Mother And Me

The adopted daughter of loving parents, Zara Phillips felt out of place since childhood. Although cherished, she grew up deeply insecure and alone, consumed by a void she found impossible to fill. Isolation led to alienation, until her talent brought her to the center of the heady London rock ‘n’ roll scene of the 1980s. Zara became lost in a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol and destructive relationships. An intense search for the truth of her birth led to an awakening and then to recovery. Zara’s activism for adoptee rights springs from a very personal passion. In the end, it was Zara’s experience of becoming a mother that revealed what being adopted really meant. For the first time, she gained deep understanding and compassion for both her birth mother and her adoptive mother and was able to start the healing process. Mother Me bravely illuminates the lifelong impact of adoption on every member of the adoption triad—adoptee, birth mother and adoptive mother—as well as the families of each. The tale of Zara’s search for her birth mother and her path to recovery is riveting, as are the stories of many people sharing her past.

Reunion and recovery are central to Zara's journey to motherhood. Mother Me provides a detailed account of her search for and ultimate reunion with her birth mother, and yet Zara still feels like an outsider, detached from her newly found birth family and with the void in her life seemingly bigger than ever. A subsequent move to California, love, marriage and the birth of her own children help Zara reach an understanding of her past and a final sense of compassion for both her adoptive and birth families.

In What My Mother Gave Me, women look at the relationships between mothers and daughters through a new lens: a daughter’s story of a gift from her mother that has touched her to the bone and served as a model, a metaphor, or a touchstone in her own life. The contributors of these thirty-one original pieces include Pulitzer Prize winners, perennial bestselling novelists, and celebrated broadcast journalists. Whether a gift was meant to keep a daughter warm, put a roof over her head, instruct her in the ways of womanhood, encourage her talents, or just remind her of a mother’s love, each story gets to the heart of a relationship. Rita Dove remembers the box of nail polish that inspired her to paint her nails in the wild stripes and polka dots she wears to this day. Lisa See writes about the gift of writing from her mother, Carolyn See. Cecilia Muñoz remembers both the wok her mother gave her and a lifetime of home-cooked family meals. Judith Hillman Paterson revisits the year of sobriety her mother bequeathed to her when Paterson was nine, the year before her mother died of alcoholism. Abigail Pogrebin writes about her middle-aged bat mitzvah, for which her mother provided flowers after a lifetime of guilt for skipping her daughter’s religious education. Margo Jefferson writes about her mother’s gold dress from the posh department store where they could finally shop as black women. Collectively, the pieces have a force that feels as elemental as the tides: outpourings of lightness and darkness; joy and grief; mother love and daughter love; mother love and daughter rage. In these stirring words we find that every gift, ?no matter how modest, tells the story of a powerful bond. As Elizabeth Benedict points out in her introduction, “whether we are mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, or cherished friends, we may not know for quite some time which presents will matter the most."

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner’s remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a “year in Provence” with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie’s teenage daughter. Katie and Zoë had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a seventy-seven-year-old woman set in her ways. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would grow close to her exceptional granddaughter, Katie embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that she would soon discover was filled with land mines: memories of her parents’ painful divorce, of her mother’s drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country, and of Katie’s own widowhood and bumpy recovery. Helen, for her part, was also holding difficult issues at bay. How these three women from such different generations learn to navigate their challenging, turbulent, and ultimately healing journey together makes for riveting reading. By turns heartbreaking and funny—and always insightful—Katie Hafner’s brave and loving book answers questions about the universal truths of family that are central to the lives of so many. Praise for Mother Daughter Me “The most raw, honest and engaging memoir I’ve read in a long time.”—KJ Dell’Antonia, The New York Times “A brilliant, funny, poignant, and wrenching story of three generations under one roof, unlike anything I have ever read.”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone “Weaving past with present, anecdote with analysis, [Katie] Hafner’s riveting account of multigenerational living and mother-daughter frictions, of love and forgiveness, is devoid of self-pity and unafraid of self-blame. . . . [Hafner is] a bright—and appealing—heroine.”—Cathi Hanauer, Elle “[A] frank and searching account . . . Currents of grief, guilt, longing and forgiveness flow through the compelling narrative.”—Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle “A touching saga that shines . . . We see how years-old unresolved emotions manifest.”—Lindsay Deutsch, USA Today “[Hafner’s] memoir shines a light on nurturing deficits repeated through generations and will lead many readers to relive their own struggles with forgiveness.”—Erica Jong, People “An unusually graceful story, one that balances honesty and tact . . . Hafner narrates the events so adeptly that they feel enlightening.”—Harper’s “Heartbreakingly honest, yet not without hope and flashes of wry humor.”—Kirkus Reviews “[An] emotionally raw memoir examining the delicate, inevitable shift from dependence to independence and back again.”—O: The Oprah Magazine (Ten Titles to Pick Up Now)

A picture book for expectant mothers and already-mothers everywhere, perfect as a shower gift or for Mother's Day. I felt you. You were a pea. Then a lemon. Then an eggplant... In this beautiful celebration of motherhood, the universal message of unconditional love for a child shines through. Laurenne Sala's heartwarming text, accompanied by New York Times bestselling artist Robin Preiss Glasser's charming illustrations, creates a sweet and intimate look at the powerful bond between mother and child from pregnancy to birth and beyond.

Advice on feeding and exercises to assist the development of babies' mouth and facial muscles to ensure language development, good mouth structure and movement.

Through a series of letters from his parents' passionate World War II courtship, Morrison uncovers a startling, touching story. This follow-up to his critically acclaimed 1993 memoir paints the unforgettable picture of a quietly determined heroine and of a son's search to learn the truth about her.

“You will devour these beautifully written—and very important—tales of honesty, pain, and resilience” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls) from fifteen brilliant writers who explore how what we don’t talk about with our mothers affects us, for better or for worse. As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in acknowledging how what we couldn’t say for so long is a way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves. Contributions by Cathi Hanauer, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Dylan Landis, Bernice L. McFadden, Julianna Baggott, Lynn Steger Strong, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, Sari Botton, Nayomi Munaweera, Brandon Taylor, and Leslie Jamison.