The Book List
Winters are here. How about finding a few interesting books to read while enjoying a cup of ginger tea or lovely coffee? I recommend these three books for mothers. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and I get new insights and wisdom every time I re-read.
These books can be read from any page and there is no need to read it page by page. However, you may get captivated and would want to read it fast, but that’s another story.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Woman Who Run with the Wolves
“Everyone who can read should read this book.”–Maya Angelou says about this book. Clarissa Pinkola Estes is a Jungian analyst. In this book, she interprets old tales to reveal an archetypal wild woman who has been tamed by the society that believes that good virtue is about boundaries.
Within every woman is a wild, natural and powerful force that is filled with passionate creativity, eternal knowledge, and good instincts. These gifts are bestowed on women at birth but are lost as they grow in a society that tries to make them civilized by placing women in rigid roles.
This book makes you think about myths, fairy tales or stories in a profound way. Dr, Estes writes-
“Though fairy tales end after ten pages, our lives do not. We are multi-volume sets. In our lives, even though one episode amounts to a crash and burn, there is always another episode awaiting us and then another. There are always more opportunities to get it right, to fashion our lives in the ways we deserve to have them. Don’t waste your time hating a failure. Failure is a greater teacher than success.”
Her writing is amazing. She masters the art of using apt, visual words to create pictures in your mind. Her dramatic storytelling is to be experienced.
Sarah Napthali’s Buddhism for Mothers of Schoolchildren: Finding Calm in the Chaos of the School Years
This is one book that I would like to share with parents, not only mothers. Parenting is a challenging task where we need to grow with the child. This book defines the challenges and offers practical solutions based on the principles of Buddhism.
When you run through days, weeks, months, year after year, packing lunch boxes, cooking, teaching, picking, dropping the children, life becomes drudgery.
Most of the times we are attached to finding solutions to all problems as Sarah writes-
“I had uncovered a widely held but overlooked attachment: our attachment to the view that every problem must have a solution. We delude ourselves that we can think our way out of a problem or we see it as a matter of finding the right person to advise us. We become beggars for our problems, asking numerous people for an opinion. So often, we refuse to relax until a problem is fixed, only to discover our inability to relax as most of the problem.”
Sarah teaches you to find calm, peace and happiness, in the midst of all the chaos of the school-going years. She believes and endorses that these states are not as elusive as they seem. These are scattered throughout those lovely moments throughout the day that need to be mindfully experienced.
This book helped me enjoy motherhood by accepting the person behind my ‘child’. Today, I am much calmer, happier and more mindful.
Kate Hopper’s Use Your Words: A Writing Guide for Mothers
If you enjoy reading and writing creative nonfiction, this book is just for you. Kate amazingly summarizes the complete book in the first sentence.
“The transition to motherhood, whether by birth or adoption, is a universally defining event for women, setting a new tone for all that follows.”Her writing is brutally honest. When Kate writes about her daughter soon after birth, she writes-
“I stare down at my tiny baby and felt sick to my stomach.”
There are many poignant stories shared by mothers that you can relate to. A mother writes about losing a child to pre-eclampsia, another mother shares her experience with her son, diagnosed with autism.
Kate rightly tells you that ‘motherhood literature’ is real literature. “Through my blog and teaching,” she writes, “I discovered exactly what I expected: women—mothers—crafting memoirs and essays dealing with issues of identity, loss and longing, neurosis and fear, ambivalence and joy. I found stories about transformation and how the authors see themselves in relation to the world in which they live. Last time I checked, this was the stuff of which real literature was made.”
Each chapter of the book focuses on one element of writing, with a lecture, an essay, and exercises for practice. This is a great guide that can help moms to practice writing.
Let me know if you have any suggestions for books for mothers, I would love to explore your list.
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