Child of Mine: Original Essays on Becoming a Mother - Softcover

Kline, Christina Baker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385333021 ISBN 13: 9780385333023

Publisher: Delta, 1998

Synopsis

Child of Mine is a book of original essays that reveal the many faces of motherhood, and which explore the amazing variety of feelings and changes that women go through in the first year of maternity.

The essays--by writers including Susan Cheever, Mona Simpson, Sarah Bird, Naomi Wolf, Meg Wolitzer, and many more--address a wide range of concerns, from changes in your marriage to delivery experiences to body image, to the mother/child bond, to ambivalence about breastfeeding. We see an African-American mother who's conflicted about hiring a Jamaican baby-sitter; we see an urban working mom who's delighted to be back to her job after maternity leave; we see a mother's nightmare journey through a year of her son's colic. And we see the adoption experience with all its ups and downs.

Covering an amazing breadth of experience, readers will recognize themselves as they discover that other mothers have felt the same emotions, cried the same tears, thrilled to similar milestones, and suffered the same indignities and heartaches in that challenging first year of motherhood.

About this title

Review:

Take away the pink glow of diaper commercials and what is motherhood in the '90s about, anyway? In this collection of original essays, thirty-five writers, including Naomi Wolf, Susan Cheever, and Mona Simpson, talk about their expectations and experiences of new motherhood. The writers range widely in age, race, and cultural background, and so does the tone of their essays--from heart-wrenching to thoughtful to laugh-out-loud hysterically funny. What they have in common is their strength of voice. This is an excellent choice for those interested in parenting issues, as well as those interested in good literary writing.

About the Author:

Christina Baker Kline is a novelist and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the novel Sweet Water, and coauthor of The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism. She has taught creative writing at Yale, New York University, and the University of Virginia, and currently resides in New York City with her husband, David, and her two children, Hayden and William.

About this edition

• Publisher: Delta
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0385333021
• ISBN 13: 9780385333023
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352