Dickson, K: Conscious Motherhood

Conscious Motherhood is a personal account of how having a child changes one woman's life. It is the story of one woman's experience of herself during these changes. This semi-autobiography traces the journey toward increasing psychological and emotional wholeness and the role of motherhood in this process.

The birth of the child initiates a dichotomy between home life and work life and how the new mother deals with the conflict between continuing her career or full time motherhood.

Immediately after the birth, she experiences her body as an instrument in the titanic force of life. In the early days at home with her baby, she feels she has left civilization and has descended psychologically to a place which is very close to both life and death. Without the structure that a career gives life, she experiences daily life against the patriarchal structures of family and marriage. A sense of emptiness within, loss of her center, and loss of control of her own life is felt. In her isolation she feels the presence of her mother and grandmother and seeks role models and mentors in her friends. Her mind is filled with images of women and mothers as well as images of daughters recapitulating their own mothers' experiences. She questions how she would like her experiences to be different from those of her mother and what utopian motherhood could be like, and how these expectations are shaped by one's early experience of home and domesticity. The sense of inner revolution and upheaval is paralleled by chaotic and violent events in society. The year is 1968; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are assassinated, the women's movement begins, students riot, and many protest the Vietnam War. These events form the backdrop of a long journey, told in twelve chapters in the creative nonfiction genre.

The point or purpose of the work is to both present a unique personal account of individual growth as well as to present those aspects of a major experience which are universal. What is valuable and interesting about this journey is that this rite of passage is told from the woman's point of view and the woman's experience through the life-writing or memoir style.