Negotiating Motherhood: Variations of Maternal Identities among Women in the Illegal Drug Economy

Abstract

This study examines negotiations of motherhood among women in the illegal hard drug economy in Norway. Based on interviews with mothers who are users and dealers, this study analyzes four predominant maternal identities: grieving mothers, detached mothers, motherly dealers, and working mothers. Particularly relevant factors explaining variations in maternal identities include the timing of pregnancy, time spent with children, control over drug use, and place in the drug market hierarchy. By revealing patterns of intra-group variations by gender performances and work situation, the study expands upon previous work on how mothers who are structurally disadvantaged negotiate motherhood ideals.

Keywords

motherhood drug use drug dealing maternal identities women and crime

Femininity and motherhood are intertwined and mutually constitutive (Glenn 1994). In Western societies, the dominant model of motherhood is largely based on white, middle-class definitions (Skeggs 1997) in which women are expected to successfully combine the ideology of “intensive mothering” and paid work (Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson 2001; Hays 1998). Despite the existence of normative motherhood, there is much diversity in maternal identity constructions, shaped by structural inequalities (Arendell 2000; Glenn 1994; T. Miller 2007). A broad body of empirical work has shown how dominant motherhood is negotiated or contested by groups such as black working-class mothers (Blum and Deussen 1996), white working-class mothers (Skeggs 1997), transnational working mothers (Hoang 2016; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997), lesbian mothers (Hequembourg and Farrell 1999), and drug-using mothers (Baker and Carson 1999).

In this study, I investigate constructions of maternal identities among mothers who are part of the illegal hard drug economy. Such women are stigmatized twofold: they are involved in crime, and they fail to live up to normative gender expectations. Much of this double deviance relates to the link between femininity and motherhood, particularly norms about “nurturant role obligations” (Steffensmeier, Schwartz, and Roche 2013, 451). Indeed, studies on mothers who use drugs show how they negotiate maternal identities to present themselves as “good mothers” despite their drug use (Baker and Carson 1999; Hardesty and Black 1999; Kearney, Murphy, and Rosenbaum 1994). The gender-stratified organization of male-dominated criminal markets adds to the complexity of women’s negotiations of motherhood. For example, men may exclude women from accessing lucrative positions in crime groups because of presumed dedication to caregiving (Steffensmeier and Ulmer 2005). As previously shown, women have to relate to the dominant ideal of hyper-masculinity in their drug market navigations (Grundetjern 2015). The purpose of this article is to build on existing scholarship on structurally disadvantaged mothers’ negotiations of maternal identities. In my analysis of in-depth interviews with 21 mothers in Norway who both dealt and used drugs, I pay attention to the extent to which motherhood informs their identities, particularly how motherhood intersects with their gender performances (cf. West and Zimmerman 1987) within the drug economy, and its consequences. I demonstrate that the mothers have little access to dominant motherhood. Instead, intragroup nuances reveal a complex dynamic between involvement with crime and mothering.

Conceptualizations of Motherhood

Feminist social constructionists have highlighted how society’s predominant gender ideologies shape motherhood (Arendell 2000, 1193). The meanings of motherhood vary across culture and throughout history yet remain closely linked to normative expectations of gender (Glenn 1994). Essentialist understandings of mothering are rooted in a gender dualism based on biology and reproduction, where mothering is the responsibility and “sole mission” of women (Glenn 1994, 3). Early feminist scholars challenged such biological explanations of motherhood. For example, Chodorow (1978) theorized that early gendered identity formation of girls led them to identify with their mothers, thus making nurturance important to their identities. Later feminist scholars, such as Glenn (1994), have been concerned with avoiding universalistic theorizations of motherhood, and highlighting diversity in mothers’ experiences.

An ideology of intensive mothering that reflects white middle-class ideals has dominated in Western societies over the past several decades, advising “mothers to expend a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children” (Hays 1998, x). Mothers are to be devoted to the care of others and self-sacrificing, yet they must also successfully combine this mothering with paid work (Arendell 1999). Hays (1998, 2) argues that in this there is a contradiction, as mothers are expected to manage the fundamentally different logics of paid work and mothering. However, intensive mothering is the normative standard by which mothers draw from and evaluate their own mothering practices (Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson 2001).

