Motherhood Memoir

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.

A Mother’s Tears is a memoir that explores the relationships between perseverance, disease, and never-ending determination. It is conveyed through the hardships of a woman brought up under Communist rule who eventually escapes the confined conditions of her home country only to find out she now has a physical conflict to fight. It is a heart-wrenching journey down the corridors of cancer, drugs and alcohol, and loneliness as a mother tries anything she can to make sure that both she and her son live to fight their own personal battles another day.

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.

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.

A real mum's hilariously honest tales of motherhood, mayhem and mental health. 'You see, pre-motherhood I had this image of the sort of motherhood I was going to have. Happy, confident and in total control, breezing through my perfect new mum life, clad in white linen, with a smiley, easygoing baby attached to my hip. But then, something happened.'

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.

Funny, acutely observed, frighteningly honest and drawing on her own and hundreds of other mum's real experiences, Stephanie Calman serves up the perfect antidote to all those books that tell you that your children must be perfect, and to all those Stepford mums and kids out there who look as if they just might be: perfectly groomed, perfectly behaved and perfectly brilliant.

1542. A French noblewoman is left abandoned on a small island north of Nova Scotia. She has a crossbow, arquebuses and gunpowder. The island is populated only by wild beasts. She may be pregnant at this time. Centuries later, whilst mothering her young children, a woman begins writing what she believes to be a television script about the life of Marguerite de la Rocque and her incredible story of survival against the odds. As she draws closer to the nature of Marguerite, the woman begins to question her ability to tell this story.

From the author of the viral New York Times op-ed column "To Siri with Love" comes a collection of touching, hilarious, and illuminating stories about life with a 13-year-old boy with autism that hold insights and revelations for us all.

Throughout her stories of misplaced toys, temper tantrums, and experiences as a physical education teacher, Christine offers observations that will ring true with all mothers. In short, this book offers a virtual high five to women for the million things they manage to miraculously get done.