In 1935, a young woman wrote a letter to Nursery World magazine, expressing her feelings of isolation and loneliness. Women from all over the country experiencing similar frustrations wrote back. To create an outlet for their abundant ideas and opinions they started a private magazine, The Cooperative Correspondence Club. The deep friendships formed through its pages ensured the magazine continued until 1990, fifty-five years after the first issue was put together.
Sarah McGreggor has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. It is at this critical moment that Sarah learns she was adopted. When the "One Last Wish" check arrives, Sarah decides to search for her birth mother--and a chance for life.
"Slay Like a Mother is a feisty, clever, and fun blueprint for modern motherhood that belongs on every book shelf and in every diaper bag...As a woman and mother, you'll gain a newfound power, happiness, and ability to leap tall Lego buildings in a single bound."—Erin Falconer, author of How To Get Sh*t Done: Why Women Need to Stop Doing Everything So They Can Achieve Anything A revelatory, inspirational guide for mothers to crush their "never enough" mentality and slay every day! Katherine Wintsch knows firsthand the self-doubt that rages inside modern moms. As founder and CEO of The Mom Complex, she has studied the passions and pain points of moms worldwide to help some of the largest brands develop innovative new products and services. As a working mom of two, she was running in an exhausting cycle of "never enough"—not strong enough, not thin enough, not patient enough, not "mom" enough. In Slay Like a Mother, you'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll discover eye-opening lessons about: THE MASK YOU'RE WEARING. The one you hide behind when you say everything is "just fine" when it's not. YOUR UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS. The goal-setting tactics you're deploying to get ahead could be what's holding you back. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN STRUGGLING AND SUFFERING. Being a mother is a struggle — it always has been — but your suffering is optional. Brave, supportive, and insightful, the stories and advice in this book will encourage you to live more confidently, enjoy the present, and become your best self — as a woman, a mother, and beyond. Perfect for fans of Girl Wash Your Face and #IMomSoHard! ***As featured in The Wall Street Journal and Parade.com*** Additional Praise for Slay Like a Mother: "Wintsch's style is brisk and forthright with enough humor to make readers laugh even as she illuminates dark corners. Although this is aimed at moms, any woman will find this enlightening and encouraging."—Booklist, STARRED review "Slay Like a Mother is much more than a self-help book for women; it is the end of self-doubt and the beginning of self-love... and that is nothing short of life-changing"—Rachel Macy Stafford, New York Times bestselling author of Hands Free Mama
Customer experience pioneer Jeanne Bliss shows why “Make Mom Proud” companies outperform their competition. Her 5-step guide to customer experience and culture transformation makes this achievement possible. Bliss urges companies to make business personal to earn ardent fans and admirers, by focusing on one deceptively simple question: "Would you do that to your mother?" “Make Mom Proud” companies give customers the treatment they desire, and employees the ability to deliver it. They turn “gotcha” moments into “we’ve got your back” moments by rethinking business practices, and they enable employees to be part of the solution to fix customer frustrations. Bliss scoured the marketplace seeking companies who excel at living their core values, grounded in what we all learned as kids. She offers a five-step plan for evaluating your current behaviors and implementing actions at every level of the organization. Step 1. “Be the Person I Raised You to Be” Understand how you are hiring, developing and trusting employees to bring the best version of themselves to work. Vail resorts, for example, the world's largest ski resort operator, banned the three words "Our policy is..." from their vocabulary, freeing employees to take spirited actions to deliver "the experience of a lifetime." Step 2. “Don’t Make Me Feed You Soap” Learn the eight key frustrations that bind us as customers (waiting, fear, anxiety, the black hole of no communication, etc.) and how to apply actions from companies who are delivering a seamless, frictionless and easy experience. Step 3. “Put Others Before Yourself” Determine if your focus is on helping customers achieve their goals – and evaluate how that is fueling your growth. Canada's Mayfair Diagnostics, for example, spent over a year studying the emotions of patients entering an imaging clinic, so they could redesign their welcome to deliver warmth and caring over procedure and process. The newly designed clinic achieved profitability in record time. Step 4. “Take the High Road” Learn how companies who do the right thing rise above the competition. Virgin Hotels, for example, named #1 U.S. hotel by Conde Nast Reader's Choice Awards, walked away from price gouging at the mini bar, so you'll never pay more for that Snickers bar than what you'd pay at the corner market. Step 5. “Stop the Shenanigans!” Evaluate your current company behaviors and identify the key actions that you can begin immediately. With 32 case studies and examples from more than 85 companies, this is a practical and easy to follow guide for your experience and culture transformation. Filled with comics to snapshot our experiences as customers, a “mom lens” to reflect continuously on your performance, and a “make-mom-proud-ometer” quiz – the book makes Bliss’s approach accessible and approachable. Join the movement to #MakeMomProud by applying this book across your organization. Whether you're contemplating your company's returns policy, its social media presence, or its big-picture strategy, this approach will help your company anticipate both employee and customer needs, extend patience, and show respect at all times.