While an intensive motherhood ideology dominates, a rich body of empirical work has shown that groups of mothers who are in structurally disadvantaged positions (i.e., related to class, race, sexuality, or other facets of inequality) construct alternative maternal identities (e.g., Blum and Deussen 1996; Hequembourg and Farrell 1999). For example, in her study of white working-class women in the United Kingdom, Skeggs (1997, 62) showed how women were attentive to how they might be judged by others as not living up to middle-class gender ideals, and as a response they used femininity and motherhood to claim legitimacy. Similarly, Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) showed the stigma experienced by Latin immigrant women who worked in the United States. With their children remaining in their home countries, these “transnational mothers” engaged in identity work to allow for seeing themselves as good mothers despite separation from their children. Moreover, Hoang’s (2016, 904) study of Vietnamese migrant mothers who also were separated from their children showed that they negotiated judgment from others by emphasizing being lonely and discontented.

In the Nordic countries, norms of combining intensive mothering with paid work are overt. These countries are at the top of global gender equality indexes (Hausmann, Tyson, and Zahidi 2012), and parenthood has been pivotal in the politicization of gender equality. The predominant family model upholds a dual earner/caregiver norm for both parents. Welfare State arrangements such as a generous parental leave (including a specific “father’s quota”), public child care services, and nonmarginalized part-time work, stimulate this norm (Ellingsæter and Rønsen 1996). Studies have shown that despite dominant norms of gender equality in the Nordic countries, in everyday practice caring is still constructed as important to womanhood (Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson 2001). In their study of employed mothers in Sweden, Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson (2001) identified key aspects of dominant motherhood: mothers should be available, psychologically content, and they should separate motherhood from work. Although the mothers in their study constructed motherhood differently, all took these ideals into account.

Mothering on Drugs

Most scholarship on motherhood and drug use emphasizes that mothers present themselves in relation to dominant norms, and that, because of their awareness of the stigma of being drug-using mothers, they engage in identity work to emphasize being good mothers despite their use (e.g., Baker and Carson 1999; Hardesty and Black 1999). Baker and Carson (1999) found that the drug-using mothers in their study rejected the label of “bad mother” by constructing less rigid boundaries for acceptable mothering, similar to what is shown in studies of working-class mothers (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Skeggs 1997).

Most previous studies describe women’s efforts to balance mothering and their roles in the drug economy. In her study of heroin users in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rosenbaum (1979, 432) showed how child care was women’s top concern and that “the conflict of interest is manifested in disappointment with their performance of both ‘work’ (heroin) and mothering roles.” She found that the most successful women were those with control over their drug use. Several studies have since showed how drug users attempt to protect their children by separating mothering and their drug-related activities (Kearney, Murphy, and Rosenbaum 1994; Morgan and Joe 1996).

While the majority of studies describe mothers’ attempts to separate mothering and drug involvement, J. Miller and Carbone-Lopez’s (2015) study of women methamphetamine users in Missouri showed how women accounted for their initiation into and continued meth use by referring to motherhood. The effects of methamphetamine were used to facilitate their efforts to accomplish being “supermoms” (see also Boeri 2013; Copes et al. 2016).

Existing studies have in common that they show how drug-using mothers negotiate maternal identities to live up to prevailing norms. In this study, I show more variations in maternal identities among women who are part of an illegal drug economy. Four factors were particularly relevant for explaining variations in both their constructed maternal identities and their gender enactments in the drug economy: timing of pregnancy, time spent with children, control over drug use, and place in the drug market hierarchy. In emphasizing these factors and the importance of taking into account the complex social conditions under which motherhood is negotiated, this study corresponds with feminist theorists’ call not to treat motherhood as an inherent identity or practice (Arendell 2000; Glenn 1994). Instead, I pay attention to how variations in maternal identities within a group (i.e., as users/dealers) are also patterned by gender performances and work situation.

Methods

Data for this research come from qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in Norway in 2011-2012 with 32 women who used and dealt drugs, 24 of whom were mothers. Among them, 21 mothers form the sample used for this study, since three women did not provide detailed-enough data about their children to merit inclusion in this analysis.¹ Interviews usually lasted one to two hours, with a few exceptions lasting three hours. I interviewed all participants: two in their private homes and the rest in prison. In prison, prison officials facilitated recruitment. Some participants volunteered after hearing about the project; staff directly asked others. Although the latter could raise the potential for coercion, I believe this was limited given that some women declined to participate. Moreover, I obtained informed consent; my impression was that their consents were sincere. I also interviewed three women outside the prison whom I met through my contacts with police offers at a local police station. I only include the two mothers who were users/dealers in this study. I use pseudonyms for all the mothers. To further protect the identities of this vulnerable group, I altered demographic details of women’s children when doing so would not affect the results presented.

