, diary-writing, essay-writing, all writing! I’m blending my two worlds, family and education, crossing more boundaries, and it’s changing me, I can feel the difference… My labels are blurring, becoming fuzzy as I’m swinging back and fore between student and mother and daughter. They’re not separate ‘hats’, they’re all me all of the time, and to deny any of them detracts from the whole. I’m a multi-layered, multi-faceted person and I don’t have to worry about finding which one is the ‘real’ me – I’m always all things at all times. Growth is change, and to grow you have to embrace change and go with it.
Being both researcher and researched creates a strange dynamic, as does researching your family. Disrupting the usual hierarchies of knowing, using your own discomposure as a methodological means to reveal different alliances for understanding, distorts and thereby exposes previously limiting patterns of thought. In transposing my mum's parental authority over her daughter with my researcher's authority over my respondent, I suddenly found myself fascinated with what the woman in her had to say. I listened to the same story as before, but heard it in a completely new language.
‘I’m having a real time of transition again, really struggling to get my head around uni this semester, it's really unsettling and un-nerving. My dissertation is going great, I think I’m well on track for a really good project, and my life histories assignment is turning out surprisingly well. Both these pieces of writing have really helped me work through, or at least begin to recognise, issues of my own on a really personal level, which is good in one way but really unsettling in another. So my uni work is proving to be a really personal challenge this semester, but I’m learning such a lot from it… In some ways I feel I still haven’t ‘found’ myself, but I’ve decided I’m thinking in the wrong tense – if identity is about becoming not being, then I should be thinking in terms of finding, not found? Because I am finding myself, it’s a constant process of adapting and changing and exploring, it’s about fluidity, not rigidity. I am who I am now, a blend of all the things I have ever been and all my hopes for the future.’
‘I’ve finished my first full draft of my dissertation! It’s nowhere near ready to be handed in, but I’m just so proud of it, how it’s turned out, or even that it’s turned out at all! It feels such a triumph to have got this far in my life after having taken so many wrong turnings along the way... The nicest thing of all is that I now feel more at peace with myself than ever before, which has the knock-on effect of letting me be at peace with mum at long last.’.
Although a common theme in autobiographical texts is the apparent 'judging' of parents, it is considered important to recognise that the expectations and constraints placed on your own parent, influencing their own upbringing, must equally be taken into account. This effectively offers "a practical instance of fairness to others, imaginatively extending to another person the same considerations we bring to bear in self-assessment" (Barbour, 2004:91), allowing for deeper understanding of your parent and ultimately of your shared relationship. In temporarily changing the dynamics of our relationship from one of mother and daughter to one of interviewee and interviewer, I ultimately found a way to see my mum as a woman first and a foremost, and as my mother second. I have finally accepted that:
"Mothers and daughters fight, laugh, collude and compete, wound and heal, exclude and share, over and over again, but the relationship is unique and inescapable. Love her or hate her, respect or reject her, admire or revile her, your mother is the model of womanhood you first experienced, the woman whose role in the family and in society you first observed, the giver of life and care from the very first breath, the transmitter of the genes you carry through life, the womb in which you lay" (Perry, 2003:2).
‘It seems I no longer as have a problem with my femininity, and I think my dissertation has played a big part in that.’
I think I am now much more comfortable in my female skin. I recognise myself as being an integral part of one of those little Russian 'Matryoshka' dolls, one mother doll with ever-decreasing smaller dolls nestling one inside the other. Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, I am still the third of five living generations in my family, and I now think as much about the similarities as the differences between us as culturally and historically situated women. I begin to think of social roles as places and spaces, where motherhood is perhaps seen as the identity ‘place’ to be in, but the function of that space changes, becoming a different identity ‘space’ in different contexts through time. There is at the same time a sense of continuity and yet a contingency of being, a comforting and an unsettling, a meeting and a departure.
