Wild Motherhood

'Raw, elemental and beautiful.' Telegraph 'This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails- the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair. MORE PRAISE FOR CLOVER STROUD- 'Clover's expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar' - Pandora Sykes 'As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. I want to give this triumphant book to every mother I know' - Rachel Joyce 'Stroud is always willing to rip open her very soul in order to reveal the truth about her life - and every time a woman tells the truth like this, it sets another woman free' - Elizabeth Gilbert 'I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing... For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating' - Alexandra Heminsley Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child's life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to - not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.

Create new forms of mothering and learn to facilitate daily access to the power, spirit, and joy that mothering from the center brings. Building on themes from Tami Lynn Kent’s award-winning Wild Feminine, Mothering from Your Center takes a groundbreaking, holistic approach to women’s health as Kent provides gentle guidance through the emotional and physical transformative process of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. Revealing her own soul-filled journey from miscarriage to motherhood, Kent offers an intimate and comprehensive guide to reclaiming the energetic center of the female body. Drawing on her work with thousands of women and the energy of the pelvic bowl, Kent teaches you to access the creative potential of your center and the profound medicine it contains for all aspects of mothering and living creatively. Learn how to • engage the energetic power of the pelvic bowl; • heal from pregnancy and birth; • strengthen the bond between mother and child; • create holistic family harmony; • find balance between work and home; • enhance creativity and joy. Whether you are pregnant, trying to conceive, recovering from childbirth, or raising children today, Mothering from Your Center will help you tap into your core feminine energy and explore your full creative range.

Wild Mother Dancing challenges the historical absence of the mother, who, as subject and character, has been repeatedly suppressed and edited out of the literary canon. In her search for sources for telling the new (or old, forbidden story) against a tradition of narrative absence, Brandt turns to Canadian fiction representing a varety of cultural traditions - Margaret Laurence, Daphne Marlatt, Jovette Marchessault, Joy Kogawa, Sky Lee - and a collection of oral interviews about childbirth told by Mennonite women. The results broaden, enrich, and finally recover the motherstory in ways that have revolutionary implications for our institutions and imaginations.

This New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year from the author of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, On the Rooftop, is "a powerful tale of racial tensions across generations" (People) that explores the depths of women’s relationships—influential women and marginalized women, healers, and survivors. In 1924, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine’s family. Nearly one hundred years later, Josephine’s descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother, Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays Ava to be her companion. But Martha’s behavior soon becomes erratic, then threatening, and Ava must escape before her story and Josephine’s converge. The Revisioners explores the depths of women’s relationships—powerful women and marginalized women, healers and survivors. It is a novel about the bonds between mothers and their children, the dangers that upend those bonds. At its core, The Revisioners ponders generational legacies, the endurance of hope, and the undying promise of freedom. "[A] stunning new novel . . . Sexton’s writing is clear and uncluttered, the dialogue authentic, with all the cadences of real speech . . . This is a novel about the women, the mothers." ―The New York Times Book Review

“A juicy tale of bad behavior.... Very Nice gets pretty mean—but gloriously so.” —Entertainment Weekly Rachel Klein never meant to kiss her creative writing professor, but with his long eyelashes, his silky hair, and the sad, beautiful life he laid bare on Twitter, she does, and the kiss is very nice. Zahid Azzam never planned to become a houseguest in his student’s sprawling Connecticut home, but with the sparkling swimming pool, the endless supply of Whole Foods strawberries, and Rachel’s beautiful mother, he does, and the home is very nice. Becca Klein never thought she’d have a love affair so soon after her divorce, but when her daughter’s professor walks into her home, bringing with him an apricot standard poodle named Princess, she does, and the affair is ... a very bad idea. Zigzagging between the rarefied circles of Manhattan investment banking, the achingly self-serious MFA programs of the Midwest, and the private bedrooms of Connecticut, Very Nice is an audacious, addictive, and wickedly smart take on the way we live now.

On a hot July night on Cape Cod, at the age of 14, Brodeur became a confidante to her mother's affair with her husband's closest friend. Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help, but when the affair had calamitous consequences for everyone involved, Brodeau was driven into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. In her memoir she examines how the people close to us can break our hearts simply because they have access to them, and the lies we tell in order to justify the choices we make. -- adapted from jacket

Written for mothers seeking to fulfill their soul’s work while simultaneously raising future generations, Sacred Motherhood offers women on the path of motherhood a guide back to themselves. It will help you embrace the reality that this is your spiritual life—every moment of every day, whether you are at the grocery store, changing diapers, arguing with your partner, snuggling with your baby, or dyeing your teenager’s hair pink. Greet the moments when you fall down as awakening opportunities, every bit as holy and powerful as the moments you can drop in and bliss out. Spanning the sacred and the mundane, Sacred Motherhood is both a guide and a journal, enticing you to pause momentarily to reflect and write, and then return to your mothering tasks armed with a fresh perspective, renewed vision, practical tips, and creative ideas for enriching family life. For fifty-two weeks—a year of sacred motherhood—the chapters illuminate subjects that are likely to arise as the mothering journey unfolds, and present thoughtful prompts and helpful reminders relating to you, your soul, and your child. From the Trade Paperback edition.

When Carrie Visintainer became a mother at the age of thirty-two, she worried it was all over, that her adventurous life was done. World travel? Adios. Solo explorations in the mountains? Ciao. Creative outlets? She wondered, are diapers my new white canvas? Immersed in a whirlwind of sleeplessness and spit-up, she was madly in love with her new baby, yet also felt her adventurous spirit and core identity crumbling. So Carrie laced up her boots and set out on a soul-searching journey, with revelations near and far. Inside a local Walmart, she realized that new motherhood is like traveling to a foreign country, with a new vocabulary, unknowable customs, and extreme jetlag. Lying in a yurt in the Colorado forest, she came to terms with her postpartum depression. While sailing on a gullet off the coast of Turkey, she examined feelings of guilt about leaving her child in pursuit of adventure. And then, while perched in a handsome stranger's motorcycle sidecar in the Mexican jungle, she found herself face-to-face with her central quandary: Domesticity vs. Wanderlust. Finally, she discovered she could-and should-have both.