The interviews took the form of life stories, using an interview guide with key themes. Although motherhood was not a topic initially mentioned in the interview guide, all the women provided information about whether they had children, and all the women with children mentioned their children on their own initiative. That the study was not explicitly designed to investigate motherhood could be a limitation, but for inductive analyses it is likely beneficial in that it reduces the potential of cue-related researcher effects (Yule, Paré, and Gartner 2015, 266). The effect may be particularly important for a topic such as motherhood, given its cultural weight in popular assessments of women in the drug economy. Indeed, scholars have noted the potential for such cues in shaping gendered accounts of women who use drugs (J. Miller, Carbone-Lopez, and Gunderman 2015). Another limitation of the analysis is my categorization of maternal identities based on limited interviews only. The mothers who did not have custody of their children likely had been through multiple phases (and might go through more in the future) for dealing with their loss.

The median age of the 21 mothers in this sample was 36 years. All but one were ethnic Norwegians. Among them, 13 reported amphetamines as the main drug both used and dealt, five reported heroin, and three reported cocaine.² The vast majority were from families of low socioeconomic status, and 17 had been involved in the drug economy prior to having children. Twelve women had one child, seven women had two, and two were mothers of three. Most women with multiple children had them with different fathers, though none were in an intimate relationship with any of their children’s fathers at the time of the interview. Their previous relationships with the fathers varied; 16 had been in a romantic relationship with the father when they became pregnant or had previously been in such a relationship—in some cases, while living together as a family—whereas for three women pregnancy was a result of a one-night stand, and for two it was the result of rape or sexual exploitation. The majority of fathers were also involved in the drug economy as users and/or dealers. Only four women, all of whom had previously lived conventional family lives, had children with men who were uninvolved in crime. In most cases, the fathers were absent, and in all but one case, in which the father had daily custody, the fathers had only sporadic or no contact with their children. Except for the case involving a custodial father, child welfare services had been involved at some point, albeit to varying degrees. Whereas 12 mothers had lost custody of their children many years ago, sometimes permanently, nine had custody of their children or had lost custody only briefly (e.g., during incarceration).³

My analysis relies on grounded theory (Glaser and Strass 1967). I started the initial coding by sorting all incidents in which interviewees discussed their children. An important line of distinction was whether they had limited or extensive contact with their children. I noted vast differences in maternal identities not only between but also within those two initial groupings. Four predominant patterns became evident: grieving mothers, detached mothers, motherly dealers, and working mothers. I discovered that these four patterns corresponded with four patterns of gender performances I had previously identified in a study using the same sample of women dealers (Grundetjern 2015). I proceeded with detailed coding using basic tabulations to determine the circumstances in which the women gave birth to their children and how motherhood influenced their involvement with drugs. I identified four significant factors that influenced their maternal identities: timing of pregnancy, time spent with child, control over drug use, and position in the drug market hierarchy. I treated these factors as tentative theoretical categories to test further (Charmaz and Bryant 2011, 292) and used the constant comparative method to verify the strengths of patterns discovered (Glaser and Strauss 1967).

Maternal Identities among Women in the Illegal Drug Economy

All women in this study described becoming a mother as an important life event. Mothers involved in the drug economy prior to having children reported that, during pregnancy and for the first months of their children’s lives, they quit using drugs and either discontinued or de-escalated their criminal involvement. Each eventually started using and dealing again. However, that is where the common ground in maternal identities in this study ends. In what follows, I present four predominant maternal identities, and illuminate how gender performances and place in the drug economy structured these patterns.

Grieving Mothers

In this study, eight mothers exhibited as grieving mothers. Motherhood was vital to the identities of these mothers, despite having lost custody of their children permanently and having limited contact with them. The lost opportunity to engage in mothering on a daily basis had brought them seemingly endless grief, which they said had initially pushed them into heavier drug use and further marginalization. Of all the women in this study, the grieving mothers tended to talk about their children the most. As shown elsewhere, these dealers enacted “emphasized femininity” (Connell 1987), as expressed in their strong identities as women and mothers and weak identities as dealers (Grundetjern 2015).

These women were particularly likely to have become pregnant early in life: five became mothers in their late teens and two at age 20, with the exception of one woman who became a mother in her early 30s. Like most mothers in this study, they were involved in the drug economy when they first became pregnant. With one exception, each was also in a romantic relationship with the father of the child at the time. The mothers had their children taken from them at various points in their lives, mostly by child welfare services. Although their drug use was the reason authorities became involved, their use increased after losing custody. All but one, who received a particularly long prison sentence, suffered from severe addiction. Five used heroin and tended to deal drugs at low levels to finance their drug use. Of the others, two used amphetamines and one cocaine.

