| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立新竹教育大學 === 教育心理與諮商碩士學位在職進修專班 === 102 === Abstract
This thesis is a study of three mothers who had children with Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) through the analysis of their narratives. These mothers, who were born between 1950 and 1970, went through endless challenges while bringing up their children. The study of their stories shows that on the long, tough journey, these brave mothers constantly fought in both “inner” and “outer” battles and “love” was always the best weapon that they could find and use effectively. And the battlefields of this long-term warfare could roughly been divided into two categories. One was the “inner battles,” including the mothers’ parents’ families, the process of their getting married, their marital relationships, and the relationships between their children and them. The other was the “outer battles,” like the teacher-parent relationships and problems with the medicare system. This epic-like journey was also a love cycle—it began with the innocent people’s being loved, then came the sufferings of being orphans, caretakers, and fighters, then came the skepticism and identification of being pursuers and magicians, and then it ended with the innocent people’s faith in love.
The joy of being loved of the “innocent people” originated from these mothers’ earlier experiences of being treated fairly well. The feelings of being “orphans” arose from the cutting off of these mothers’ sources of love, sources in their parents’ families, in their husbands’ families, in their husbands, in unloved selves, and even in their unloved children with ADHD. “Caretakers” were created in both the inner and outer battles; these mothers gradually developed a firm co-existence ecology in an effort to survive and live on and learned to love themselves as well as their children. “Fighters” were people of action. To love their children, who are hard to love, and to love themselves, who had often been suppressed and bashed, these mothers’ courage and fighting spirit were so plucked up that they could defeat all the enemies or find ways to break through, especially to break through their own boundaries. When their children were grown up, these mothers turned “pursuers” of self-identification; they began to ask themselves, “Who am I?” And it was not until these mothers developed the traits of both “pursuers” and “fighters” and melting these traits into those of “caretakers” that they gained real independence and realized who they were. In old age, when they became empty nesters, under the life law of “raising the young at the expense of the old,” these mothers came to the stage of a depression full of self-pity and sorrows. But strangely enough, when such pain and despair came together to them, they also offered these mothers opportunities to reconfirm their self-esteem and hopes. Finally standing high as “magicians,” these mothers combined their life experiences and interpersonal relations into new wisdom and well balanced relationships with their environment besides finding their favorite self-identification. In addition to learning to love life itself, they came to love themselves the way they were; they also acquired the capability of interpersonal love, which in turn awakened the inner “innocent people” to love and have faith in whatever has happened and all humanity. After these mothers of children with ADHD came to the end of the journey of parenting emerged the core value of such an epic-like journey: LOVE, their endless love for both their children and themselves.
key words: mother of a child with ADHD, heroic journey, archetype, endless love.
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