‘It’s an invisible wound’: the disenfranchised grief of post-separation mothers who lose care time

ABSTRACT

This paper enriches understandings of the implications of contemporary custody law for mothers and their children. It does so through a discussion of mothers’ grief and emotional pain over involuntarily losing care time with children. Mothers involuntarily lose care time by becoming non-resident parents against their will or by having a shared care parenting order imposed on them. Both experiences of losing maternal care time are becoming more commonplace as a result of the gender neutrality of custody laws across the Anglo-West and the increased emphasis given to shared care parenting as a viable post-separation parenting arrangement. Yet investigations into the emotions engendered by mothers’ loss of care time are sparse. Exploratory qualitative research with twelve mothers who involuntarily lost care time reveals the intensity and durability of their grief, its entanglement with emotions like fear, and its significance, as a relational welfare approach emphasises, to children’s best interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Mothers
• post-separation
• custody law
• shared care
• non-resident parent
• grief
• relational welfare

Acknowledgments

This article is dedicated to the twelve women who spoke with me about their experiences of loss, as well as to all the other women who would have liked to have spoken formally to me about but could not face the ordeal. I would also like to that the reviewers for their thoughtful response to the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Because of the clumsiness of constantly referring to ‘separation and/or divorce’ I will, throughout the rest of the paper, speak of separation, acknowledging that for many but not all former couples, divorce is integral to the process of the dissolution of their relationships.

2. Research has also shown that fathers who have been violent and abusive towards the child’s mother and/or the child are also not prevented from obtaining generous contact provisions, equal care time or even resident parent status. (See for example: Eriksson and Hester 2001; Kernic et al. 2005; Zeoli et al. 2013).

3. Kaspiew, Gray, Weston, Moloney, Hand & Qu’s (2009) review of the impact of the 2006 reforms to Australia’s custody legislation found a rise of shared care orders from 4 percent to 34 percent among the litigating population.

4. In addition to being embroiled in conflict, this population tends to be characterised by a range of reported difficulties including, domestic violence, child abuse, mental health problems, addiction to drugs and/or alcohol, which raise concerns about whether shared care orders are in a child’s best interest (Fehlberg et al. 2011; Archer-Kuhn 2018).

5. For example, Kelly Rutherford.

6. See for example, MATCH or Mothers Apart from their Children http://www.matchmothers.org/ and Protective Mothers Alliance International https://protectivemothersallianceinternational.org/.

7. See for example, Dr Laura Monk’s blog https://mothersapartproject.com/ and https://www.workingmother.com/special-reports/custody-lost#page-2 .

8. The two mothers who lost resident parent status as a result of child protection interventions had dealings with the family court for custody matters both before and after this intervention. Moreover, there was not a clear distinction in their loss narratives between these two branches of the law. Similarly, many of the mothers who lost care time through family law processes had interactions with child protection workers as part of attempting to resolve care and contact issues.

9. For a full and relatively recent discussion of a relational approach to emotions see Burkitt (2014). While acknowledging that we may engage in what Hochschild calls emotion work, Burkitt is critical of this concept because of its underlying assumptions about social life, the self and emotions. ‘Emotion work’, for Burkitt, does not entail the management of individual emotions but the management of specific relationships or situations and their often contradictory effects on us.

10. For the purposes of this paper, I defined ‘recent’ as publications from the last 20 years i.e. 1997 to 2017.

11. Love labour occurs when the work of responding to the care needs of another is infused with love; it is the joining together of caring for (i.e. the activities and practices of care) and caring about (i.e. care based sentiments and feelings). As Lynch (2007, 2009) discusses, engaging in love labour leads to strong feelings of attachment between the carer and the cared for, resulting in the caring relationship coming to occupy a pivotal place in each person’s emotional landscape and sense of self.

12. This reported perception of the father’s entitlement is notable although incorrect. As pointed out above, there is no presumption of equal care time under New Zealand law and decisions are supposed to be made on the basis of the particulars of each case.

13. When this initial decision was reviewed, the case worker acknowledged that a mistake had been made and there was no justifiable reason for removing Annie’s child from her care. However, the review took place many months later and in the interim very little had been done to maintain Annie and her child’s relationship. Nor did the review result in care being transferred back to Annie.

14. In many cases the mothers’ fears turned out to be well-founded, with six mothers reporting that their child/ren had been neglected or harmed while in their father’s care and that these harms continued to negatively impact their child/ren.

15. The mothers were all highly critical of the evidential gathering processes that surrounded their allegations, with several reporting that their allegations were not investigated properly because they were assumed to simply be part of a bitter custody dispute.