Greta was in her late 30s at the time of the interview. She lost custody of her two children (now in their late teens) when they were 5 and 2. For the first two years of her oldest child’s life, she was in a romantic relationship with the father. The relationship ended, and the following year she had a daughter with a new boyfriend. Although she had been drug-free during pregnancy, postpartum relapses led her to lose custody:

I gave birth to her, and to be allowed to keep my children, I had to move into an institution. . . . At the time I was drug-free the whole time, so to speak. Except the last half year, when I had seven relapses. I didn’t have my children with me, but that didn’t help, I had to give them away anyway.

As Greta’s case illustrates, although women in this group reported having decreased their involvement with drugs after becoming mothers, they still used drugs occasionally, typically on the weekends when someone could babysit their children. Yet they did not view their use as a problem, and they generally indicated that it had never come at the expense of their mothering responsibilities. For example, Astrid described her drug use after becoming a mother in this way: “I used drugs in the sense that, if one can even call that using drugs . . . I started going out after one year, but I was very careful. I was a real mother hen [chuckles].”

When child welfare services placed their children in foster care, these mothers described fighting to get them back. Yet, when their attempts failed, they reported having “hit a wall” and started using drugs more heavily to cope. Greta explained:

Everything I tried: No. So you hit a wall. You hit a wall no matter what you do. You get pretty fed up, sad, and desperate. . . . Then there’s that on the side—the drugs—which become a very easy escape. . . . I didn’t get really addicted to drugs, I mean become a real drug addict, until after I had to give up my children. I’m very bitter about the whole thing.

According to these women, motherhood was such a vital part of their identities that not having their children near them triggered an escalation into more serious drug use. Recalling the times when they had lost custody of their children brought up feelings of sadness as well as anger with child welfare services, which they thought had worked against them. Ada said:

It started when I lost my little son, who is [now] 6. I think that child welfare services . . . after all I have been through, I think that they should support a person who is alone, instead of taking them away from them [their children].

Ada was indignant about not getting help with her personal problems that stemmed from her traumatic childhood, as well as conflicts she had with the father of her oldest son.

Unlike Ada, two mothers had taken the initiative themselves to place their children in foster care. Judith described this as necessary to protect her children from their violent father: “I realized that the children could not stay at home, with violence, and seeing me get hit.” For these mothers, the decision to place their children in foster care marked the ultimate sacrifice, and represented motherly care and unselfishness (Skeggs 1997, 56). Still, both Ada and Judith stated they initially conceived the placement as a temporary arrangement. Later they attempted to regain custody, but to no avail.

During the interviews, most grieving mothers cried when recalling when they lost their children. Illustrating the highly emotional nature of this topic, Astrid said:

I had an anxiety that was painful beyond words. I was used to being with her every hour of the day. . . . I missed her so much. At the same time, I used drugs to ease the pain that I felt. I was so devastated. I was so down. I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. I had no opportunities.

Her statement reveals the tremendous impact her loss had on her life, for she could see no opportunities. Ada also attributed her increased drug use to the unbearable psychological distress of losing her children: “I did it to get high, to put a lid on my feelings.” The consequences for grieving mothers, however, exceeded the emotional. Most described having lost their apartments and started selling doses of heroin to finance their own addiction; three also supplemented their sales with street-level sex work. Drug use further impeded them from fulfilling their wish to engage in active mothering.

The grieving mothers’ strong embodiment of emphasized femininity suggested that motherhood fit neatly with their identities when they had children, despite their young age. Separation from their children revealed tension with their maternal identity construction. Although they expanded normative motherhood by stressing that separation from their children was an expression of care, holding on to motherhood as pivotal to their identities continuously fueled their grief.

Detached Mothers

The identity of the detached mothers emerged among four dealers and users in this study. Like the grieving mothers, they had lost custody of and had limited contact with their children. Yet, their identities stood in stark contrast. For these women, motherhood was not a central part of their identities, and they talked about their children significantly less than other mothers. After losing custody, detached mothers seemingly did not dwell on the past, but instead they (re)turned to embracing a street cultural identity constructing their gender identities as “one of the guys” (Grundetjern 2015; J. Miller 2001).

Similar to grieving mothers, detached mothers had children when they were very young: one was 17, two were 19, and one was 20. For two mothers, pregnancy resulted from a one-night stand with a friend, another had had a boyfriend for a brief period of time, and one was raped. In three cases, their children were in foster care as infants, and in a fourth case as a toddler. They held positions as low- or mid-level dealers, and although they did not describe their drug use as uncontrolled, they reported extensive drug use, often using multiple types of drugs at once.

Now in her 20s, Michelle became pregnant after spending a holiday abroad with a friend. Upon learning that she was pregnant, she entered a drug rehabilitation center for pregnant users. Though she managed to stay drug-free throughout her pregnancy, her child was nevertheless sent directly to foster care:

I was there [in the drug rehabilitation center] for 8 months, and then I had my daughter and lost her in the hospital. Child welfare services took her away from me. I stayed clean for 9 months after that. I kept fighting in court and handed in urine samples and stuff to prove that I was clean. Then after 9 months I couldn’t handle it any longer, so I fell off the wagon.

