ABSTRACT
Through shared conversations, the authors, who are academic mothers, have come to believe that maternal ambivalence is heavily shaped by factors lying outside/beyond a mother’s will. We challenge characterizations of ambivalence in philosophy as a problem of will or insufficient coherence of identity, contrasting them with our own personal narrative as a ground for theorizing ambivalence. We offer a narrative that reflects our conversations on maternal issues to demonstrate the profoundly situated nature of maternal ambivalence. We highlight the essentially shared nature of knowledge making and the importance of narrative theorizing, offering insights to the experience of mothering in academia.
