Real Mothers or Otherwise

This thesis is a memoir of the women in my family and their relationship to
motherhood, both adoptive and biological. The primary source of this work is
memory and is contextualized within the Caribbean culture. The process of
interpreting these memories relies on narrative, cultural, and life history theory that
disarticulate ideas of motherhood found in North America from those in the
Caribbean. The beginning chapters are a personal memoir of motherhood while the
end chapters are analyses of the theoretical foundations of what I have explored. In
the last chapter, I reflect upon the personal process of writing memoir. There is no
equivalent study of the perception of the adoptive mother versus the biological
mother in the Caribbean. These stories of my family contribute to our understanding
of motherhood in the lives of women of color in the Americas, many of which have
been missing from history's larger narrative.