After failing to regain custody, Michelle fell back into drug use and resumed dealing. The topic did not prompt strong emotions as it did for the grieving mothers. Instead, Michelle talked about giving birth and the subsequent loss of her child with seeming ease. Nevertheless, by describing having stayed drug-free throughout the pregnancy and having fought to get her daughter back, Michelle constructed her identity as previously having been a “good mother.” This distinguished the detached mothers, who generally indicated viewing motherhood a closed chapter.

For all detached mothers except Michelle, the primary reason for losing custody of their children was a gradual return to drug use. Henriette stated, “When I had a babysitter on the weekends, I started taking some pills again. So it started small. And then it developed a bit.” Brigitte, who was 28 at the time of her interview, told a similar story: “I had a neighbor, and we went on a major [drug using] spree together. So I asked Mom if she could take my daughter for a while. . . . And I guess that spree still lasts [laughs].” Young when she became a mother, Brigitte was seemingly unprepared to surrender her youthful activities at the time, and her laughter points to how her life after losing custody differed greatly from those of the grieving mothers. The detached mothers’ almost nonchalant way of describing the event, and laughing instead of crying, may have been a defense mechanism resulting from having lost a child and having lost control over the possibility of getting the child back.

Upon losing their children, the detached mothers returned to embracing the masculine street cultural identity that they had readily available. Michelle even associated the loss of her child to the decision to assume a tough identity: “After I stopped using drugs and had the kid, it occurred to me that now I have lost everything, so I am all in. I wanted to build myself up in the drug trade.” Her statement resembles those of the grieving mothers, yet differs in an important way; instead of “giving up,” they decided to go “all in” as dealers. Their distance from motherhood also surfaced, as Michelle’s statement exemplifies, in their use of the more objectifying phrase “the kid,” which was a phrase rarely seen in the interviews with the other mothers who typically used “my daughter” or “my son.”

After having lost custody, detached mothers had limited contact with their children. In three cases, the women’s mothers became the foster parents of their own grandchildren, and all expressed having problematic relationships with their mothers. Tove’s mother had told child welfare services that she neglected her daughter: “[I] had her for one-and-a-half years. Then my mother snitched me out to child welfare services, because I was out with her in the stroller around 11, 12 [o’clock] at night.” Tove’s statement exemplifies an indifferent way of discussing difficult life events, which was common among these women. Moreover, suggesting that her mother “snitched” illustrates her street cultural identity.

For women whose mothers had custody of their children, their problematic mother–daughter relationships complicated contact with their children. When asked whether she had regular contact with her daughter, Brigitte said:

Well, all contact goes through my mom, and I don’t have a very good contact with my mom, so for the moment I don’t have very good contact with her [my daughter]. . . . Outside [of prison] one’s slightly reluctant to call, right? It weighs heavy on the conscience. It adds up. It only gets worse and worse, and then one keeps delaying the whole thing. It gets like that. It’s not easy.

Brigitte’s language throughout the statement revealed a distance, as best represented by her using the impersonal pronoun “one” instead of saying that she is reluctant to call, which indicates detachedness from her own situation. Importantly, her statement also suggests that detached mothers’ lack of contact with their children was not due to lack of concern for their children. Rather, displaying detachment (i.e., excluding motherhood as vital to their identities) likely allowed the women to protect themselves from the emotional distress of losing a child, particularly when that loss was beyond their control.

The detached mothers were young and still adjusting to their adult identities when they had children, all of whom were unplanned. In having had their children with them so fleetingly, they likely never developed motherhood as an important part of their identities. Given their street cultural and masculine identifications, a motherhood identity was not accessible to them in the first place.

Motherly Dealers

A vastly different maternal identity emerged among four motherly dealers who had significantly more contact with their children than grieving and detached mothers. For the motherly dealers, their maternal identity shaped and converged with their dealer identity. They incorporated femininity and motherhood into their roles as dealers, and they used a “feminine business model” of organizing dealing around care and sociability (Grundetjern 2015). Moreover, these mothers were successful drug dealers: Three were high-level dealers and one was in the upper echelons of midlevel dealing.

