Download or read book The Reluctant Mother written by Zehra Naqvi and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2022-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Reluctant Mother is a book of rage. Rage at being alone in your pain, having your conflict belittled, and your struggles trivialised. It is the story of a young woman who seeks to find herself in a world that constantly tries to define her and who she should be. It is the memoir of an anti-mother. A woman who doesn’t fall in love with her baby at first sight but discovers love along the way. This book is for anyone who feels overwhelmed by the idea of ‘ideal’ motherhood. Be it a woman or a man, one way of confronting trauma is to know that you are not alone in it. To know that someone shares your story and understands your emotions and guilt that accompanies feeling anything other than ‘perfectly blissful’ about motherhood. It is at once heartbreaking and poignant as it is hopeful and comforting. It is the story of one woman and yet the life of many. It reveals how tradition and modernity, faith and reason, pleasure and pain are all so intimately interwoven for women that their true sense of self is inevitably one of contradictions. The book’s biggest strength lies in its rawness and honesty. Nothing but the truth stands here.
Download or read book The reluctant mother written by Mary Geikie and published by . This book was released on 1947 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Reluctant Mother written by and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Playing House written by Lauren Slater and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2013-11-05 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed author Lauren Slater ruminates on what it means to be family. Lauren Slater’s rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two children, and three houses later, she came around to the challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards of playing house. Boldly honest, these biographical pieces reveal Slater at her wittiest and most deeply personal. She describes her journey from fiercely independent young woman to wife and mother, all while coping with mental illness. She tells of a chemical fire that rekindled the flame in her ailing relationship with her husband; she reflects on her decision to have an abortion, and then later to have children despite suffering from severe depression; she examines sex, love, mastectomies, and how nannies can be intrusive while dogs become family. Beautifully written, often humorous, and always revealing, these stories scrutinize the complex questions surrounding family life, offering up sometimes uncomfortable truths.
Download or read book The Reluctant Mother written by Hemmie Martin and published by . This book was released on 2017-06-07 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postnatal psychosis strips Colette of her early time with her baby, shreds her sanity, and almost destroys her marriage. When suicide seems the only option, Colette must face her limitations and move forward with demons clinging to every aspect of her life, whilst desperately trying to hold on to what she dearly loves.
Download or read book The Reluctant Rogue Or Mother s Day written by John Patrick and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 1984 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Reed Dolan would seem to be living in the best of all possible worlds: he is young, attractive and a professor of drama at a small college teeming with toothsome coeds anxious for good grades. Reed's specialty is inviting his better-looking stu
Download or read book The Not Good Enough Mother written by Sharon Lamb and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychologist who evaluates the fitness of parents when their children have been removed from their custody finds herself reassessing her own mothering when her son falls victim to the opioid crisis. Psychologist and expert witness Dr. Sharon Lamb evaluates parents, particularly in high-stakes cases concerning the termination of parental rights. The conclusions she reaches can mean that some children are returned home from foster homes. Others are freed for adoption. Well-trained, Lamb generally can decide what’s in the best interests of the child. But when her son’s struggle with opioid addiction comes to light, she starts to doubt her right to make judgments about other mothers. As an expert, a professor, and a mother, Lamb gives voice to the near impossible standards demanded by a society prone to blame mothers when anything befalls their children. She describes vividly the plight of individual parents, mothers in particular, struggling with addiction and mental illness and trying to make stable homes for their kids amid the economic and emotional turmoil of their lives—all in the context of the opioid epidemic that has ravaged her home state of Vermont. In her office, during visits with their children, and in the family court, the parents we meet wait anxiously for Lamb’s verdict: Have they turned their lives around under child welfare’s watchful eye? Do they understand their children’s needs? In short, are they good enough? But what is good enough? Lamb turns that question on herself in the midst of her gradual realization of her son’s opioid addiction. Amazed at her own denial, feeling powerless to help him, Lamb confronts the heartache she can bring into the lives of others and her power to tear families apart.
Download or read book The Reluctant Queen written by Sarah Beth Durst and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-07-04 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filled with political intrigue, violent magic, and malevolent spirits, the mesmerizing second book in Sarah Beth Durst’s Queens of Renthia epic fantasy trilogy that started with the award-winning The Queen of Blood. Everything has a spirit: the willow tree with leaves that kiss the pond, the stream that feeds the river, the wind that exhales fresh snow . . . And those spirits want to kill you. It’s the first lesson that every Renthian learns. Not long ago, Daleina used her strength and skill to survive those spirits and assume the royal throne. Since then, the new queen has kept the peace and protected the humans of her land. But now for all her power, she is hiding a terrible secret: she is dying. And if she leaves the world before a new heir is ready, the spirits that inhabit her beloved realm will run wild, destroying her cities and slaughtering her people. Naelin is one such person, and she couldn’t be further removed from the Queen—and she wouldn’t have it any other way. Her world is her two children, her husband, and the remote village tucked deep in the forest that is her home, and that’s all she needs. But when Ven, the Queens champion, passes through the village, Naelin’s ambitious husband proudly tells him of his wife’s ability to control spirits—magic that Naelin fervently denies. She knows that if the truth of her abilities is known, it will bring only death and separation from those she loves. But Ven has a single task: to find the best possible candidate to protect the people of Aratay. He did it once when he discovered Daleina, and he’s certain he’s done it again. Yet for all his appeals to duty, Naelin is a mother, and she knows her duty is to her children first and foremost. Only as the Queen’s power begins to wane and the spirits become emboldened—even as ominous rumors trickle down from the north—does she realize that the best way to keep her son and daughter safe is to risk everything. Sarah Beth Durst established a place of dark wonder in The Queen of Blood, and now the stakes are even higher as the threat to the Queen and her people grows both from within and beyond the borders of Aratay in this riveting second novel of the Queens of Renthia series.
