To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma

by Molly Millwood

Too much of the existing literature on motherhood, both scholarly and popular, diminishes or completely overlooks the relational context in which motherhood occurs. Certainly, mothering is recognized as relational in nature; mothering is about interacting with our children. What gets less attention is that motherhood, as an experience and identity, usually unfolds within the context of an intimate adult relationship. Experiences of loss, separation, power, control, autonomy, dependency, and conflict within a woman’s romantic partnership are, at various times, either background or foreground in the experience of motherhood. These issues simply cannot be disentangled from the supposedly “individual” ones that characterize new motherhood, like mental and physical exhaustion and loss of personal freedom.