Unlike other mothers in this study, motherly dealers had their children prior to entering the drug economy. They were in their early to mid-20s during their first pregnancies, in long-term romantic relationships with the father of the child, and lived conventional family lives until the relationship ended. Thereafter, they lived as single mothers, which tended to be the time they started using and dealing drugs. They began dealing full-time when their children were between 5 and 17 years of age. The children of two motherly dealers were eventually sent to foster care, the children of one moved to stay with the father, and another had her children living with her the entire time. Unlike the previous two groups, these mothers maintained extensive contact with their children, described having control over their drug use, and identified incarceration, rather than drug use, as the greatest threat to mothering.

Although they articulated various reasons for the onset of their drug use, all described having started to use amphetamines for functional reasons. Liv, whose children had lived with her the entire time, was a single mother in her late 40s. She started self-medicating amphetamines due to a chronic illness, lost her job, and started dealing drugs to provide for herself and her children. “What’s been important to me is that I’ve been able to put food on the table for my kids,” she underscored. Britt attributed drug use, domestic responsibilities, and mothering to her initiation to drug use and later to dealing. Still married upon starting to use amphetamines to cope with stress related to combining work and family life, she stated, “I found myself with a newly built house, and work and, yes, a husband who worked a lot, so I started cheating a bit on my form.⁴ I was very tired at the time.”

Interviewer:

’Cause you worked as an accountant at the time?

Britt:

Mm-hmm. And I had a house and a garden to fix and … pretty much everything.

Interviewer:

You tried to be kind of a super–

Britt:

[interrupts] Yes, Superwoman, who cheated with her energy levels!

Similar connections between amphetamines and mothering surfaced in Else’s story. When she and the father of her youngest child separated, she became a single mother of two (one with ADHD) who also had to work a full-time job. She explained, “I was alone. And that’s when it became too much for me.” To cope with her mounting everyday responsibilities, Else increased her amphetamine use.

The identities of motherly dealers underscore the tension between mothering and involvement in the drug economy. Despite changing life situations, all these women found ways to integrate motherhood into their newer, increasingly strong identities as dealers.

For example, unlike any other group of women, the motherly dealers emphasized their refusal to sell drugs to young people, who they argued could be their own children. Sophie said, “I wouldn’t have liked it if someone had tried to push drugs on my kids. . . . So I’ve had very young people ask me about it, but I’ve always said, ‘No, forget about it.’” The firm tone of voice used by Sophie demonstrated a mother’s “tough love.” The others also emphasized selling only to adults who had been using for years, suggesting concern for being good role models (Kearney, Murphy, and Rosenbaum 1994).

Although maternal identities shaped all motherly dealers’ styles of dealing, Liv merged mothering and dealing in a particularly explicit way. Her young adult daughters had been using drugs since their teens and, along with their friends, had first received drugs from men dealers who expected sexual favors in return. To intervene in this situation, Liv wielded her position as a high-level dealer:

What happened in later years is that these men . . . sit around and lure these young girls. . . . I’ve experienced pressure from below, you might say, because they have their claws in my daughters. . . . They have hooked them on one thing after the other. When they sit there with your daughters, you’re willing to do whatever it takes.

To help her daughters, Liv sold cheap, high-quality amphetamines to their men dealers who were below her in the hierarchy so that her daughters were more likely to get clean drugs. She also paid her daughters’ debts with their dealers and sometimes gave her daughters drugs directly. Despite having moral qualms about her actions, she tried to make the best of the situation by protecting them in the best way available to her.

Motherly dealers explained having bad consciences about spending time away from their children, yet they emphasized that they had managed to maintain close relationships with their children. Liv stated that she felt guilty about being away from her children so much, but knew that her time away had not come at the expense of their love:

Despite having been in prison so much and everything, we have very, very strong family ties. I have very good contact with my children. . . . Although my conscience is black as night . . . they have never ever blamed me for anything. It’s incredible, but they haven’t. . . . We were home together at Christmas, and we talk so nicely. We are together and love each other when we are together. So, you know, that has been an enormous relief. Even though it bothers me of course that I’m not around the entire time, like I should have been. But when I’m there, I’m there 100 percent.

All motherly dealers de-escalated their involvement in their children’s lives after entering the drug economy and acknowledged that dealing negatively affected the time that they had for mothering, but not its quality.

Because of the timing of having their first child, it made sense that motherhood was important to the motherly dealers’ identities. Although their drug involvement came at the expense of time spent with their children, they upheld regular contact and negotiated motherhood in close dialogue with dominant norms.

Working Mothers

The maternal identity of working mothers involved taking sole care of their children despite being active dealers. The five mothers in this group either had daily custody of their children or had lost custody only briefly (typically when incarcerated or under police investigation). Like motherly dealers, working mothers focused on maintaining close relationships with their children, yet they did not present a singular identity as both dealer and mother. Instead, they situated their roles as mothers next to but apart from their roles as dealers.