Download or read book The Reluctant Psychic written by Suzan Saxman and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all, as children, saw imaginary friends and heard monsters in the closet. But for Suzan Saxman, those friends and monsters didn't go away—and they weren't imaginary. They were the dead who came to her from the time she was a little girl with urgent messages for the living. Raised in a house filled with secrets, she saw and spoke the truth as soon as she could talk, alarming the nuns in her convent school with her revelations and terrifying her own mother with her strange visions. Each night she woke to see a man with no eyes watching her, and each day she kept watch by the window while her father was at work and Steve, her real father, a swarthy drifter, rendezvoused with her mother. It was the 1960s in suburban Staten Island and she tried to hide it all, and be a daughter her mother could love. Always skeptical of her tremendous gift, she struggled to come to terms with her calling even as she revealed the destinies of everyone, from housewives to hit men, stockbrokers to rock-and-rollers. She could witness everyone's future—everyone's but her own. Why was she visited by angels and demons? Could she ever escape this strange fate? Where was her own soul mate? Now Suzan tells the story of her journey and tries to make sense of her family's buried secrets. Through powerful readings of others' destinies interwoven with compelling narrative, a reluctant psychic emerges from the shadows.
Download or read book Know the Mother written by Desiree Cooper and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short, searing glimpses of how race and gender shadow even the most intimate moments of women’s lives. While a mother can be defined as a creator, a nurturer, a protector—at the center of each mother is an individual who is attempting to manage her own fears, desires, and responsibilities in different and sometimes unexpected ways. In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women—both black and white—find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives. In this heart-wrenching collection, Cooper reveals that gender and race are often unanticipated interlopers in family life. An anxious mother reflects on her prenatal fantasies of suicide while waiting for her daughter to come home late one night. A lawyer miscarries during a conference call and must proceed as though nothing has happened. On a rare night out with her husband, a new mother tries convincing herself that everything is still the same. A politician's wife's thoughts turn to slavery as she contemplates her own escape: "Even Harriet Tubman had realized that freedom wasn't worth the price of abandoning her family, so she'd come back home. She'd risked it all for love." With her lyrical and carefully crafted prose, Cooper's stories provide truths without sermon and invite empathy without sentimentality. Know the Mother explores the intersection of race and gender in vignettes that pull you in and then are gone in an instant. Readers of short fiction will appreciate this deeply felt collection.
Download or read book A Reluctant Mother written by Deirdre Simon Dore and published by . This book was released on 2024-05-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honest, sometimes humorous and often tragic, FRIDA's narrative tells a modern tale of a conflagration of deceit, adultery, regret and love. Frida, childless by choice, is an artist with a heartbreaking childhood history. When she agrees to allow her husband's spurious daughter into their lives they are devastatingly changed forever. Frida tells her story while confined to a hospital bed where a very young lawyer relentlessly pushes for a recounting of events. Frida's memory, though often faulty and sporadic, comes back to her in poignant scenes that she is forced to relive, each alarming act leading to yet another even more ill-advised. In FRIDA, Deirdre Simon Dore's evocative writing has created a difficult, blunt and vitally genuine "reluctant mother." A contemporary novel of a woman whose relationships are an exercise in hilarity and tragedy both. Deidre Simon Dore has won The Journey Prize; Western Magazines Gold Award for Fiction; Short Grain Award and was a Best Canadian Stories selection. Praise for Deirdre Simon Dore's Writing: "A wonderful rarity: a lightly told and very funny story that nevertheless bears great weight ... an imaginative and original voice the reader will return to with pleasure."--Journey Prize jury "Weaves a near-cinematic spell of brewing suspense... as these unforgettable characters collide."--Malahat Review Fiction.
Download or read book The Reluctant Journal of Henry K Larsen written by Susin Nielsen and published by Tundra Books. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen-year-old Henry's happy, ordinary life comes to an abrupt halt when his older brother, Jesse, picks up their father's hunting rifle and leaves the house one morning. What follows shatters Henry's family, who are forced to resume their lives in a new city, where no one knows their past. When Henry's therapist suggests he keeps a journal, at first he is resistant. But soon he confides in it at all hours of the day and night.