Relates how the author and her husband adopted a six-month-old boy from South Korea and the lessons they had to learn as parents, including how to incorporate aspects of another culture and how to discuss birth parents with their son.
A collection of feminist essays steeped in “Solnit’s unapologetically observant and truth-speaking voice on toxic, violent masculinity” (The Los Angeles Review). In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, “Solnit draw[s] anecdotes of female indignity or male aggression from history, social media, literature, popular culture, and the news . . . The main essay in the book is about the various ways that women are silenced, and Solnit focuses upon the power of storytelling—the way that who gets to speak, and about what, shapes how a society understands itself and what it expects from its members. The Mother of All Questions poses the thesis that telling women’s stories to the world will change the way that the world treats women, and it sets out to tell as many of those stories as possible” (The New Yorker). “There’s a new feminist revolution—open to people of all genders—brewing right now and Rebecca Solnit is one of its most powerful, not to mention beguiling, voices.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, New York Times–bestselling author of Natural Causes “Short, incisive essays that pack a powerful punch.” —Publishers Weekly “A keen and timely commentary on gender and feminism. Solnit’s voice is calm, clear, and unapologetic; each essay balances a warm wit with confident, thoughtful analysis, resulting in a collection that is as enjoyable and accessible as it is incisive.” —Booklist
The loss of a mother is one of the most traumatic experiences of a woman’s life. At any age, a mother’s death may leave a daughter with feelings of anger, abandonment and profound sadness that taint the way she views herself, her world and every other relationship around her. In this breakthrough book, author Patricia Commins, who lost her mother at 26, shows readers that the key to escaping the sorority of sorrow is by understanding their mothers as women and by feeling an ongoing connection with them. From this perspective —outside the parent-child relationship that is so fraught with conflict and complex emotions — women gain key insights into their mothers and themselves. By addressing the psychological and spiritual connection that remains after a mother’s death, Remembering Mother, Finding Myself offers the essential element that is missing from other books on motherless daughters. The Path of Understanding —a unique experiential process based on journaling, conversations with friends and relatives, and meditative exercises— does not seek to negate the loss a woman feels when her mother dies. It instead gently leads her beyond the grief and pain to a new awareness, freeing her from forever trying to be the perfect daughter. Through her own illuminating experiences and those of other women, Commins shows women how to reconnect their deceased mothers while finding peace and self-acceptance. Included are interviews with dozens of women, including such notables as writers Joyce Maynard and Nancy Friday and psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.
Instead of preaching what mothers ought to do, psychotherapist Naomi Stadlen explains what mothers already do in the course of any exhausting day's work. Drawing from countless conversations with hundreds of mothers spanning more than a decade, What Mothers Do provides lucid insight into the true experience of motherhood and answers the perennial question common to mothers everywhere: What have I done all day? Stadlen's wise reflections, threaded throughout with the voices of real mothers, explore unsentimental reactions to motherhood-resentment, guilt, splintered identity, crippling inefficiency, and deadening fatigue. Yet the overriding sentiment is one of empowerment and wonder, as Stadlen illustrates how seemingly insignificant skills such as responding to a baby's colicky cry, being instantly interruptible, or soothing an overstimulated child to sleep profoundly contribute to an individual's socialization, self-worth, and curiosity. Remarkably perceptive and heartening, What Mothers Do will resonate with mothers everywhere in search of understanding and wisdom.
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