‘I can’t believe I’m almost finished my degree, and especially that I’ve done so well throughout the three years. I’m really quite proud of the standard of my work, not just the marks but the use of words and ideas and arguments. I really do enjoy writing, particularly academic writing – it’s a challenge to be accurate but not stuffy and boring. But however well I seem to do I still feel a ‘fraud’, which is disconcerting in the extreme…’
I still seem to be seeking a legitimacy of my self, and I have learned that this too is partly a result of the inevitable tensions within my life. There remains an inescapable “disciplinary potential confronting those who fail to display an appropriately normal model of narrative identity. This disciplinary possibility is latent in any enforcing of norms” (Eakin, 2001:120). Although I succeeded in linking my family life and my academic life to a certain extent through writing my dissertation, according to the available discourses, as a good mum, I cannot absent myself to be a good student; as a good student, I cannot be both a good and an absent mum. To prevail in one is to flounder in the other, tarnishing any illusions of success within one sphere with shameful failure in the other.
Being a good individual necessarily makes me seem a bad nurturer, and vice versa. As a result, in whichever world I succeed, I constantly fear exposure as a latent fraud from the other. Once again I reach impasse. However, "one of the things which autobiography can offer to do for us is to dramatise the misnamings, the collisions, the very performance of uttering a subject" (McElroy, 2000:255). Autobiography highlights not hides the active disjuncture between subjectivities. But why, in a fluid, flexible postmodern world such as we are supposed to reside, do these confrontations still frequently occur, up close and personal, with such dramatic impact?
One current theoretical standpoint suggests that formal hierarchical structures of modernity have now been replaced by a society based on 'individualization', where "the individual… becomes the unit for the reproduction of the social in his or her own lifeworld" (Beck, 2002:203). Rather than identifying with the expected social roles and their allotted place within a rigid social structure, we are now all expected to create our own individual identities. However for women, this dynamic necessarily plays out differently than for men due to the old patriarchal association of women with caring: "as women were increasingly released from direct ties to the family, the female biography underwent an ‘individualization boost’ "(Beck-Gernsheim, 2002:55).
Changes in education policy, allowing girls equal access to all subjects and thereby opening up the female experience to the competitive challenge of individual excellence, has meant that a "general line of movement is discernible… away from ‘living for others’ towards ‘a bit of life of our own’” (Beck-Gernsheim, 2002:55). However, our consciousness-raising education places us in the transitional position of being, “‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’” (Beck-Gernsheim, 2002:56). We are no longer tied so tightly to the social roles of modernity, but neither are we yet completely freed from the institutional constraints of women as nurturers built into the fabric of the social system in which we live. Supposed changes in the workplace and within the family unit have been much slower to filter through to the practical experiences of women at grass roots level. I may be lauded as an individual for seeking an education, but am still required to achieve this education without disrupting the status quo within my family dynamic.
“The improvement in educational opportunities, however, entails a growth in knowledge and therefore in power on the many battlefields of everyday life” (Beck-Gernsheim, 2002:59). I find myself existing in a temporary 'no-man's-land' between the first and second modernities, neither fully integrated into the system of patriarchy nor that of individualization. My internal conflicts are not only my own, not only the result of clashing discourses, but are unavoidably the lived experience of the inevitable tensions existing below the surface of a hybrid society. “If narrative is indeed an identity content, then the regulation of narrative carries the possibility of the regulation of identity – a disquieting proposition to contemplate in the context of our culture of individualism” (Eakin, 2001:114). It seems that utilising the discourses that most fit your particular experience remains as important as ever in an individualized society – the only difference is that now we have more available choice. My education has thankfully offered me the power to know this, and my knowledge in turn hopefully gives me the power to start to use it to my advantage.
Continuity and continuum
‘I had my last ever class today, and it feels so strange to be at the end of my degree… it’s a real anti-climax, a ‘nothing’ really? This is just such a whole new ball-game for me, because the life I left behind isn’t there for me just to slot back into any more. I feel a bit in limbo, a bit lost, and more than a little anxious about the future.’
Having completed that particular educational journey, I find myself in a far more alien place than I could possibly have imagined when I first began. The distances I have travelled theoretically, intellectually and emotionally have taken me far further than I had ever hoped, to somewhere beyond expectation, to the very limits of my current comprehension.
‘Having a degree does make a difference, I just don’t feel the same any more – I’m no longer grateful to have been given any job at all, and I do want more out of life than was available before. But now that so much more is accessible to me, how do I know what I want? Too much choice feels almost as threatening as no choice. I worry that I might choose wrong, embarrass myself, be exposed as a fraud. But then I get angry at myself for still questioning my own ability – I have an excellent BA degree, so why, with such a respectable qualification, do I still doubt myself so much?’
