A Curriculum of Mother-son Plots on Education's Center Stage‪.‬

We start life suspended inside our mothers' wombs. After laboring for that first breath outside of our mothers, while struggling to let go of our symbioses, in the moments of severing our bodily entanglements with the placenta, migrating, separating, suffering, identifying, and (re)connecting with pleasure through suckling, surviving movements of emotions all at sea, how do men learn to remember our first baby steps towards relational intimacies, and our infinite returns to those desired places of love and hate, life and death? And, as "straight" men, at what points in our journeys towards traditional "manhood" does the taste of feminine love turn to bitter milk? Until recently, and still, I knew little about my mother's life before giving birth to the multiplicities of "I's" that sits before you writing. (1) I have always known Elizabeth Gray as the ideal mother I imagined she was, was not, or ought to be. Like the sands of time, my understanding of who she is, as (m)other, continually slips through my interpretive grasp and remains the silhouette of a diasporic mirage. On this occasion, I migrate across shifting theoretical landscapes in order to examine how re-reading personal memories against such landscapes can provide prisms to analyze and synthesize my earliest understandings of how the limits of auto/ biographical mothers-son relations were conceived and delivered, or not, within men's life-narratives. Reading the works of various critical gender theorists as a politically "profeminist" conscious act (Pease, 2000), provides a "methodological filter" if you will (Hesford 1999), for how I might navigate interpretations of mother-son life narratives. Feminist and masculinist theorists (Gilmore, 1994; Digby, 1998), along with Pinar's (1994, 1995, 1975/2000, 2004) method of autobiographical research, as currere, (2) have helped to shape my current political consciousness, of how I choose to read and to what and to whom I teach. In this paper, drawing on Pease's (2000) memory work with men, I provide the reader with some personal stories that problematize the mother-son narrative patterns of distancing, devaluing, blaming, and dependency. I then illustrate how such narrative plots are often projected--acted out--on the educational stage. Although women currently constitute the majority of all public school instructional personnel, as Grumet (1988) stresses, like many mothers' life-narratives, teachers' experiences in the classroom remain hidden.