Working mothers were established high-level dealers when they first had children in their 20s, and they described making important changes to accommodate mothering. Similar to motherly dealers, working mothers reported having control over their drug use. Their success as dealers resided in their ability to be flexible and align their gender performances to the expectations of different circumstances (Grundetjern 2015).

Nina became pregnant at age 27 by her ex-boyfriend, who was a drug business partner: “We ended the relationship. One year after, we met [again] and I became pregnant; then she [my daughter] came [chuckles]. And at the same time, Day 2 of my pregnancy was all about cutting everything [all drug use] right away. And it went fine.” Nina described having remained drug-free until her daughter was 5, though she had dealt drugs the entire time. As with grieving mothers, working mothers described quitting or cutting back their drug use and/or dealing while their children were toddlers in order to reduce the risk of getting caught during a particularly important developmental phase for them. Jenny said, “I’ve always been very careful. . . . I’ve had breaks in sales, and then I start again. When I’ve been pregnant and all that, I’ve withdrawn completely.” Kari and the father of her child, with whom she had run a business at the time, had decided that she should keep a low profile in the first months after their child was born, which prevented her from getting caught in the same situation as him: “He told me, ‘Don’t worry. Just be at home and be a mom, and everything will be fine.’ I’m very grateful to this day that I wasn’t sentenced in that case.”

Eventually, most working mothers scaled up both their dealing and use again, yet they made changes in their lives so that they could retain custody despite being active dealers. For example, they protected their homes by not accepting customers at the door. Though Nina had previously allowed customers to come to her apartment, she began to refuse them once she became a mother: “Nobody knew where I lived. . . . When looking back, I think it all went really well!” In that sense, working mothers treated dealing as a regular job. Another strategy that they used to separate their private and business lives was to have only a few loyal customers.

Control of drug use and dealing was important to all of the working mothers and enabled them to balance mothering with dealing. They had stressed routines that included having dinner and doing homework at specific times. At one point, Jeanette had combined mothering with dealing cocaine and amphetamines, in addition to having a regular job. She described that time as “the most physically challenging period” of her life. Yet, she upheld her routines for her daughter: “I made dinner every day, so that I could eat with my daughter, so that we could have a meal together.”

Having control over their drug use also allowed working mothers to manage their involvement in the drug economy, which they deemed particularly important as mothers. Jenny said, “I don’t want to look like a user either. That’s always been important to me, since I have children, right.” Similarly, Kari put great effort into upholding a façade so that nobody would know of her involvement with drugs:

I got to know people through my child, because we went to this open kindergarten and things like that. But I always had to keep people at a distance, because I had so much to hide. . . . About my past, and about his daddy, who was in prison.

While Kari’s statement illustrates how motherhood can be an effective way to live under the radar as a drug dealer, it also illustrates the downside of living a double life, as Kari could not let people know her on a personal level. Working mothers also described living with the constant fear of getting caught and losing their children. Kari explained, “When you have children, that’s really the nicest time of your life, but at the same time I was really scared about, ‘Oh damn. Is this the last day I get to spend with them [my children]?’” In short, motherhood escalated the stakes and increased working mothers’ concerns with getting caught.

Working mothers described putting great effort into parenting, and all expressed particular concern with their children’s need for both love and boundaries, which they had not sufficiently received from their own parents as children. For working mothers in this study, care entailed protecting their children from drug use and dealing. Nina, whose parents had been involved in organized crime, was determined to give her daughter a better childhood:

My daughter has never seen me high ever, that has been very, very important to me. Because, I was so scared of my father’s friends when I was little. And that’s something you take with you from your childhood, like setting boundaries. My daughter has had boundaries the whole time. She has things to do throughout the day, she—yes she deserves to have the things she wants, and last but not least: I would go to my parents and ask for something and really be asking for love, but I would get money instead. And it shouldn’t be like that.

Jeanette, whose mother had used and dealt drugs during her childhood, was also particularly concerned about making “tough decisions” for her 14-year-old son. She was protective, but not naïve: “I am super alert when I’m talking to him: noticing what he says, how he says it, where he’s been, who he’s been together with, and what he did while he was there.”

Aware of their own childhoods far from dominant norms, working mothers underscored the importance of physical and emotional availability for their children. Their preexisting establishment as successful dealers and control over their drug use further enabled them to separate mothering and work and to be comparably successful in both.

