Metastatic Cancer and Mothering: Being a Mother in the Face of a Contracted Future

Abstract

For the majority of people diagnosed with metastatic cancer, there is little hope of a disease-free future. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a support group for women with metastatic cancer, we examine the relationship between metastases and mothering. We argue that the experience of raising children while living with a terminal illness crystallizes cultural expectations about mothering based on an essentialist model of parenthood whereby the person best suited to raise children is their biological mother. These expectations create an irresolvable gap between discourse and experience that both increases the suffering of women raising children and generates an internal hierarchy of suffering among women with cancer metastases that hinges on the distinction between those who have dependent children and those who do not.

Key Words:

• Cancer
• children
• metastases
• mothering
• mothers
• terminal illness

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is dedicated to “Sarah” and the other women the metastatic cancer support group has lost along the way. The research on which this article is based was supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research “Cross Cultural Palliative Care New Emerging Team” Grant and a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Operating Grant “Between Life and Death: The Contradictions of Cancer Survivorship.” Although any deficiencies in the manuscript are ours alone, we gratefully acknowledge the helpful feedback provided by Darlene McNaughton, the support group facilitator, and the three anonymous Medical Anthropology reviewers.

Notes

All names are pseudonyms.

As Miall and March (2003) showed in relation to adoption, the idea that biological mothers have a closer bond with their children is still relatively common.

The figure is likely higher as the sex of the cancer patient was not reported in all studies. Although the overrepresentation of mothers is at least partially an artifact of the overrepresentation of breast cancer patients in research studies, it is striking how unreflective many of the commentators are about the implicitly gendered representations of parenting the studies entail.

The father's perspective during the time of cancer is neglected in the literature (Helseth and Ulfsaet 2003), although rare cases show that fathers are often deeply concerned about how their own or their partner's cancer may impact their children (e.g., Russell 2001; Van Dernoot 2002).

Women rarely talked about their relationship with their husbands or partners in support group meetings beyond passing references along the lines of Eileen's comments. Individual interviews with women revealed that there appeared to be some sort of unspoken agreement in the group about avoiding this topic.

As Heidegger (1962:296) noted, “Dying is leveled off to an occurrence which reaches Dasein [being], to be sure, but belongs to nobody in particular. Dying, which is essentially mine in such a way that no one can be my representative, is perverted into an event of public occurrence which the ‘they’ encounters.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirsten Bell

KIRSTEN BELL is Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her current research focuses on the anthropology of biomedicine and public health with an emphasis on cancer, smoking, research ethics, and genital cutting.

Svetlana Ristovski-Slijepcevic

SVETLANA RISTOVSKI-SLIJEPCEVIC is Research Associate in the Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her research examines the sociological aspects of health and illness with current emphasis on cancer, mothering, and food and nutrition.