Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Shattered Motherhood: Surviving The Guilt of a Child’s Suicide
by Donna F Johnson
Spinifex Press
Feb 2025, $19.95, 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1922964144
“I make no bones about the fact that I am writing this book in an effort to alleviate the guilt of mothers following the suicide of their child,” Donna F. Johnson writes in her thoughtful but devastating new book. She goes on:
“When a child dies by suicide the contrivance of maternal guilt operates in a way that is particularly cruel. I wish to expose maternal guilt as a nefarious social construct intended to keep women feeling inadequate – and serving a system that is not in our interest.”
Subtitled, Surviving the Guilt of a Child’s Suicide, Donna F. Johnson’s study of women whose children have killed themselves analyzes the sources of guilt, the pressures placed on mothers in a patriarchal society, abusive relationships, and support systems that are there to protect the women.
Right away, Johnson, who worked for sixteen years in a battered women’s shelter, identifies the need for talk and for community. “Can a woman reclaim her shattered motherhood on her own? Maybe some can. But if you’re asking my opinion, this is not a journey for a woman to make alone. It’s just too hard.” Over and over again, Johnson cites the “hayloft” metaphor from Sarah Polley’s 2023 film, Women Talking, based on Miriam Toews’ novel with same title. Eight women in a Bolivian colony, victims of brutal sexual violence by men, meet in a dusty hayloft to determine their actions.
In the early years of the 21st century, Johnson became involved in the issue of mothers with children who’d died by suicide when she saw how devastated these women were, “ravaged by shame and self-loathing.” She’d met a woman named Judy whose son had killed himself. “I need to meet another mother who has been through this,” Judy told Johnson, but when she researched such support groups, Johnson discovered that none existed! She started her own.
Shattered Motherhood chronicles Johnson’s response, first in setting up her own group, which convened at the urban Canadian police station where she worked. The group of five women met for about a year. “What stands out about that first meeting was how instantly comfortable the women were with each other,” Johnson notes. The suicides included two girls and three boys, ranging in age from sixteen to thirty-one. The women shared their grief and guilt. Some were victims of spousal abuse. Judy, Mary, Nicole, Margaret, and Eleanor – mostly pseudonyms – described their circumstances, the absent fathers preoccupied with their work, their abusive behavior, alcohol addiction.
The support group was largely successful, providing “a space where each woman could fully process her trauma and loss, and evolve in her understanding of herself as a mother.”
Not long after the group disbanded, Johnson retired from police work and lost contact with the women. But she continued to assist battered women. “My conviction that maternal guilt is a patriarchal contrivance grew with every mother I met.”
Fifteen years later, during the COVID lockdowns, Johnson noticed that domestic abuse was on the rise. “For women, isolation is a killer.” She “came out of retirement,” as it were, and reconvened her group. A new victim, Kate, whose son Theo is caught in the crosshairs of an abusive relationship that ultimately leads to him taking his life, also became involved and is central to Johnson’s book.
Through her work with the mothers, Johnson thought about so many aspects of the situation. Her observations about abusive relationships and the politics of motherhood in the context of a patriarchal society inform several of the chapters of this book, and again she cites the collectivity of the mothers as a tool for empowerment through the raising of feminist consciousness. She offers guidelines and actions for supporting and uplifting the mothers of children who commit suicide.
Johnson cites eight kinds of abuse – emotional, physical, sexual, social, financial, environmental, religious, pregnancy and childbirth – by which abusive husbands seek to control women. She includes a long checklist of specific actions, from kicking and spitting and gaslighting to stalking, controlling the money, and abandonment.
Throughout Shattered Motherhood, Johnson cites the poet Adrienne Rich, who in works like Of Woman Born brought the oppression of women to the forefront of poetic discourse. Rich cites “the invisible violence of the institution of motherhood, the guilt, the powerless responsibility for human lives” in that seminal book, and Johnson gives credit where credit is due.
In a final chapter, Johnson turns the table on men and society in general, as she sees women years later still trying to atone for their guilt. She concludes her book: “Patriarchy’s coup de grâce is manipulating mothers into thinking they are responsible for the suicide of their child. And for this, it must atone.”
But it’s the company of other women in which Johnson sees the most hope. Among other women who’ve experienced the same guilt at the suicide of a child, “she will begin to have compassion for herself. In the faces of the other women, in their stories, in their love and in the pain they carry … she will reclaim the goodness and integrity of her relationship with her deceased child.”
Copiously footnoted and with a five-page bibliography, Shattered Motherhood is a thoroughly researched discussion of this topic of mothers who have lost a child to suicide. Not only does Donna F. Johnson bring her own years of experience to this, she also brings the vast knowledge and insight of so many others, both men and women. Written with authority and conviction and a profound understanding of the political and social implications of the situation, Shattered Motherhood is a vital contribution to the understanding of this all-too-often ignored crisis involving mothers of suicides.
About the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry collection, A Magician Among the Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Light Press Poetry winner. A collection of poems and flash called See What I Mean? was recently published by Kelsay Books, and another collection of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was just published by BlazeVOX Books.