Hail Mary: On Prayers, Poetry, and Navigating Motherhood

Through an exploration of the imbricated identities of mother, feminist academic, and Recovering Catholic, the author demonstrates how poetry can be a method of inquiry into the self and the culture(s) that gave birth to it, and a method of meaning making. This autoethnographic essay invites readers to make their own meanings of motherhood through an encounter with poetry. Poetry is used as a way to convey the author’s own experiences of motherhood and mothering within a particular religious and cultural tradition so as to provide some critical perspective on both.