mothers

I am a mother. A working mother. A working mother who somehow scored the right blend of help, stubbornness, and luck to successfully breastfeed. As a working, breastfeeding mother I’ve spent a lot of time in Mother’s Rooms (which thankfully are becoming more prevalent) and as a working, breastfeeding, *librarian* mother, I’ve pondered the books I think should come standard with all Mother’s Rooms. The following is a list I am titling “My ideal Mother’s Room bookshelf.”

Unbuttoned: Women Open Up About the Pleasures, Pains, and Politics of Breastfeeding

Unbuttoned is a beautiful compilation

Seen through the lens of an anthropologist, the women who inhabit the Upper East Side of New York City appear to be a strange tribe with outrageous rituals, beliefs, and attitudes.

In this memoir by Wednesday Martin, we watch as she, along with her husband and young child, journey from lower to upper Manhattan – a trip that is negligible geography-wise and enormous socially and culturally.

As she undertakes the highly stressful search for the right apartment and preschool, Martin realizes what a foreign land she has moved to. It is from within this unique and exclusive enclave that Martin,

In this novel, Marie, a young mother, is a server at an upscale Dallas restaurant.  Some nights the tips border on phenomenal. Yet, she is slowly suffocating under a great, sorrowful blanket of depression. She exists, she suffers, she endures acts of degradation and abuse from men on the off chance that occasionally she will experience something other than sadness and pain. Her daughter is a buoy that she lets go of to sink back into the nasty muck. Love Me Back holds no happy ending, no redemption.  Tierce is excellent, she never takes the focus off Marie even when it sickens us to watch.

This nifty book has colorful pictures, which are heartwarming and uplifting. The inspirational read is for mothers or anyone to enjoy. A great book to flip through when you are in line waiting or on break.

What a sweet, heavy, sorrowful story. Elizabeth McCraken's baby dies in the ninth month of pregnancy and this is her story rolled out backwards for her readers, from the opening pages when she shares that her precious son dies and a second child is born alive and healthy. Knowing from the start that Elizabeth and her husband will have this second child does nothing to ease the reader through the horror and savage grief of that dreadful day when their child is stillborn. Elizabeth's words "This is the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending," says it all.

There are many things we practice for: a test, an interview, a sports event. In the early and middle part of last century women sometimes practiced being a mother. There were home economic programs at some colleges that offered female students the opportunity to learn about motherhood firsthand. Orphaned babies were loaned to the program for a year or two in order for the student, or practice, mothers to learn about taking care of a real baby. The effect of being raised by, and passed on to, more than one mother is explored in the book The Irresistible Henry House by Lisa Grunwald. The story

Welcome to a crazy alternate-historical steampunk world, starring a plucky and determined mother/son pair who must use all their wits to escape from a Seattle that has been taken over by zombies. Priest does some great world-building that literally immerses the reader (bring your extra filters, kids, the air isn't fit to breathe) and goes most authors one better by leaving much of the zombie horror offscreen. You'll focus more on intently listening for a rotter's shuffle than you will on the occasional gore, making the story trip along much more like J-horror than a Saw-fest. My YALSA blogging