Abstract:

Little is known about the experience of mothers who take care of adult children with a profound intellectual disability. The aim of this study was to explore this experience from their perspective. Mothers raising adult children with a profound intellectual disability present a type of a maternity that differs from the commonly accepted model of a mother and a woman.

I conducted narrative interviews with 32 Polish mothers from this group. The interviewees were chosen deliberately, based on the age of the adult children (they were more than 25 years old- at that moment a person with a profound intellectual disability have to terminate education in Poland). Each interviewee signed a written consent of the participation in the study. The respondents’ ages varied between 50 and 78 years. The women were from different regions of Poland, were single mothers and divorced. During the interviews I tried to emphasise and understand their motherhood.

The choice of a qualitative method required from me to abandon the privileged position of a distant observer. The study was conducted in Poland between September 2016 and Decmeber 2018. The interviews lasted from 120 to 240 minutes and were recorded on a voice recorder. I used a narrative interview which is similar to in-depth, free conversations. Through follow-up questions, I was trying to encourage the interviewees to tell a story of their experiences of motherhood. I analysed the information shared during the participant interviews using analytical methods that align with a grounded theory, because it involves building a theory on the basis of systematically obtained data that directly relate to the observed aspect of social reality.

Narrative conversations show that this group of women struggles with many difficult experiences and emotions related to their existence. Women- mothers characterized their motherhood as a one of the most important events in life. The motherhood experiences was varied, depending partly on the involvement of family, social support, personality. Understanding and learning about this kind of motherhood, and especially about the way of the perception of it, helped me to learn about the social context which has a huge impact on today's image of mothers of adults children with profound intellectual disabilities.

Keywords:

Motherhood, adult children, profound intellectual disability, social context.