Being in a recognisably transitional phase again has brought back many of my old insecurities. “Education is a site where juxtaposing discourses are framing women’s lives, but still a theatre of local struggles and resistance, a transitional space in these lives” (Tamboukou, 2003:39). I struggle yet again to find a creative compromise between the different facets of my self. My old dilemma has returned in a new guise, as I realise that in many ways perhaps I fear success as much as, if not more than, failure. I fear that individual success conveys me even further away from my family, too far away from the context of their world. I can still feel ‘safe’ where I am, still 'just a mum with a degree', still only one step away from where I came from. But in the same breath I also feel restless, anxious to be 'on the move' again intellectually: "Women tend to move, they experience great difficulties in remaining in certain spaces. They feel confined and oppressed" (Tamboukou, 2003:59). I still want my family and my academic freedom: I need a discourse that accommodates both.
‘Still struggling a bit with my identity… Not only do I not know what I am (i.e. no longer a single mum, no longer a wife, no longer a student, not yet an employee again), but I still don’t quite know who I am. It’s as if taking away the old framework of social roles leaves you with just the outer fabric of you, like an octopus with no skeleton to form it into a fixed shape. Without the shape of the ‘what’ I’m temporarily left with a formless, indistinct ‘who’… But like an octopus whatever my shape I do still exist in one form or another, so at the end of the day defining the precise 'who' just doesn't seem to matter so much any more…I'm still here regardless, pushing the boundaries more than ever'
In spite of the continual contradictions and fluctuations in my journal musings, it seems I am beginning to learn to know myself after all. Perhaps what matters most is not what I am or who I am, but that I am here at all, continuing to creating my own little piece of history for posterity. I realise now that my own particular little gems of knowledge, although inevitably socio-historically specific at source, are nevertheless cut, faceted and polished to a brilliant finish of my own design. Each is enhanced by my own individuality in the process of my understanding of it through the unique lens of my personal experience. Theory in the abstract is to me no more than societal compressed carbon; the delicate beauty of the finished diamond only revealed through the painstaking individual crafting of the raw potential.
For me, education has proved transformational not only intellectually through learning to apply the theoretical knowledge gained, but corporeally through the very process of acquiring that knowledge, from the physical complexities of place and space to the creative act of writing about the principles studied. Through writing legitimately, academically, of my own experience I can creatively write a self, a multiplicity of selves, that I would not have recognised before coming to university and completing my degree. These various selves are neither fixed nor focused, but form and revise fuzzy temporary alliances in a never-ending homeostasis of flux: a lived continuum of change.
“Placed in a wider matrix of complexities, the female self emerges as fluid and nomadic. In her becoming, she strives for an aesthetics of existence and dreams the improbable dream of making her life a work of art” (Tamboukou, 2003:5). My self-narrative is still my 'work of art', just as I have in the past used writing, through missives to friends and entries in my journal, as a means of asserting my existence, I can now make use of academic theory to champion my own cause, continue to create meaning for my life. Indeed "a narrative is itself an accumulating construction. As you follow it, you hear meanings and realities accrue" (Andrews et al, 2000:6).
'I think that perhaps one of my biggest ‘who am I?’ answers, is that I am a writer. From the stories I wrote as a child to the letters I wrote to my friends to the diaries I have kept for years and the essays I wrote for my degree, I have always been a writer and a story-teller. I think best on paper (or on screen), express myself most clearly through the written word, which I can only then articulate afterwards fluently and with clarity.’
Writing in itself can be used dynamically to straddle the boundaries between art and science, to merge subjective and objective, to obfuscate the demarcation between literal fact and literary fiction (Richardson, 2000). In writing as I am now, I too am actively resisting the constraints of dominant discourse: "Cyborg writing is about… seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities" (Haraway, 1991:175).
My own ‘monstrous’ story of physical familial abandonment places me firmly outside of contemporary 'good' motherhood, however much emotional support I still provide for my adult children. Why is physical presence, rather than the quality of your interactions, so often the prerequisite for being considered a ‘good’ mum? Where is the discourse of 'good motherhood’ that accommodates individualization, allows perhaps for the mother rather than the teenage child leaving home and getting a degree, as I have done so defiantly? Perhaps this particular discourse begins here, in consciously raising such an ‘outrageous’ question in such a manner. Because ultimately
“By turning to autobiography, which enacts the performative gestures that constitute a ‘real self’ for writers and readers alike, we can better understand the multifarious effects that arise when dominant and emergent discourses about femininity are put into dialogue with one another, as well as observe the continuity between them” (Corbett, 2001:22).
