“It feels a bit like drowning”: Expectations and Experiences of Motherhood during COVID-19

Authors

  • May Friedman Ryerson University School of Social Work
  • Kori Kostka Lichtfuss Ontario Tech University, Community, Population and Public Health Program
  • Lucas Martignetti Ontario Tech University, Community, Public and Population Health Program
  • Jacqui Gingras Department of Sociology, Ryerson University

Keywords:

motherhood; COVID; matricentric feminism; gender roles; pandemic

Abstract

What is the impact of bringing unrealistic and overwhelming conditions of motherhood into the context of a global pandemic?  This article aims to explore the impacts of maternal expectations and experiences in the time of COVID-19. Through first person accounts of eighty self-identified mothers parenting through COVID, we aim to explore good mother myths, feelings of failure, and the paradoxical freedoms that occur under pandemic time.

 

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Author Biographies

May Friedman, Ryerson University School of Social Work

May Friedman is a faculty member in the Ryerson School of Social Work and in the Ryerson/York graduate program in Communication and Culture. Most recently, much of May’s research has focused on intersectional approaches to fat studies considering the multiple and fluid experiences of both fat oppression and fat activism. The bulk of May’s work focuses on unstable identities, including bodies that do not conform to traditional racial and national or aesthetic lines.

Kori Kostka Lichtfuss, Ontario Tech University, Community, Population and Public Health Program

Kori Kostka Lichtfuss is a Registered Dietitian and is currently completing her MHSc at Ontario Tech University in the Community, Population and Public Health Program.

Lucas Martignetti, Ontario Tech University, Community, Public and Population Health Program

Lucas Martignetti is a Master of Health Sciences student in Ontario Tech University's Community, Public and Population Health Program. His research focuses on health equity, and his thesis examines barriers and facilitators to equitable access to naloxone in Durham Region, Ontario, Canada.

Jacqui Gingras, Department of Sociology, Ryerson University

Jacqui Gingras is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her research explores social health movements, fat studies, radical democratic pedagogies, and decolonization of health professions within the entanglements of colonial neoliberal economics and intersectional feminisms. She has published in the Fat Studies Journal, Journal of Sociology, and Critical Public Health. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Critical Dietetics, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal at http://criticaldietetics.ryerson.ca.

Illustration by Marianne Charlebois showing a wooden house and a cloud with mathemathical signs.

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Published

2021-05-04

Issue

Vol. 42 No. 1 (2021): "Covid and the Academy" & Open-themed Research

Section

Original Research

License

Copyright (c) 2021 May Friedman, Kori Kostka Lichtfuss, Lucas Martignetti, Jacqui Gingras

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