Becoming Mum

Becoming a mother is one of the greatest transitions of a woman’s life. For many women it is a joyous adventure, but one that involves physical and emotional challenges and enormous personal adjustment. How are you going to rise to the challenge that motherhood brings? How are you going to enjoy your life while trying to conceive, throughout pregnancy and as a new mum? How are you going to become a good mum—and just what is a good mum anyway? What kind of mother do you want to be? In Becoming Mum, Dr Koa Whittingham, a clinical and developmental psychologist, parenting researcher and mother, draws on the latest research, her clinical experience and her own experiences as a mother. In each chapter you will find suggestions on how to apply the concepts presented in Becoming Mum to your unique situation, including coping with challenges such as miscarriage, postnatal depression and preterm birth. Discover: • your unique parenting values, and how to harness these to become a confident and happy mother • how to use mindfulness and acceptance to create a loving bond with your baby and support your baby’s emotional development • techniques for coping with criticism, unhelpful advice, distressing emotions and physical pain • how to keep your romantic relationship healthy and your support network strong • flexible, step by step strategies for facing major challenges that can be adapted to your personal circumstances Becoming Mum is written for all mothers, regardless of the specific challenges that you are facing, to support your unique journey from first trying to conceive, throughout pregnancy and into your new life as a mother. Become the mum that you want to be!

Having a baby is a life-changing event, and can be a very stressful time. One of the best supports women have before and after childbirth is regular, sometimes daily, contact with friends and relatives. Becoming Mum is a virtual mother and baby support group on paper, to keep new mothers going until they have the energy to find a real one. This book will support new mothers, in a society where we don't always talk about how difficult childbirth and those first few months can be. It features interviews with 50 new mothers in Ireland and Irish mothers overseas, as well as some older mothers who have insights to share. Contributions are also provided from well-known Irish public figures, including Olivia O'Leary, Roisín Ingle, Miriam O'Callaghan and Mairéad Farrell. It's not a book of stories. It's more like a survival handbook. It's not a 'What to Expect When You're Expecting' or 'What to Expect in the First Year'. It's not about birth plans, feeding routines, daily soiled nappy levels or how to deal with cracked nipples. It's about the mad stuff: the obsessive thoughts, the negative thoughts, the fear of childbirth and the effects of sleep deprivation. It's not a fun book, but it's not heavy. It's short and snappy, but the content is real and meaningful.

Written with a great deal of honesty and a pinch of humour. The things they never tell you about becoming mum gives a real world account of the delights and dilemmas pregnant women and new parents face. It isn’t a scientific book or a guide to parenthood but shares experiences and insight into the reality of becoming a mum. The easy to read chapters cover pregnancy, labour, birth and the first eighteen months of parenting, offering countless little gems of things you really need to know. Chapters include: • Learning to zone out of unhelpful conversations • Planning the birth • How to really write a birth plan • Getting to grips with your pesky post-birth emotions • The new parent debates • Don’t forget about you

"Becoming Mother" tells the story of a woman becoming a mother. It is a reflective memoir that spans from pregnancy through the end of the first year postpartum. It follows the author as she resists, denies, copes with, and ultimately embraces her identity as a mother. This isn't a guide or a parenting book. Its goal isn't to convert you to one brand of motherhood or another. Instead, its goal is to show you what becoming a mother can be like. Without sarcasm. Without boasting or martyrdom. Just the plain, messy truth of what it's like for one to become two.

As you prepare to become a mother, you face an experience unlike any other in your life. Having a baby will redirect your preferences and pleasures and, most likely, will realign some of your values.As you undergo this unique psychological transformation, you will be guided by new hopes, fears, and priorities. In a most startling way, having a child will influence all of your closest relationships and redefine your role in your family's history. The charting of this remarkable, new realm is the subject of this compelling book.Renowned psychiatrist Daniel N. Stern has joined forces with pediatrician and child psychiatrist Nadia Bruschweiler-Stern and journalist Alison Freeland to paint a wonderfully evocative picture of the psychology of motherhood. At the heart of The Birth of a Mother is an arresting premise: Just as a baby develops physically in utero and after birth, so a mother is born psychologically in the many months that precede and follow the birth of her baby.The recognition of this inner transformation emerges from hundreds of interviews with new mothers and decades of clinical experience. Filled with revealing case studies and personal comments from women who have shared this experience, this book will serve as an invaluable sourcebook for new mothers, validating the often confusing emotions that accompany the development of this new identity. In addition to providing insight into the unique state of motherhood, the authors touch on related topics such as going back to work, fatherhood, adoption, and premature birth.During pregnancy, mothers-to-be talk about morning sickness and their changing bodies, and new mothers talk about their exhaustion, the benefits of nursing or bottle-feeding, and the dilemma of whether or when they should return to work. And yet, they can be strangely mute about the dramatic and often overwhelming changes going on in their inner lives. Finally, with The Birth of a Mother, these powerful feelings are eloquently put into words.

Women who opt not to be mothers are frequently warned that they will regret their decision later in life, yet we rarely talk about the possibility that the opposite might also be true—that women who have children might regret it. Drawing on years of research interviewing women from a variety of socioeconomic, educational, and professional backgrounds, sociologist Orna Donath treats regret as a feminist issue: as regret marks the road not taken, we need to consider whether alternative paths for women currently are blocked off. She asks that we pay attention to what is forbidden by rules governing motherhood, time, and emotion, including the cultural assumption that motherhood is a “natural” role for women—for the sake of all women, not just those who regret becoming mothers. If we are disturbed by the idea that a woman might regret becoming a mother, Donath says, our response should not be to silence and shame these women; rather, we need to ask honest and difficult questions about how society pushes women into motherhood and why those who reconsider it are still seen as a danger to the status quo. Groundbreaking, thoughtful, and provocative, this is an especially needed book in our current political climate, as women's reproductive rights continue to be at the forefront of national debates.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother is multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk’s honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood. Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human existence to which no one turns up. It is the process by which an ordinary life is transformed unseen into a story of strange and powerful passions, of love and servitude, of confinement and compassion. In a book that is touching, hilarious, provocative, and profoundly insightful, novelist Rachel Cusk attempts to tell something of an old story set in a new era of sexual equality. Cusk’s account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep, and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; a meditation on madness and mortality; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone. “Funny and smart and refreshingly akin to a war diary—sort of Apocalypse Baby Now...A Life’s Work is wholly original and unabashedly true.”—The New York Times Book Review

Mothering is messy. Our joy and hope in raising children doesn’t change the reality that being a mom can be frustrating, stressful, and tiring. But just as God is using us to shape our children, God is using our children and motherhood to shape us. In The Better Mom, author Ruth Schwenk, herself a mother of four children, encourages us with the good news that there is more to being a mom than the extremes of striving for perfection or simply embracing the mess. We don’t need to settle for surviving our kids’ childhood. We can grow through it. With refreshing and heartfelt honesty Ruth emboldens moms to: Find freedom and walk confidently in purpose Create a God-honoring home environment Overcome unhealthy and destructive emotions such as anger, anxiety, and more Avoid glorifying the mess of mom-ing or idolizing perfection Cultivate life-giving friendships At the heart of The Better Mom is the message that Jesus calls us to live not a weary life, but a worthy life. We don’t have to settle for either being apathetic or struggling to be perfect. Both visions of motherhood go too far. Ruth offers a better option. She says, “It’s okay to come as we are, but what we’re called to do and be is far too important to stay there! The way to becoming a better mom starts not with what we are doing, but with who God is inviting us to become."