Who Will Be My Mother

Charming illustrations and whimsical rhyme present the tale of a little raccoon who decides he does not want to do what his mother wants him to do. So, he leaves home in search of another mother. Wandering through the forest, he inquires of several likely candidates whether they would be willing to be his mother. This includes a chipmunk, a squirrel, a bluebird, an anteater, even a beaver.

How Do You Forgive a Parent Who Has Failed You? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother stepped into her baby-blue Dodge Dart and drove away, leaving behind Melissa and her brothers. Rarely seeing their mother as they were growing up, they blamed themselves for her leaving, turning to each other for support and seeking out often destructive ways to cope with living without their mom. Decades later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. She has just days to find out what happened that summer and to confront the unthinkable fear that a “leaving gene” might be lying dormant inside of her. She knew she came from a long line of mothers who left their children. But when Melissa stumbles across a folder titled “Letters Never Sent” tucked away in her mother’s filing cabinet, she begins to feel the wreckage of her mother’s painful journey, before and after she abandoned her family. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, Without My Mother is a haunting yet ultimately uplifting story of one woman’s quest to discover how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those choices to forge our own paths.

Katie Stakolich and Dr. Alfred Aidoo were born into about as different of circumstances as humanly possible. Katie grew up in California, living most of her life with a mentally ill mother who dragged her four children from one unstable living situation to the next, repeatedly exposing her kids to episodes of abuse, neglect and abandonment. Meanwhile Alfred grew up on the other side of the world in the West Africa nation of Ghana. His parents divorced when he was young, and since then his father has served as both mother and father to Alfred and his brother. His father was a respected schoolteacher, but they still struggled to eke out a life on the margins. But he always emphasized the Christian value of putting God and others before yourself in everything you do. While Katie was busy raising two sons and working in a grocery store, Alfred was caught up in the busy world of practicing medicine, serving as a minister, and being a husband and father to two young daughters. As the story goes, Katie’s Mom moved to Germany to be with friends she met on the internet. Eventually, this led her to Ghana where she became engaged to a man less than half her age. The whereabouts of Katie’s missing mother finally came to light after she was involved in a serious car crash that left her in the emergency room of the Ghanaian hospital where Alfred was her doctor. Fearing his patient might die alone, and concerned about the intentions of her young fiance', Alfred exhausted every avenue trying to locate her next of kin. That is how Alfred met Katie. Over time, Alfred wound up not only treating his patient lying in the hospital bed, but also her family back in the United States that had been broken by years of living with mentally illness. Alfred’s compassion for others touched Katie’s heart, and his spiritual guidance took root within her psyche. Her path to inner peace and contentment started with forgiving her mother. The arduous journey continues to this day as she builds on a foundation of faith in God.

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."

This edition of the inspirational #1 bestseller draws on a new year of Jann's diaries and her mother's final days. When beloved singer and songwriter Jann Arden's parents built a house just across the way from her, she thought they would be her refuge from the demands of her career. And for a time that was how it worked. But then her dad fell ill and died, and just days after his funeral, her mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. In Feeding My Mother, Jann shares what it is like for a daughter to become her mother's caregiver—in her own frank and funny words, and in recipes she invented to tempt her mom. Full of heartbreak, but also full of love and wonder.

Sophie describes her relationships with a series of boys as she searches for Mr. Right.

As a Nigerian Ibo woman living in the United States & raising daughters, the author frequently finds herself in conflict between her native culture & her adoptive culture. Her attempts to resolve this conflict are the basis of a fascinating autobiography.