Provides an in depth view of ways in which children and incarcerated mothers can learn to know each other better, and find ways of coping with the task of being a mother and caring for her developing child while the mother is away.
Reiko Ohnuma offers a wide-ranging exploration of maternal imagery and discourse in pre-modern South Asian Buddhism, drawing on textual sources preserved in Pali and Sanskrit. She demonstrates that Buddhism in India had a complex and ambivalent relationship with mothers and motherhood-symbolically, affectively, and institutionally. Symbolically, motherhood was a double-edged sword, sometimes extolled as the most appropriate symbol for buddhahood itself, and sometimes denigrated as the most paradigmatic manifestation possible of attachment and suffering. On an affective level, too, motherhood was viewed with the same ambivalence: in Buddhist literature, warm feelings of love and gratitude for the mother's nurturance and care frequently mingle with submerged feelings of hostility and resentment for the unbreakable obligations thus created, and positive images of self-sacrificing mothers are counterbalanced by horrific depictions of mothers who kill and devour. Institutionally, the formal definition of the Buddhist renunciant as one who has severed all familial ties seems to co-exist uneasily with an abundance of historical evidence demonstrating monks' and nuns' continuing concern for their mothers, as well as other familial entanglements. Ohnuma's study provides critical insight into Buddhist depictions of maternal love and maternal grief, the role played by the Buddha's own mothers, Maya and Mahaprajapati, the use of pregnancy and gestation as metaphors for the attainment of enlightenment, the use of breastfeeding as a metaphor for the compassionate deeds of buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the relationship between Buddhism and motherhood as it actually existed in day-to-day life.
She argues that Ginzburg adopted a distinct aesthetic by allowing her family stories to be narrated through a female narrating "I." This volume focuses on the broad theme of the maternal by tracing the development of the voices of Ginzburg's narrating daughters, mothers, and sisters. Their texts read as auto/biographies; that is, they are narratives about both the self and the other."--BOOK JACKET.
Rosalia de Castro (1837-85) wrote five volumes of poetry before succumbing to cancer of the uterus at the age of forty-eight. While she is perhaps best known for her more introspective and intimate poetry, Castro's mature works are also highly feminist and political in thematic orientation. This book examines the fascinating system of poetic techniques Castro employs in her works to link the compelling issues surrounding femaleness and identity- both national and individual- to the construction of a system of gendered symbolic language that has been vastly understudied by contemporary scholars.
This work reevaluates the biblical house of the father in light of the anthropological critique of the patrilineal model. It uncovers and defines the contours of an underappreciated yet socially significant kinship unit in the Bible: 'the house of the mother.'
While the existence of maternal ambivalence has been evident for centuries, it has only recently been recognized as central to the lived experience of mothering. This accessible, yet intellectually rigorous, interdisciplinary collection demonstrates its presence and meaning in relation to numerous topics such as pregnancy, birth, Caesarean sections, sleep, self-estrangement, helicopter parenting, poverty, environmental degradation, depression, anxiety, queer mothering, disability, neglect, filicide and war rape. Its authors deny the assumption that mothers who experience ambivalence are bad, evil, unnatural, or insane. Moreover, historical records and cross-cultural narratives indicate that maternal ambivalence appears in a wide range of circumstances; but that it becomes unmanageable in circumstances of inequity, deprivation and violence. From this premise, the authors in this collection raise imperative ethical, social, and political questions, suggesting possibilities for vital cultural transformations. These candid explorations demand we rethink our basic assumptions about how mothering is experienced in everyday life.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is an unashamed disregard for other people, except for how they can be used. This entitled behavior is devastating, but especially for a narcissist's child. Drawing on her experiences with her narcissistic mother, the author explains Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the problems it causes, as well as ways to heal, and to manage a relationship with narcissistic parent or sever ties with them, all from a Christian perspective. Although this book is written from the perspective of a daughter with a narcissistic mother, the information is also pertinent to sons of narcissistic mothers or those with narcissistic fathers.