Motherhood Memoir

The surprise of a second pregnancy, so soon after the birth of her first son, plunged Rosie into a despair that spiralled into deep depression. Terrified at the prospect of adding another child into her already precariously balanced life, Rosie was compelled to find a new way of living. She found herself instinctively drawn to the local parks and scraps of communal green spaces in her local south-east London neighbourhood, and to therapy via tending a hidden garden deep within the city.

In this wry, resonant and darkly funny memoir, journalist Grace Timothy explores a question most women will face at some point: if becoming a mother means the person you were before has gone, who exactly is left in its place? Best described as The Wrong Knickers for mums, in Mum Face Grace explores motherhood as an issue of identity.

Ser mamá no se mide por lo que dejas atrás al tener un bebé, sino por lo que ganas al hacerlo. Llegar a ser madre puede ser el más bello sentimiento que una mujer pueda experimentar. Ya seas madre primeriza o goces una vez más del milagro de la vida, este audiolibro te brindará la compresión y autoayuda que requiere afrontar este bello desafío.

In a world where women have more choices than ever, society nevertheless continues to exert the stigma and pressures of less enlightened times when it comes to childbirth, defining women by whether they embrace or reject motherhood, and whether they can have children or not. Dr Pragya Agarwal uses her own varied experiences and choices around motherhood to examine the broader societal and scientific factors that drive how we think and talk about this issue - including education, economic status, feminism, race and more.

Antes de tener hijos estaba segura de que sería la mamá perfecta. Destacaría en mi labor como madre, mis hijos estarían impecables siempre, y yo, brillando en mi nuevo rol, me iría a dormir tranquila todas las noches. En mi mente, despertaría descansada y con la mejor disposición para un nuevo día. Tengo que admitirles, desde un inicio, que soy malhablada. Si estás leyendo esto, debo advertirte: esto no es para las personas prejuiciosas, no es para las personas que se pelean con desconocidos en redes sociales o que escriben mensajes haters como cobardes tras una pantalla.

Rebecca Eckler is a popular newspaper columnist who lives the fabulous life and gets paid to write about it. So when a tipsy romp with her fiancé on the night of their lavish engagement party leaves her unexpectedly expecting, she is utterly at a loss. How will a woman who loves nothing more than a night out on the town sipping cocktails with her fellow party girls survive the pregnant life? "Knocked Up" is the witty, engaging and refreshingly frank chronicle of a modern woman's journey into motherhood.

Let's face it - raising children can take a wrecking ball to your ambitions, your finances, your relationships, even your health. But, as mother of three Shantelle Bisson will tell you, it doesn't have to be that way. In Raising Your Kids Without Losing Your Cool, Shantelle sets out how to get ready for baby's arrival, helps you through the big push, lays it all out on breastfeeding, and makes sure you don't forget to keep having sex. Plus, she'll help you navigate the perils of helicopter parenting, children on social media, and even gender-reveal parties.

As a twelve-year-old girl, Maria Housden’s vision of a happy future included everything that society expects girls to yearn for: a home, a husband, and, of course, children. Life had other plans.

My Body Is a Big Fat Temple, a memoir of pregnancy and early motherhood, follows a writer as she debates having children, miscarries, faces morning sickness, uncertainty, physical impairments, labor, breastfeeding, the "baby blues," the heartache of not loving her son as she thinks she should, parenting through a plague, until finally (basically, mostly) blossoming into her new identity.

Motherhood treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood - whether or not to have children - with the intelligence, wit and originality that have won Sheila Heti international acclaim. Having reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti’s narrator considers, with the same urgency, the question of whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, her body, her family, mysticism and chance, Heti's narrator struggles to make a wise and meaningful choice.

Longing to return to beer halls and boys, a teenager gives birth to a daughter during the Great Depression but shows the ultimate lack of maternal instinct when her baby is discovered to be missing. Though she claims that a nurse abducted the newborn, the infant, and the anonymous nurse are never seen again. In Minneapolis, Lorene Hermanson is raised on discipline and Christian morality.

As it turns out, it's entirely possible for the people we've lost to come back to us when we need them the most. Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice navigates it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood, and allow herself to be a daughter once more, in order to take care of her own girls.

She never imagined the pursuit to parenthood would involve the emotional assault of an adoption agency's flexible morality or invasive surgical procedures that brutalize both their bodies - but it did. Lauri M. Velotta-Rankin and her husband were sent overseas by an unscrupulous adoption agency to chase the ghosts of children they'd never bring home. After turning to in-vitro fertilization (IVF), a life-threatening diagnosis sent them reeling with fear and to the brink of emotional collapse.

This diary of acclaimed psychologist and radical feminist icon Phyllis Chesler was a pioneering work when it was first published in 1979. A look into the second wave of feminism and the era’s changing attitudes toward motherhood and pregnancy, With Child - now with an updated preface from her son - remains relevant for mothers today.

A gorgeous collection of letters about mothers and motherhood, curated by the founder of the globally popular Letters of Note website.

When you’re pregnant you think: ‘I’m having a baby’, not a person who will eventually catch trains by themselves, share a fridge with 10 strangers, go to a festival in Croatia without succumbing to a drug overdose, and, one day, bring you a gin and tonic when your mother is dying. We imagine the teenage years as a sort of domestic meteor strike, when our dear, sweet child, hitherto so trusting and mild, is suddenly replaced by a sarcastic know-all who isn’t interested in the wisdom we have to pass on.

In Hot Flush, Michelle traces her path from pop stardom with Liberty X through her burgeoning television career and how she came to discover the truth about a gene mutation and its consequences for her. Though her story is undoubtedly unique, what's not is her understanding of living and dealing with the menopause as a hardworking mother and wife, and it is this wisdom that she wants to share with other women - over 13 million women in the UK - estimated to be experiencing the menopause.

Part of growing up is realizing that everyone is dragging along baggage behind them. Some deal more successfully than others with that baggage. My memoir is my attempt to make a piece of art, a book, out of the obstacles that I tried to overcome in my early life. My main obstacle was my mother, a beautiful actress who was not at all loving or maternal to me. Like all good survivors I found substitutes in other women who filled the role of mother in my life. I have written portraits of several of them who were important to me

In this harrowing and intimate memoir, Harriet Alida Lye explores how, at just 15 years old, she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia called Natural Killer, named "the rarest and worst malignancy". The average survival time of patients with this diagnosis is 58 days. There are no known survivors. There were no known survivors. Fifteen years after Harriet's diagnosis, she became pregnant, despite having been told that her chemotherapy treatment would likely make conception impossible. To be a mother is to make a death, as death is bound up in life.

In 1979 Liz Pryor is a 17-year-old girl from a good family in the wealthy Chicago suburbs. Halfway through her senior year of high school, she discovers that she is pregnant, a fact her parents are determined to keep a secret from her friends, siblings, and community forever. One snowy January day, after driving across three states, her mother drops her off at what Liz thinks is a Catholic home for unwed mothers but which is, in truth, a locked government-run facility for delinquent and impoverished pregnant teenage girls.