ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a critical auto/biographical approach in order to explore aspects of the author's professional and personal identity with reference to maternal status and experience. All women live their lives against a background of personal and cultural assumptions that all women are or want to be mothers and that for women motherhood is proof of adulthood and a natural consequence of marriage or a permanent relationship with a man. A great deal of social and psychological research has focused on women and the role of children in their lives and is complicit in reproducing societal assumptions about women deriving their identity from relationships in domestic situations and particularly from motherhood within the family. Social attitudes and institutions support the assumption that women's ultimate role is motherhood and women who do not mother children are still expected to mother others; either vocationally as a teacher or a nurse or within the family as a sister, aunt, daughter, or wife/partner.
