Traiettorie di maternità. Le narrazioni di donne di origine moldava diventate madri in Italia.

When applied to families, the term “transnational” designates all those families whose members live separately in different countries due to migration processes, constructing and negotiating meanings around family forms and experiences. In recent decades, the literature has become progressively interested in understanding the experiences of migration undertaken by women. In parallel, the body of research studying the relationship between migration and individual life course, particularly the link between migration and transition to adulthood, is limited. In this vein, becoming a mother brings physical, identity, relational, and social changes. Considering the intersection between the literature on women’s migration and that on transnational families, this research aims to contribute to the study of motherhood in the context of transnational migration by exploring the experiences of women who are daughters of migrant parents and who, after undertaking migration experiences themselves, became mothers in a country other than their country of origin. By referring to the frameworks of semiotic cultural psychology and sociocultural psychology, this research explored the meaning-making process around motherhood experiences of women of Moldovan origin with transnational childhood and/or adolescent background – as daughters of one or both parents with migration experiences – who undertook migration and became mothers for the first time in Italy. The choice to focus the exploration on the experiences of women of Moldovan origin in Italy – and established explicitly in Veneto – is based on reasons of statistical prevalence, which in turn are connected to historical, geographical, political, and sociocultural reasons. A qualitative study was developed by conducting thirty-three in-depth semi-structured interviews with Moldovan-origin women with experiences of transnational childhood and/or adolescence who became first-time mothers in Italy. The narratives were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, and six macro themes were generated. By showing and supporting the understanding of motherhood as a unique and plural experience for every mother in general and women in the context of migration in particular, this research would like to contribute to existing knowledge about contemporary families and women’s experiences of motherhood in the context of transnational migration.