By choosing to incite a normative discourse of hybridity within my personal remit of maternal and feminist thinking, I can at last attempt to include all aspects of my self in one interconnected narrative. I can utilise the previously ‘masculine’ oriented tools of individualization in order to satisfy my supposedly ‘feminine’ oriented maternal yearnings towards patriarchal ‘good’ motherhood.
“We are not formed in outline and in detail by cultural stereotypes or socialisation practices: they provide more or less flexible spaces or channels through which we move… What we then do is use these spaces and channels in various ways” (Craib, 1994:139).
I may be provided with a set, with several sets of social scripts to follow, but how I interpret those roles, manipulate their character, and finally play them out on stage is, to a great extent, down to me. If I can find a way to amalgamate the core aspects of each discourse, to disseminate these in a mutually satisfying combination, then I can surely create my own personal discourse of hybridity to follow into my future.
I realise now that my individuality is indeed my own unique creative space, hand-crafted along the ever-shifting frontline of the discursive parameters of socio-historic place, always on the fringes of cultural no-man’s land. I now clearly understand the power of narrative identity, to have the self knowledge to be able to say what I am also means I can effectively become what I say, a self fulfilling prophecy. As with theatrical roles, “autobiography too invokes its own conventions for performance” (Corbett, 2001:15). Performance can become a mutually determining symbiosis – as I play a part, get to know it intimately, I inevitably take some of my own character into that part; and in turn the playing of that part inexorably alters my knowing self outside of that role.
I began by implying I felt I must be a ‘bad’ mum, but in the course of writing this I have subtly altered my guilty thinking – I have always tried to be, and will continue to try to be, the best mum I can be for me. But I will never stop being ‘mum’, wherever life takes me. My maternal role has created me as much as I have created my version of that role for myself. The best way for me to be a good mum is for me to be the best person I can be. And I now know that the best way for me to become that best person is to continue learning, continue writing and sharing my knowledge, and using the power of that knowledge to continue pushing the boundaries, onwards and upwards, for as long as I draw breath.
I have found that I cannot fully write of my experience of education without including aspects of my familial self, just as I can no longer think of my family relationships without accommodating what I have learned academically. It is not, after all, a case of agonising over being one thing or another, because there is an inherent reciprocity in the dual impact of family and education on my hybrid self. Without my being a mother and a daughter, my experience of higher education would have been very different, and that particular experience of education has in turn enhanced my understanding of womanhood past and present. Together my family and my education, with their inconsistent entourage of contradictory discourses, have intimately helped create the self I am now, the self I hope to be in the future, the extended, unbounded, on-going self I write here – cyborg, monster, me.
Postscript
From an academic perspective, this has been an autoethnographic, narrative exploration into the many ways that my particular experience of higher education has so far played its part, along with many other personal and social factors, in collectively and collaboratively impacting on my current sense of identity. With no claims to be a definitive text, it is instead part of a greater work in progress, focusing on the continuing ebb and flow of the theoretical conflicts emerging during this transient, unsettling period of me feeling to be ‘no longer’ just a mum, but ‘not yet’ ready to be an academic.
But from a personal point of view, this is also my story of the metamorphosis of me, of my experience of evolving my nascent individualized self within the continuum of a multitude of mechanisms and myopias discovered and deconstructed during my undergraduate degree. I find I am no longer searching for the ‘real’ me, realising that such presumed integrity is no more than an illusion. Which is the ‘true’ representation of the creature – the caterpillar, the chrysalis, or the butterfly? My personal narrative, like me is an eclectic and creative mix of academic, literary, social and personal nuances that are nevertheless drawn together in an ever-assembling story of self: “By writing today, you prepare yourself to be able to live tomorrow, and to piece together, in a predetermined framework of writing, the story of what you will have lived” (Lejeune, 2001:100). Where I will go from here remains elusively in the future, as yet undecided and untried; my delicate wings remain folded safe within my cocoon. I cannot go back, I am no longer a caterpillar, but I am not yet a butterfly. One day, however, I hope I may indeed unfurl my academic wings and take flight, heading optimistically but no doubt erratically into the infinite unknown.
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