Drawing from three years of field research with a homeschooling support group in the Pacific Northwest, I present the emotional stages mothers passed through as they tried to integrate the teacher role into their busy lives. In most cases, mothers found teaching more demanding than they had expected, straining their other roles as mothers and homemakers, as well as causing emotional burnout. To manage their insecurity, anxiety, and stress, mothers employed a variety of emotion management techniques. Mothers who successfully overcame burnout prioritized some roles, combined others, and received significant support from their husbands. I conclude by discussing the implications for theories of burnout.
In this article, the author examines interpersonal emotion management during crisis situations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a volunteer search and rescue group, she shows how rescuers managed victims' and families' intense emotions during searches and rescues, which led them to form unusually rapid and intimate bonds with these strangers. After the rescues, some victims and families sustained the newly intimate relationship with rescuers, repaying them with monetary donations and emotions like gratitude, while others terminated the relationship altogether. The author concludes by discussing the effects of interpersonal emotion management on victims' and families' selves and on their relationship with rescuers. She also extends the theoretical model of the socioemotional economy by incorporating the concept of interpersonal emotion management.
Drawing on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with homeschooling mothers in the Pacific Northwest, the author reveals several ways the temporal experience of motherhood was emotionally problematic. The intensive demands of homeschooling left them stressed and dissatisfied with the amount of time they had to pursue their own interests. Mothers tried to allocate their time differently to manage these feelings, yet their efforts were unsuccessful, which led them to become frustrated and resentful. To resolve these troublesome feelings, mothers resorted to manipulating their subjective experiences of time through a process the author calls “temporal emotion work.” In the conclusion, the author examines the theoretical confluence of emotions and temporality, suggesting that the dominant form of motherhood is culturally defined as a “time-sensitive identity” and that “temporal emotions” are unique tools in managing the emotional difficulties inherent in the trajectories of some identities.
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