My Children Matter: An Autoethnography on Becoming a Childless Mother

Abstract

My three children died of unrelated causes in 1971, 1983, and 2005. This thesis is an autoethnography in which I reclaim my identity as a mother, change my gaze to my children's lives rather than their deaths and explore how the culture of the last four decades influenced my experience. As I research my life, I seek answers from the academic literature to create meaning from my experience. At the core of this research are three stories about mothering each child within the culture in which they lived and died. Although the generalizability of my experiences is problematic, I hope that my writing resonates with the experience of readers.