In a book that offers insight, inspiration, and wisdom to women in their journeys through motherhood, Alyce Manzo-Geanopulos utilizes personal stories that are both entertaining and anecdotal. She embraces the idea that all mothers need to be loved, accepted and encouraged by each other. The Evolution of Mom is a call to mothers to be grateful and realize their full potential.
"This is so good—time to reclaim our identity and power."—Eve Rodsky, New York Times best selling author of Fair Play In a world where women are overwhelmed with empty personal growth messages, it can be hard to navigate what’s real, and what’s just a sales pitch. A Little Less of a Hot Mess: The Modern Mom’s Guide to Growth and Evolution helps quiet the noise with practical, simple, and powerful invitations for real healing and growth. The twelve invitations and practices shared in this book offer the modern mom a path toward imperfect evolution, so that she can live her life authentically. Through vulnerable and often humorous storytelling, as well as clinical expertise, licensed therapist Kaitlin Soulé invites readers into a step-by-step healing process that takes the whole woman to heart. Moms aren’t just parents, they are: World leaders Teachers Nurturers Creators Providers Soulé recognizes the importance of mental and emotional wellness for mothers, guiding readers through nonlinear, intentional evolution. Moms, YOU are worth the time it takes to be whole—step into the driver’s seat of life and say yes to the invitation for growth!
In the early twentieth century, Americans often waxed lyrical about “Mother Love,” signaling a conception of motherhood as an all-encompassing identity, rooted in self-sacrifice and infused with social and political meaning. By the 1940s, the idealization of motherhood had waned, and the nation’s mothers found themselves blamed for a host of societal and psychological ills. In Mom, Rebecca Jo Plant traces this important shift by exploring the evolution of maternalist politics, changing perceptions of the mother-child bond, and the rise of new approaches to childbirth pain and suffering. Plant argues that the assault on sentimental motherhood came from numerous quarters. Male critics who railed against female moral authority, psychological experts who hoped to expand their influence, and women who strove to be more than wives and mothers—all for their own distinct reasons—sought to discredit the longstanding maternal ideal. By showing how motherhood ultimately came to be redefined as a more private and partial component of female identity, Plant illuminates a major reorientation in American civic, social, and familial life that still reverberates today.
Being a mom is a tough job—but imagine doing it in the jungle or out on the safari, faced by the ravages of the elements, a scarcity of resources, and the threat of predators prowling at all times of the day and night. In Wild Moms, Dr. Carin Bondar takes readers on an enthralling tour of the animal kingdom as she explores the phenomenon of motherhood in the wild. A journey through motherhood for the animal kingdom—from the initial phases of gestation and pregnancy through breastfeeding and toddler-rearing and trying to parent a teenager through empty nest syndrome (which, in many of these cases, is quite literal!) to being a grandmother. In Wild Moms, Dr. Bondar answers a whole host of questions about the animal kingdom: How do moms in the animal kingdom cope with crying babies and potty training? How does breastfeeding work in the wild—particularly when a mother is nursing not one baby at a time, but a whole litter? Accessible and entertaining, Wild Moms is a celebration of moms everywhere—and a book guaranteed to make readers think about motherhood in an entirely new way.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A moving memoir about the legendary author’s relationship with her own mother. Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick! The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady,” revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them. Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights. Praise for Mom & Me & Mom “Mom & Me & Mom is delivered with Angelou’s trademark good humor and fierce optimism. If any resentments linger between these lines, if lives are partially revealed without all the bitter details exposed, well, that is part of Angelou’s forgiving design. As an account of reconciliation, this little book is just revealing enough, and pretty irresistible.”—The Washington Post “Moving . . . a remarkable portrait of two courageous souls.”—People “[The] latest, and most potent, of her serial autobiographies . . . [a] tough-minded, tenderhearted addition to Angelou’s spectacular canon.”—Elle “Mesmerizing . . . Angelou has a way with words that can still dazzle us, and with her mother as a subject, Angelou has a near-perfect muse and mystery woman.”—Essence
Mom records her baby's milestones, but what about her own? Where is the celebration of mom's transformation? Beginning with one-day-old mom, who may feel like she is learning a new language, Mom Milestones is a love letter to the myriad ways moms grow and adapt to motherhood. Here are significant firsts: First sleepless night. First walk with baby. First mom friend. Skills learned—how to soothe baby (sometimes); how to coax a preschooler into taking medicine. Mom's likes (adapting pop songs to lullaby format; gathering intelligence from other moms) and dislikes (emptying the lunch box with mystery smells; requests for video games). There's Bedtime: The Board Game; crafts mom enjoys (no glitter or glue, thanks!); and the ABCs of motherhood (E for ennui). While there might not be a road map for motherhood, Mom Milestones tracks both the memorable and slightly forgettable guideposts along the way—sunrises, snack plates, cuddles, laughter, and astonishment—because, as the saying goes, the days are long, but the years are short.
Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not. From its opening vision of “apes on a plane”; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, Mothers and Others is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children—and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.
Heard brings Buddhist philosophy to life in this epic tale of a sentient being's journey through seven incarnations. The Evolution of Kami's Soul is a brilliant novel, complicated as a three-tiered chess game yet simple as an Eric Satie tune. An allegorical depiction of the dance between animus and anima, this novel startles like Amos Tutola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. If Tutola has dinner with Mahatma Gandhi and Karl Gustav Jung in the afterlife, they will undoubtedly discuss Heard's book.
A new vision of motherhood, giving us permission to thrive, taking us from overwhelm and exhaustion to a life overflowing with joy, meaning and most of all, real connection with our children. Thriving mothers transform their own life, the lives of their children, and ultimately the world. Imagine being raised by parents who are at peace with themselves! The Motherhood Evolution challenges conventional thinking that says mothers must sacrifice and martyr themselves if they are to be good mothers. Redefining motherhood as an evolutionary path, Suzi guides us to the realization that when we thrive, our children thrive, too. Limitless in its possibilities, this approach to motherhood changes the very nature of our mothering experience liberating us to raise an entire generation of conscious, connected, thriving individuals.
