Introduction to my chapter “Motherhood Rounds It Out: Art Therapy With Mothers Without Mothers,” published in 2021 in Art Therapy and Childbearing Issues: Birth, Death, and Rebirth, Edited by Nora Swan-Foster, Ph.D., ATR-BC:

Introduction

Motherhood Rounds It Out explores the ways art therapy can help women whose mothers have died navigate the unique challenges they face in making decisions about having children, pregnancy and struggles to become pregnant, grieving their own mothers while learning how to mothers, and integrating aspects of identity that may feel polarized.  For motherless women motherhood may be fraught with emotional, psychological, and behavioral challenges, yet it may also hold the promise of coming full circle on their grief and individuation journeys.  According to “motherless mother” expert, Hope Edelman:

When motherhood interfaces with the long-term mourning process, the result is exponential.  Becoming a mother can give a motherless daughter access to a more enhanced, more insightful, deeper, richer, and, in some cases, ultimate phase of mourning for her mother, one that may initially be painful but eventually leads her to a more mature and peaceful acceptance of both her loss and herself (Edelman, 2006, p. 4)

For motherhood to fulfill this promise, however, requires active engagement in birthing not just babies but nothing less than a new sense of self, containing both Motherless Daughter and Mother parts.  Expressive art-making with an art therapist sensitive to these issues can be a powerful aid in this process.  

Supported by the attuned companioning and gentle guidance of an art therapist, images translate the client-artist’s soul experience into expression (Malchiodi, 2002), which can be profoundly healing for a motherless woman entering the beautiful but difficult crucible of motherhood.  This chapter illuminates this point through its examples of art made in art therapy that seem to give voice and a healing container to previously unknown or not-yet-validated self-knowledge. 

Motherhood Rounds It Out proposes that in having a child and actively making meaning from her experience, a woman with a deceased mother is engaging in a process of transformation from bereft daughter to wise, compassionate mother of not just her child but her inner child.  This metamorphosis decreases suffering through the inevitable challenges of parenting and long-term grief, and promotes growth in other areas of life (Edelman, 2006).   

Using case examples from art therapy with my clients, (whose names have been changed to protect their anonymity), and examples of my own therapeutic art making, this chapter elucidates the psychological challenges and opportunities for growth that confront a motherless mother and makes the case for art therapy as a treatment of choice for this population.  It views the therapeutic needs of motherless mother clients primarily through the lens of modern grief theory, which emphasizes identity revision, meaning reconstruction through re-storying self-narratives, and tending a new relationship with the lost mother (Edelman, 2006; Neimeyer, 2001).  All of these, plus techniques to cope with intense feeling states inevitably triggered by motherhood, can help women meet the practical and psycho-emotional challenges of parenting.  

Such issues are largely ignored in the research literature and larger culture and often overlooked by mental health providers (Edelman, 2006); thus, they bear further attention beyond the scope of this chapter.

I also speak to the importance of the spiritual in working with a population engaged in multiple existential initiations related to birth and death at once.  For some clients, this includes a spiritual connection that bonds her mother to her and her children; for all clients, the transpersonal element of ritual in art-making, which honors experience and makes it transformative, is inherent to the use of the expressive arts for depth work (Epstein, 2004).