Motherhood, religious and affective coping in the confession of Florica Bațu-Ichim

The following study continues some of the research I published a few years ago (particularly, the papers interested in the reflection of the imaginary of the traumatized corporeality in the women's confessive writings). It analyzes a very provocative, sadly almost unknown, cancer narrative: Florica-Baţu Ichim's book, entitled La porţile disperării, începutul speranţei/ At the Gates of Despair, the Beginning of Hope. As most of the confessive texts, written during radical identity crisis (caused by receiving a diagnosis perceived as lethal), this auto-biographical splendid text articulates itself as a hybrid narrative, in which the author mixes fragments of micro-family novel, diary notes, hospital reports, reading notes, etc. But the truly specific note of this volume – as in the case of Mioara Grigore's Cancer, my love – is given by the way in which the writer (priest's wife and devoted mother of six children) intuitively mixes religious coping with a sort of affective coping, with the aim of strengthening her spiritual identity during the terrible struggle with the Great C.