Keywords
Motherhood, Mothers -- Biography
Abstract
Birth of a Mother is a memoir that tells the story of how my unplanned pregnancy helps me to transform from a damaged adolescent into an empowered mother. Using a first person, present tense narrative, I relive the nine months leading up to the unmedicated home birth of my first child, exploring the conflicts I faced over my obesity, over having no job and no place to call home, and over developing a relationship with a man who was not the baby's father. Weaving in past tense vignettes, I attempt to show how I prepared myself for impending motherhood by reflecting on my mother's short, violent life and the abuse I suffered at her hands; the effect of losing my mother at the age of twelve and my quest to find someone to fill her role throughout my adolescence; my experiences with faith, from Christianity, to Buddhism, to Atheism, to Paganism; and by struggling to heal the emotional scars left over from suffering childhood abuse, and multiple rapes as a teenager. As I uncover parallels between my mother's life and my own, I come to a new understanding of the mental illness that seems prevalent in my family, of the causes and triggers of my personal flaws, and of methods that I can use to become for my child the mother I always wanted for myself
Notes
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Graduation Date
2011
Semester
Summer
Advisor
Bartkevicius, Jocelyn
Degree
Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)
College
College of Arts and Humanities
Department
English
Degree Program
Creative Writing
Format
application/pdf
Identifier
CFE0003996
URL
http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0003996
Language
English
Release Date
July 2016
Length of Campus-only Access
5 years
Access Status
Masters Thesis (Open Access)
Subjects
Arts and Humanities -- Dissertations, Academic, Dissertations, Academic -- Arts and Humanities
STARS Citation
Curran, Ashley Rae, "Birth Of A Mother" (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1915.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/1915