Download or read book Rebel Mother written by Peter Andreas and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Those who enjoyed Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle will find much to admire” (Booklist, starred review) in this “thoroughly engrossing” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir about a boy on the run with his mother, as she abducts him to Latin America in search of the revolution. Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s housewife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight. They were chasing the revolution together, though the more they chased it the more distant it became. They battled the bad “isms” (sexism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, consumerism), and fought for the good “isms” (feminism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism). Between the ages of five and eleven, Peter lived in more than a dozen homes, moving from the comfortably bland suburbs of Detroit to a hippie commune in Berkeley to a socialist collective farm in pre-military coup Chile to highland villages and coastal shantytowns in Peru. When they secretly returned to America they settled down clandestinely in Denver, where his mother changed her name to hide from his father. A “luminous memoir” (Publishers Marketplace, starred review) and “an illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love” (Kirkus Reviews) this is an extraordinary account of a deep mother-son bond and the joy and toll of growing up in a radical age. Peter Andreas is an insightful and candid narrator of “a profound and enlightening book that will open readers up to different ideas about love, acceptance, and the bond between mother and son” (Library Journal, starred review).
Download or read book The Reluctant Father written by Phillip Toledano and published by Dewi Lewis Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To his surprise, photographer and artist Phillip Toledano became a father in July 2009. He fell in love with his daughter about a year and a half later, when he realised she was the most bewitching human being he'd ever seen. Initially though things were different. The Reluctant Father follows Phillip s journey at the beginning of fatherhood. From dismay and confusion, to the blinding light of unalloyed love. It s a surprisingly frank, funny and moving account, and he hopes his daughter won t hold it against him when she s grown up.
Download or read book A Reluctant Bride written by Kathleen Fuller and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She never wanted to marry. He hopes to make amends for past wrongs. Can love find a way to heal both of their hearts? Sadie Schrock swore she would never marry. All of her other Amish friends could court and marry—she was content to manage the family business and eventually take it over when her parents are ready to retire. But all of that changes when a reckless driver kills both of her parents and seriously injures her younger sister. With mounting hospital bills adding to the pile of debt her parents left behind, Sadie is left with no choice: she must marry. And not just any man—the man who saw her at her weakest and walked away. Aden knows what his brother did to Sadie years ago was inexcusable. And every day since that incident, Aden has lived with the guilt for not intervening sooner. When he is faced with the chance to protect Sadie once again, he can’t let her down—even if it means living with the scorn of the woman he loves for the rest of his life. Working alongside Aden at the store, Sadie realizes he isn’t the same boy who once betrayed her. Just when Sadie starts to let her guard down and perhaps develop feelings for her new husband, dangerous secrets are revealed. Now everything Sadie has worked so hard to protect is threatened, and she must find a way to save her family—and herself.
Download or read book Playing House written by Lauren Slater and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed author Lauren Slater ruminates on what it means to be family. Lauren Slater’s rocky childhood left her cold to the idea of ever creating a family of her own, but a husband, two dogs, two children, and three houses later, she came around to the challenges, trials, and unexpected rewards of playing house. In these autobiographical pieces, Slater presents snapshots of domestic life, populating them with the gritty details and jarring realities of sharing home, life, and body in the curious institution called “family.” She asks difficult questions and probes unsettling truths about sex, love, and parenting. In these pages, Slater introduces us to her struggles with her mother, her determination to make a home of her own, her compromises in deciding to marry (her conflicts manifesting as an affair on the eve of her wedding), her initial struggle to connect with her newborn child, and the dilemmas of mothering with a mental illness. She writes openly about her decision to abort her second pregnancy and her later decision to have a second child after all. She tells us about the searing decision to have elective double mastectomy and how her love for her husband was magically rekindled after she saw him catch fire in a chemical accident. It’s not all mastectomies and chemical fires, though. Slater digs into the everyday challenges of family living, from buying a lemon of a car and fighting back menacing weeds to gaining weight and being jealous of the nanny. Beautifully written, often humorous, and always revealing, these stories scrutinize the complex questions surrounding family life, offering up sometimes uncomfortable truths.
Download or read book The Reluctant Detective written by Martha Ockley and published by Lion Fiction. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Couldn't resist touching the body, eh?" observed Ben. Faith was defiant. "I had to check for a pulse." Faith Morgan may have quit the world of crime, but crime won't let her go. The ex-policewoman has retrained as a priest, disillusioned with a tough police culture and convinced that she can do more good this way. But now her worlds collide. Searching for the first posting of her new career, she witnesses a sudden and shocking death in a quiet Hampshire village. And of all people, Detective Inspector Ben Shorter, her former colleague and boyfriend, shows up to investigate the crime. Persuaded to stay on in Little Worthy, she learns surprising details about the victim and starts to piece together a motive for his death. But is she now in danger herself? And what should she do about Ben? Then a further horrifying event deepens the mystery...
