ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the concepts of imagined maternal communities, personal maternal narratives, and migrant maternal imaginaries. It highlights how migrant mothers imagine themselves within local, national, and diasporic maternal communities and within an individual maternal narrative that may have been disrupted by migration. Migrant mothers, even first-time mothers, bring with them knowledge, practice, and values accumulated through their upbringing and observations of maternal practices. These accretions of knowledge, practice, and values form a narrative of themselves as mothers in relation to an imagined national community, which often lies largely unexamined until activated by their move into motherhood. Decision-making around maternal practices brings this narrative into focus, as it is challenged by alternative narratives and lived experience of motherhood and baby care. These challenges are also important moments of identity construction, as women enact or shift their attachments to their imagined communities, reconstructing or reconciling their personal narratives in their changed context. Nevertheless, some elements of their maternal narratives are not able to be reconstructed or reconciled after the rupture of migration. The irrecoverable loss of these elements may produce a sense of sadness and maternal failure, which some women struggle to overcome.
