Mother Interrupted: Matrescence and feminist writing praxis

Becoming mother means being interrupted. ‘Matrescence’, defined by anthropologist Dana Raphael as the ‘time of mother-becoming’ (1975: 66) and by Lucy Jones as a ‘metamorphosis’ (2023), provokes interruptions on both macro and micro scales. In this creative-critical article, I use Lisa Baraitser’s Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) to consider how writers create work during and throughout ongoing experiences of matrescence. Using critical theory, autoethnography and examples of artworks and literature I am to explore the interruptions of motherhood(s) conceptually through language. In doing this I critique ideas of ‘deep work’ which need solitude and isolation and instead acknowledge maternal realities of interruption and consider this as having creative potential. Following Baraitser’s assertion that interruptions can be generative, I consider fragmentation as a form, using examples of performances, poems and texts by writers which explore matrescence and perform interruption. Using a writing methodology of interruption and employing Baraitser and other’s ideas as interrupters, examples of creative practice in writing and performance, and my autoethnographic accounts of interruptions, this article invites interrupted reading, and suggests that by destabilising dominant notions of time and patriarchal modes of working which do not acknowledge maternal experiences, alternative forms of creative practice and engagement emerge. I argue that through this fragmented method, textual maternal interruption(s) perform a feminist praxis.