Jackie Krasas - Still a Mother: Noncustodial Mothers, Gendered Institutions, and Social Change

For the noncustodial mothers who so generously gave of their time for this book

If motherhood is being there (E. Boyd 2002), then mothers without custody of their children are nonmothers. They are anti-mothers. Bad mothers. Undeserving mothers. They are suspect, to be reviled, or at the very least a cautionary tale. For the purposes of this book, a noncustodial mother is one who does not have majority physical or legal custody of her child or children in a postdivorce or postrelationship agreement. This is not a book about mothers who have had children removed by the state, nor is it a book about mothers who had their children adopted. Each of these populations is important in its own right, and their stories are not entirely discontinuous with those of the mothers in this book. The population of noncustodial mothers in this book appears to be growing as postrelationship parenting arrangements are changing. What are the challenges of being a mother without primary custody of ones child? Might there be benefits to being a noncustodial mother? What might the growth of noncustodial motherhood signal to us about motherhood more generally?

Since the 1970s, divorce and child custody have become more gender neutral in the eyes of the law. Families increasingly choose or are assigned shared custody of children in the wake of relationship dissolution. Many, but far from all, custody arrangements will have come into contact with the family court system; however, the outcome of each case is determined in a more fluid manner than a simple custody hearing. Some disputed cases are actually resolved before they come before a judge. Some undergo a formal custody evaluation. Others involve round after round of motions and court appearances, charges of contempt, and changes in parenting time.

As of 2010, shared child custody arrangements were more common than sole mother custody after divorce (Meyer, Cancian, and Cook 2017). However, it is difficult to precisely gauge the size of the noncustodial mother population. There is no single data set to count them. Much of the data on custody arrangements is held at the state and local levels. Many custody arrangements are informal, and not all families have child support orders in place. We do know that in 2016, of the 27 percent of children under twenty-one who had a parent who did not reside with them, 19.6 percent had a custodial father. This figure increased from 16 percent in 1994, representing a 22.5 percent increase in father custody in a little more than twenty years (Grall 2018). While it is problematic to assume that a custodial father always implies there is a corresponding noncustodial mother, we can approximate that 5 percent of all children in the United States have a mother who is noncustodial.

This book arose in part out of my own short-lived journey as a mother without primary custody when I took a new job half a state away. I found it excruciatingly frustrating that, as a gender scholar, I was having feelings about being a noncustodial mother that I knew were socially driven. That is, there were times when I was uncomfortable with my status as a noncustodial mother, even as I looked at my situation with a critical, sociological eye, knowing I should know better than to buy into societal prescriptions of motherhood. I decided to dive into the scholarly literature on noncustodial mothers to better understand my own reality. Finding very little, I decided to conduct my own research and analysis, ultimately leading me to write this book.

Early on, I turned to the internet and eventually found several groups of noncustodial mothers discussing, making sense of, and theorizing about their realities. Hesitantly, I joined in and quickly realized that this seemingly invisible group that I was a part of had existed all around me. I was not the only mother without custody of her child. While my noncustodial journey was brief in comparison to that of many of the mothers I met and spoke with, I remained connected to these communities of mothers who gave me much food for thought. I have enjoyed their company and their spirit since 2008, which makes this a long-term participant observation endeavor. I conducted thirty-five formal, in-depth interviews with noncustodial mothers and have had too many informal conversations and interactions to count. I approached the project as an institutional ethnography, which, although it focuses on the experiences of individuals, endeavors to understand the social relations that shape those experiences. Institutional ethnography is more than just qualitative interviewing. It starts where people are to understand their everyday lives but also attends to power relations, or the relations of ruling (D. Smith 2005). Toward that end, institutional ethnography incorporates multiple sources of data that can include things like interviews and participant observation, as well as discursive analyses of texts or documents.