Mothering Without a Map: The Search for the Good Mother Within

Details: Product Description
Every woman longs to be a good mother. But what about those women who grew up “undermothered”—whose own mothers were well-meaning but unavailable, absent, distracted, or depressed? How are they to become the good mothers they aspire to be?
In this beautifully articulate book, Kathryn Black, whose own mother’s early death inspired her award-winning In the Shadow of Polio, offers affirming news: One doesn’t have to have had a good mother to become one. Probing for answers from experts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, social work, biology, and other disciplines, Black reveals that there are other paths to discovering the good mother within. This moving and powerful book shows how “wounded daughters” can become “healing mothers” who give their own children a legacy of security, happiness, and love.
On the web: http://www.motheringwithoutamap.com
Review
Kathryn Black writes with personal and professional authority about an important topic. Shes an excellent writer with fresh, positive ideas. (Mary Pipher, author of "Reviving Ophelia")
About the Author
Kathryn Black, a journalist for twenty years, is the author of
In the Shadow of Polio, named by the
Boston Globe as one of the ten best 1996 nonfiction works, winner of the Colorado Book Award for literary nonfiction, the June Roth Book Award for Health and Medical Writing, and a
Denver Post bestseller. Black was named 1997 Author of the Year by the American Society of Journalists and Authors.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The journey toward motherhood for any woman begins with conception. But whose? Did my maternal path begin when my first child was conceived? The casual answer to that question is yes. But the true answer, I think, is that the journey began long ago, with my conception, or my mother’s, or her mother’s or even further back in the chain of mothers before us. For me, as for every woman, all the incidents of my life, all that makes up my character and personality, my DNA, what I read and experience, where I’ve traveled from and to, all of it led me to motherhood. And all of it affects how I mother. Nothing, however, exerts an influence on how a woman raises a child as powerfully as does her own mother. For some women, the maternal route traces a clean trajectory from a childhood of being watched over by a loving and consistent mother to later parenthood whose foundation rests on Mother’s solid template.
For others of us, the maternal experience is far different. My mother disappeared into hospitals when I was four years old and died when I was six. From her I came to know the cavern of grief the absent mother creates.
I also know what it is to be mothered by someone who can’t see you, who can’t recognize or respond to the needs of your deepest self. That was the kind of care I found in mother substitutes — stepmothers, but mainly my maternal grandmother — who held dominion over me after my mother’s death. These experiences, which underlay my identity, kept me from the comfortable assumption that I would mother my children with ease, relying on the patterns, practices and confidences conveyed from mother to daughter. For a long time, my childhood privation kept me from motherhood altogether. My first marriage was to a man who wanted nothing to do with fatherhood, and that suited me just fine. I wanted a career and an arena of cities and adventure, not the stifling limits of a life I assumed would be bound by shopping malls and schoolyards. I feared the suffocation of motherhood.
At age forty-one I married again, this time to a childless man who wanted children with the same fever that had by then overpowered my fears. Together we created a family, with two sons born to us in quick succession.
Once a mother myself I began to search for assurance that I could nurture my children more joyfully, deliberately and lovingly than I had been reared. Long excluded from the hallowed covenant