Hannah, an urbanmoms.ca member from Vancouver, recently emailed me to ask me to feature the book Misconceptions by Naomi Wolf in our Urbanmoms Books section. She had read the book and had recommended it to all of her friends. I too had read the book but it had been a few years and one child ago so I decided to pick it up again.
As soon as I opened it I remembered how passionately our book club had responded to Naomi Wolf. My first child was 2 when I read it and I was amazed that another person was able to understand so well what I was going through – both the ups and the downs, the unexpected and the predictable.
Every mom should read this book. It helped me to know I was not alone and it opened up conversations with my friends that were therapeutic and reassuring. As Hannah said in her email, "I was no longer embarassed or ashamed at mourning the loss of the life I had before. It didn’t mean I didn’t love my children. It simply meant that I had moved on and I owed it to my past to honour that." As Wolf states:
I was mourning, protesting a point of departure in the road that I could never retrace. An "I" would go forward, swept irrevocably on by the tide of the natural order, and that "I" would sit on the sofa hour after hour and be someone’s Lithium, someone’s Lethe, someone’s Popsicle-someone who would come to be a love of my life, but whom I did not yet know. And the "I" would reconfigure eventually around that need, and take joy in it, and spin a new identity. But it would never again be the "I" it had been before.
Now that I have two children and am barely able to remember my life before kids, I read the book from a different perspective. I am now that reconfigured "I" Naomi Wolf refers to. I have come out on the other side. Still me but better and with a greater purpose.
I love Naomi Wolf’s honesty and understanding of the modern mother. These days, many of us live a lot of our lives before starting a family. We have successful careers, years of marriage, exotic travel and the purchase of our first home. We are established. Having a child changes everything and for most of us it just takes some time to adjust and accept the new "I".
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Jen
One thing I like to do as a busy mom is to take my MP3 player to the gym and listen to podcasts of books. I don’t get a lot of time to read and it is hard to hold a book on the treadmill!