B. Lee Murray
Bio
I am currently an Associate Professor at the College of Nursing, University of Saskatchewan. I am also a Clinical Nurse Specialist (CNS) in adolescent mental health. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Nursing, a Master of Nursing and a PhD Education Administration from the University of Saskatchewan. I teach in the area of adolescent mental health, individual and group counseling, interprofessional practice and leadership and school health in context of the role of a mental health nurse in schools.
My clinical practice and research involves working in schools with adolescents with developmental disabilities regarding sexual health education. I also have a great interest and curiosity regarding "Mothering". To satisfy this curiosity, I use autoethnography as methodology to explore the normative discourse of mothering in the context of my own experiences as a mom.
Dissertation Abstract
As I write this piece, I wonder how I got here. I began with an interest in adolescent mental health services in schools. Then I was captured by autoethnographic writing and Carolyn Ellis became my hero. I read everything I could find regarding autoethnography and mostly I read autoethnographic stories. This led me to wanting to tell my own stories, but I realized they were very difficult stories to tell and very difficult stories to hear. I became interested in why certain stories are difficult to tell. I wanted to know what made them difficult stories. I wanted to understand why we tell certain things more easily than others or why we don’t tell at all. I then became interested in secrets. I realized that my personal secrets were mostly about mothering. I wondered what it was about mothering that made these stories so difficult to tell. I wondered what was unique and specific to the secrets of mothering. I read extensively about mothering and motherhood. I was exhilarated when I found the work of Andrea O’Reilly and the Association for Research on Mothering at a book fair at a local conference. I had found another hero. Then I read Susan Maushart (1999) and Adrienne Rich (1986) and I became immersed in the search for meaning about motherhood, mothering, the masks of motherhood and the normative discourse of mothering. I realized there was a disconnect between the discourse of mothering and the actual practice of mothering. I also began to realize that perhaps the masks of motherhood and the normative discourse contributed to and perpetuated the secrets of mothering. I tell my own secrets of mothering to examine this phenomenon. And I tell stories that I never thought I would tell in a public forum. My stories look behind my cool and competent “mask of motherhood” (Maushart, 1999), and expose the raw emotions of my secrets of mothering. I am often vulnerable and naked and I ask readers to appreciate this in context of their own nakedness and vulnerability. An exploration of the discourse and practice of mothering, and the secrets related to that, offers a means to disturb the normative discourse of mothering and a means to unravel my secrets of mothering. I offer no solutions only hope and possibility that the disturbing and unraveling will guide mothers and parents to decide which mask to wear (or not) and which secrets to keep (or not) and perhaps to awaken readers to the social and political issues related to these stories (both mine and the readers). I introduce and provide the background for the dissertation through my positionality in Tomasulo’s chair. I will give no other explanation of the chair except to say that I move in and out of the chair as I explore the purpose of my dissertation and position myself within that exploration.
Full Dissertation