Learning after Motherhood: UK women's retrospective narratives on the impact of having a child in the life course

Motherhood is one of the key events that characterizes female life course in societies; it has been analysed from different conceptual approaches and from several epistemological perspectives. Little attention is paid to the relationships between motherhood, working life and adult learning, starting from a comprehensive perspective, allowing portrayal of the long effect of motherhood in women’s life course trajectories. In this paper we analyse the impact of having [or not] children in women’s live starting from a retrospective and a reflective perspective of Mid-life, directly from women’s narrative accounts.