Conclusion

A significant body of scholarship has challenged the idea that motherhood is an inherent identity or practice (Arendell 2000; Glenn 1994; T. Miller 2007). Building on this work I have shown how the interrelationships among maternal identity, gender performance, and place in the drug economy resulted in four predominant maternal identities: grieving mothers, detached mothers, motherly dealers, and working mothers. Mothers who use and deal drugs find themselves in a particularly complex gendered situation; not only are they doubly stigmatized in broader society, but they also operate in a gender-stratified organizational context that forces them to focus on their gender enactments (J. Miller 2001; Steffensmeier, Schwartz, and Roche 2013). The mothers in this study drew from their repertoires—which were shaped by timing of pregnancy, time spent with child, control over own drug use, and position in the drug market hierarchy—in their individual constructions of maternal identities. The findings from the analysis have important theoretical implications for our scholarship on motherhood, by illuminating these factors and the dynamics of how women’s involvement in crime and motherhood interact to create specific patterns of maternal identities and intra-group variations.

The major problem for the grieving mothers was separation from their children. Their experiences were similar to those found in studies of transnational mothers. As with the mothers in Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila’s (1997) study, grieving mothers widened the definitions of normative motherhood by defining separation as an expression of motherly care. However, corresponding with the findings of Hoang (2016), their highlighted feelings of sadness was likely even more important for negotiation of the stigma they faced and could legitimize having resigned the attempts of being active mothers again.

The detached mothers did not attempt to present themselves close to normative motherhood expectations. From their positions far from dominant ideals, their selection of another (readily available) gender identity made sense. Their identification as one of the guys, which itself had emerged as an adaptation to being in a male-dominated context (J. Miller 2001), enabled them to create a space for rejecting society’s motherhood ideals. This way they partly mitigated some of the emotional stress of losing a child and navigated the drug economy more successfully than did the grieving mothers.

Representing one out of two maternal identities in this study that actively engaged in mothering, the motherly dealers came closer to the normative standard against which women are measured. By drawing on maternal responsibilities when accounting for their drug use and dealing, and by emphasizing care and sociability as business strategies, they constructed uniform identities that accommodated being both mothers and dealers. Their experiences corroborated other research on methamphetamine users (Copes et al. 2016; J. Miller and Carbone-Lopez 2015). Although they could not escape the stigma of failing to living up to intensive mothering, they created leeway for themselves by widening such ideals (Baker and Carson 1999). When their ability to be physically with their children was threatened, they negotiated this by highlighting having particularly strong emotional ties with their children (cf. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997).

The working mothers differed from the others by not only combining mothering and paid work (i.e., drug dealing) but also by separating the two. Thus, they drew on ideals common for employed mothers in Western societies more generally (Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson 2001). By coming close to the intensive mothering ideal, they significantly reduced the gendered social stigma of being mothers involved in the drug economy. Their ability to separate the two was related to their flexible gender performance and ability to adapt to the expectations of different situational contexts (Grundetjern 2015). Still, other challenges surfaced as working mothers faced the paradox of performing according to expectations of two highly different domains (Hays 1998). For the working mothers in this study expectations were likely heightened. Because of the gendered nature of the drug economy, the gap between work and home domains were more substantial than what occurs in most legitimate occupations. Moreover, having to keep their work hidden added to the stress for these mothers.

This study contributes to our theorizing on motherhood by unpacking how gender performances and work situations pattern maternal identities. Among the women in this study, grieving mothers and detached mothers were the most marginalized, both as dealers/users and as mothers. As previous research has shown, sometimes the lack of resources has lead women to use motherhood to construct themselves as moral subjects (Skeggs 1997). The grieving mothers’ embodiment of emphasized femininity was perhaps key to understanding the paradox of their situations. Similarly, the detached mothers’ performance of masculinity resembled what Connell (1995) theorized as “protest masculinity” to show how constructions of exaggerated masculinity are rooted in marginalization. Importantly, this is an enactment more commonly used by men. Scholars have argued that mothers cannot escape the presence of intensive motherhood in their constructions of maternal identities (Elvin-Nowak and Thomsson 2001; Skeggs 1997). The detached mothers were the exception that confirms this rule. Their identity constructions came with considerable consequences. Rejecting dominant motherhood norms seemingly also required rejecting femininity. Their experiences, as with the experiences of the rest of the mothers in this study, are a powerful reminder of the omnipotence of motherhood ideologies, and how those ideologies continuously constrain mothers whose social positions make them unattainable.

Footnotes

Author’s note:

I would like to thank Jody Miller, Sveinung Sandberg, Heith Copes, Jørn Ljunggren, and Anne Bitsch for their helpful comments. I am grateful to the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, where I previously was affiliated, for their support during this work. I also thank Jo Reger, Krista Brumley, and the anonymous reviewers for their guidance in improving my manuscript.

Notes

Heidi Grundetjern is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Her research focuses on the role of gender in illegal drug markets, with a specific emphasis on the experiences of women who deal drugs.

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