Vol.:(0123456789) Subjectivity https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-021-00113-4 ORIGINAL ARTICLE “When I was a kid:” Childhood memories, care work, and becoming mom Maria Kromidas 1 Accepted: 26 April 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2021 Abstract This article explores how childhood memories served as a rich resource in women’s formations as maternal subjects. So afectively loaded is the child fgure, and so dif- fuse and malleable are memories, that the remembered child appeared in women’s narratives in multiple fgurations and served multiple functions. These memories incited the intensive multidimensional labors of the middle-class mother while also curbing and critiquing these labors, as well as a resource to imagine being mother otherwise. Women’s childhood memories highlight the ways that neoliberalism’s heightened stakes and increased competition for middle-class reproduction lodge themselves into women’s labors and psyches. Yet they also point to perspectives and desires outside of normative neoliberal femininities associated with the middle- class. Their narratives enrich accounts of being and becoming mom as a feld of dreams, desires, and memories where past, present, and future time intersect in non- linear ways. Keywords Childhood · Memories · Middle-class · Motherhood · Mothering · Neoliberalism In my research about the experiences and struggles of mothering the middle-class child in NYC, I was struck by how often women brought up memories of their own childhoods. So afectively loaded is the child fgure, and so difuse and mal- leable are memories, that the remembered child appeared in women’s narratives in multiple fgurations and served multiple functions. These memories incited the intensive multidimensional labors of the middle-class mother while also curbing and critiquing these labors, as well as a resource to imagine being mother other- wise. I explore how women wove childhood memories into their narratives of their care work and trace how mother subjectivities are formed in relation to the child. Memories of the child fgure speak to the contemporary contradictions of what Lisa * Maria Kromidas mariakromidas@gmail.com; kromidasm@wpunj.edu 1 William Paterson University of New Jersey, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ 07470, USA