ABSTRACT
This book is about women’s perceptions and experiences of their adult children leaving home. It explores how the absence of the child in the mother’s everyday life impacts on her sense of identity as a mother, and investigates her negotiation of the transition in her life course that is precipitated by that absence. It offers a chronological structure to findings from a three-year study of how women sustain relationships with their adult children over time and offers a critical lens to existing formulations of motherhood. In so doing, it yields elements of a new model for motherhood that reaches beyond current representations that foreground the presence rather than the absence of children.
