Mother Shadow

A poignant telling of the legacies of mothering

Mother Shadow is a meditation on what it means to be a 'good mother' where two women - separated by continents and time but connected by blood - each find themselves enchained by social and personal forces that seek to limit them. The book blends a reimagining of the life of a 19th century unmarried peasant woman from Bologna who abandons her daughter to a foundling home - institutions known as slaughterhouses for the babies who died there - with present day reflection on the challenges of mothering with a disability.

Mother Shadow opens with the uncovering of a family secret. The author's great-grandmother was not an orphan, as she'd been told, but a foundling, relinquished at birth by a mother who 'did not consent to be named'. The discovery of the abandoned baby in her maternal line triggers a passionate and indignant reaction as she asks- what kind of a mother would relinquish her child? It also triggers a painful personal memory of the day she dropped her baby after falling backwards in her wheelchair and realised her worst fear. That her broken body, permanently injured in a plane crash in her early 30s, could not be trusted to protect her baby.

Troubled by her rush to judgement of her ancestor, the author becomes fixated on uncovering the mother's identity and piecing together the fragments of her life, a quest that takes her and her family to Bologna. As she comes to understand the series of tragic events that compelled her ancestor to abandon her baby, she wonders if the compulsion to make sense of the woman's act is linked to the overwhelming sense of inadequacy that haunts her because she is unable to mother according to the standards she has set for herself.

It turns out that Bologna, a city of porticoes with their smooth, flecked mortadella-like walkways, is the perfect city for a mother in a wheelchair and her scooter loving six-year-old.