Showing titles in Motherhood

Discover the true meaning of craftsmanship, and let this story inspire you to create something lasting in your own life, motivating you to pursue personal growth and meaningful connections.

When Kate Swenson’s son Cooper was diagnosed with severe, nonverbal autism, her world stopped. She had always dreamed of having the perfect family life. She hadn’t signed up for life as a mother raising a child with a disability.

Raising physically, mentally, and emotionally healthy children has never been more difficult. In the past, the influences a child was exposed to were limited, directly observable and could be controlled, but with the growth of technology, the proliferation of social media and the general air of growing paranoia and divide in today's society, parenting has become a challenge with far too many ways things could go wrong...if you are not on your toes and prepared.

Mindful Mamma is a reassuring and practical guide to help you to navigate the life-changing first year of motherhood. You’ll learn quick and easy mindfulness and hypnosis techniques to create moments of calm wherever you need it - even at four a.m. with a restless baby! As well as this, you’ll discover how to use these powerful tools to help with specific challenges along the way, such as fatigue, anxiety around breastfeeding, relationships and the end of maternity leave.

During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who were able to overcome both society’s judgement and their own maternal instincts in order to leave their children. More than anything, she was fascinated by her own prejudice towards these women, so clearly tied up in a much wider cultural bias.

Sharp, irreverent and very funny women's fiction for women who won't put up with being told to step aside! Isn't it about time we talked about you? Tessa, Sandra and Harriet have been best friends through first crushes, careers, marriage and the trials of motherhood. After 20 years of taking care of everyone else's every needs, they've found themselves hitting the big 5-0 and suddenly asking themselves, 'What about me?' Sandra has a sordid secret, and Harriet is landed with her ailing mother-in-law.

Liv's Alone is an honest and hopeful memoir that captures the joy and the challenge that is parenting alone by choice. From smashing the fairy tale story that we're fed from a young age and grieving the life you thought you were going to have, to buying sperm from Denmark and bringing a baby into the world, Liv guides listeners through the highs and lows with warmth, humour and understanding.

Maternal instinct - the all-consuming, utterly selfless love that mothers lavish on their children - has long been assumed to be an innate, indeed defining element of a woman's nature. But is it? In this provocative, groundbreaking audiobook, renowned anthropologist (and mother) Sarah Blaffer Hrdy shares a radical new vision of motherhood and its crucial role in human evolution. Hrdy strips away stereotypes and gender-biased myths to demonstrate that traditional views of maternal behavior are essentially wishful thinking codified as objective observation.

Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the “family”. The surrogacy industry is estimated to be worth over one billion dollars a year, and many of its surrogates around the world work in terrible conditions - deception, wage-stealing, and money-skimming are rife; adequate medical care is horrifyingly absent; and informed consent is depressingly rare. In Full Surrogacy Now, Sophie Lewis brings a fresh and unique perspective to the topic.

Like many women, Clare Pooley found the juggle of a stressful career and family life a struggle, so she left her successful role as a managing partner in one of the world's biggest advertising agencies to look after her family. She knew the change wouldn't be easy, but she never expected to find herself an overweight, depressed, middle-aged mother of three who was drinking more than a bottle of wine a day and spending her evenings Googling 'am I an alcoholic?'

As a woman used to traveling and living the high life in Bangkok, Leanne Shirtliffe recognized the constant fodder for humor while pregnant with twins in Asia's sin city. But in spite of deep-fried bug cuisine and nurses who cover newborn bassinets with plastic wrap, Shirtliffe manages to keep her babies alive for a year with help from a Coca-Cola deliveryman, several waitresses, and a bra factory. Then she and her husband return home to the isolation of North American suburbia.

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

Virginia Grohl, mother of Dave Grohl, had not seen any of it coming. Not the arenas of screaming fans, not Nirvana or the Foo Fighters, not the induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and certainly not her son, Dave, performing with Sir Paul McCartney at the White House. Theirs had always been a life full of music - the Grohl family sang together on long car trips, harmonising to Motown and David Bowie - yet Virginia never expected her son to become a musician.

Alexandra Fuller won worldwide attention, popular acclaim, and critical accolades for her memoir of her childhood in Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. This engaging follow-up explores Fuller’s parents’ childhoods and charts the trajectories of their lives through all the British couple’s experiences in war-torn Africa. With the same sharply etched narrative that has earned the author such immense praise, Fuller expands on and offers new insights into her family’s remarkable trials and successes.

Becoming a parent, once the expected outcome of adulthood, is increasingly viewed as a potential threat to the most basic goals and aspirations of modern life. We seek self-fulfillment; we want to liberate women to find meaning and self-worth outside the home; and we wish to protect the planet from the ravages of climate change. Weighing the pros and cons of having children, millennials and zoomers are finding it increasingly difficult to judge in its favor. With lucid argument and passionate prose, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman offer the guidance necessary to move beyond uncertainty.

It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep. No stranger to loss – young siblings, a parent, a home country – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled.

Many family fights, communication break downs, relationship disconnections, and overall stress and frustration can be solved if parents and children learn the principles and skills of self-government. This second edition of Parenting: A House United is the improved version of Nicholeen’s original basic guide for establishing a united self-governing family.

What happens when you find you have exceptional children? Do you panic? Put your head in the sand? Or risk everything and jump in headfirst? As mother to tennis champions Jamie and Andy Murray, Scottish national coach, coach of the Fed Cup and general all-round can-do woman of wonder, Judy Murray is the ultimate role model for believing in yourself and reaching out to ambition. As a parent, coach and leader, she is an inspiration who has revolutionised British tennis.

An inspiring memoir, reminding us that whether life's lessons arrive through illness, trauma or any other unexpected upheaval, life really does love us. As a free-spirited, independent woman, Bronnie Ware was used to donning a variety of hats: singer, songwriter, author, speaker, traveller and adventurer. And as her soul would have it in her mid-40s, she felt the urge to add one more: mother.

Adrienne Rich's influential and landmark investigation concerns both the experience and the institution of motherhood. The experience is her own - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.