“I Wanted It to Be Flowers and Sunshine, but That Was Not It at All”: A Relational Dialectics Theory Analysis of Black Motherhood

ABSTRACT

Research on motherhood in family communication scholarship has traditionally focused on White women’s experiences in the U.S. Few communication studies have reported the experiences of Black mothers in their findings. However, there is still a dearth of scholarship in studies that centralize the voices of Black mothers. While the paths to becoming a mother might be fairly similar, the experiences of mothers differ based on many factors. African American women exist on the margins of race, gender, and the legitimacy of “how they became mothers.” Centralizing the voices of Black mothers in communication scholarship, this study analyzed the stories of 31 African American mothers. Using Relational Dialectics Theory as a theoretical framework, the discourse of intensive mothering (DIM) and the discourse of motherhood as distressing (DMD) emerged from the data. The DIM and DMD interplayed through diachronic separation, synchronic interplay, and dialogic transformation (discursive hybridity).

Acknowledgments

I specially appreciate my dissertation advisor- Erin Sahlstein Parcell, whose expertise and guidance shaped this work in significant ways. I will also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose valuable feedback and suggestions helped improve the quality of this manuscript. Lastly, I am grateful to the Black mothers who trusted me with their stories to make this project a step towards maternal healthcare advocacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. This manuscript is part of a larger dissertation study focusing on African American women’s maternal healthcare experiences. Thus, the need for the requirement of pregnancy/birthing within the last one year.

2. “‘Low-income individual’ means an individual whose family’s taxable income for the preceding year did not exceed 150% of the poverty level amount” (U.S. Department of Education, 2023).

3. One participant had missing information on their education status.

4. On one hand, Negating involves a rejection of an alternate discourse, in a way that renders it irrelevant or unacceptable. It does not deny the existence of other discourses but acknowledges them only to disclaim their validity. On the other hand, countering involves repositioning a discourse so as to replace it with an alternative discourse in order to position the alternative discourse as dominant. Entertaining interplay is evident when a speaker acknowledges a discourse as just one of the many alternatives of a discursive position.