Trying to be Good Enough: Exploring Enculturative Intensive Motherhood Discourse

Intensive motherhood is a pervasive discourse that enables and constrains mothers’ choices. However, intensive motherhood does not only affect mothers; it teaches each of us how we should judge a mother’s goodness. In this essay, I use autoethnographic moments of my life to explore how good mothers enact intensive motherhood discourse, highlighting how difficult it will be to undo the material effects of a discourse like intensive motherhood. Still, I argue that identifying how mothers have been made facilitates how to make mothers differently, offering hope that these hurtful discourses can be altered toward something better, however slowly.