Shattered Motherhood by Donna F Johnson

Shattered Motherhood by Donna F Johnson

For a mother, the death of a child under any circumstances is unbearable. When the child is severed from the mother’s life by his or her own hand, the cleaving is particularly brutal. It is a bereavement with no equivalence in human experience. If you are a mother today, you are mothering in patriarchy. What that means, and how it might impact a mother grieving the loss of her child to suicide, is a subject Donna Johnson explores in this profound book. Johnson, in her counselling role in a police service, worked closely with mothers who lost a child to suicide, supporting them through those first traumatic days, weeks and months as the impact of suicide reverberated throughout their lives. What struck her was the absence of specific supports for mothers and the prevalence of a type of paralysis in the mothers. The burden of overwhelming guilt, shame and a huge sense of failure – emotions not shared by the fathers of the children – impeded the possibility of mothers recovering from their child’s suicide. In Shattered Motherhood, Donna Johnson argues for specific supports for mothers in these circumstances; supports that meet their unique needs, recognise the depth of their suffering and provide them with proper care. Through a feminist lens, she considers the institutions of marriage, motherhood and the family as well as the suffering of mothers who have lost a child to suicide. Johnson articulates her belief in the power of women coming together to name their own experiences, feel their own pain and search for their own solutions.

Donna F. Johnson was born in Montreal, Canada. Her lifelong passion has been to uncover how the inferior status assigned to women plays out in their everyday lives, particularly in the domain of marriage, motherhood and the family. After graduating with a Masters in Psychology, Donna worked in a battered women’s refuge. She helped establish Canada’s first monument to women murdered by their intimate partners. She has worked as a crisis counselor in an urban police service, taught feminist social work at Carleton University and published countless essays describing the plight of abused women. She is on the Canadian team for Hague Mothers, a global campaign aimed at ending the injustices created by the Hague Convention for mothers and children fleeing abusive men. Shattered Motherhood: Surviving the Guilt of a Child’s Suicide is her first book.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781922964144
ISBN 10	192296414X
Title	Shattered Motherhood
Author	Donna F Johnson
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Spinifex Press
Year published	2025-04-02
Number of pages	180
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable