ABSTRACT
Pregnant women and mothers seeking treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) offer an important contrast and critique to traditional motherhood discourse and its good/bad motherhood binary conceptualized within global metropoles. U.S. pregnant women and mothers often face challenges unique to living in rural locations, are seldom featured in OUD literature, and, by nature of their drug use, are often immediately condemned as “bad” mothers with little to offer discourse on motherhood. In this chapter, we use interview data from women with OUD in a rural U.S. state and the providers assisting them to emphasize the need for scholarly work that centers the lived experiences of marginalized mothers. Our results problematize and subvert the prevailing motherhood rhetoric that defines pregnant women and mothers with OUD by their deficits and disregards the valuable opportunity they offer in understanding how a challenge like OUD affects mothering. We draw on both maternal studies’ mothering framework and family resilience theory to argue that conceptualizations of the mother role must stem not from idealized motherhood tropes but rather must be grounded in lived, substantive experiences of mothering that demonstrate the empowering potential of mothering for overcoming very real challenges experienced by so many across the world.
