The most recommended books about motherhood

I adore novels that weave actual historical circumstances into the narrative without it being the focus. Both Ruby and Eleanor existed in times when we failed our young girls in a multitude of ways, and classism, racism, and colorism were unapologetically expressed.

While the characters endure these injustices in several ways, it is not the focus. I love how we get to witness them simply pursue their desires, loves, and dreams with these realities as a backdrop.

Johnson does an amazing job of placing us there and letting us feel the emotions of these human experiences within the muck of those external forces, almost like an added weight we know to be there but try to find happiness despite it. That’s how I imagine life really was. It was necessary for survival.

Given my interests in nature and nurture, what I find especially fascinating is “the nature of nurture”. By this I mean how Darwinian natural selection has shaped the way our species rears its children and the effects such care has on them.

This book by a world-famous anthropologist beautifully, informative, and insightfully reveals how evolution has made us who we are as parents, people capable of unconditional love but by no means always dispensing it, sometimes the exact opposite—and why that is the case.

Motherhood features in diverse literary traditions, from antiquity to the present, as perhaps the most prominent aspect of female power.

Already in the womb and shortly after, during the formative stage of the child's upbringing, the mother occupied a unique, almost exclusive, position vis-à-vis its offspring, imbuing it with character and ideals. It is for this reason that maternal power and roles have been treated so extensively in diverse literary traditions and genres, constituting an object of religiously-charged imageries.

In Conceiving Identity, Keuny masters a rich Islamic literary corpus in order to show how literary images constituted a means for women to negotiate their patriarchal-designated office and imbue their office with their own set of ideals.

I normally gravitate toward fiction, so this one came out of left field for me.

Abigail Tucker, a correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, dives deep into the science of what makes a mother. I think I enjoyed this book so much because it almost reads like fiction between its accessible (and surprisingly funny!) tone and the stranger-than-fiction revelations about what happens to a woman’s brain when she becomes a mom.

Having raised three children as a single parent, there have been complaints from said children post-childhood. This book saved my sanity. I got all three of them intact physically, two arms, two legs, working eyes, and brains. Hence the critiques. But, I digress. As a mother you give it your best shot, sacrifice, and work like a demon. Then you must let it go. As I said two arms, two legs, etc. 

This book powerfully expands our definition of mothers and the role of mothering and presents it as a path to transformation. You will leave this book with a radical new perspective of what mothering does for everyone in our society. It is anti-imperialist, inclusive, and as the title suggests - revolutionary. If everyone read this, we would all live in a better world!

Slavery was brutal in eighteenth-century Jamaica, mostly due to how hard enslaved people were worked as sugar workers. That hard work had massive consequences for enslaved women’s fertility. Early abolitionists used the inability of enslaved populations to naturally reproduce as an indictment of the plantation system. Planters, belatedly, tried to institute policies that helped pregnant women but their desire for profit usually overwhelmed their concern for maternal comfort. It meant that enslaved women themselves took the lead in forcing planters and officials to do something to make pregnancy endurable and infant mortality less extreme than before abolitionism began.

Heti’s heady, meditative, heavily autobiographical novel documents its narrator’s personal ambivalence about the idea of motherhood.

While this is not a conventional novel with a linear plot, it is a gorgeously written reflection on what motherhood means, or could mean, in general and to our narrator in particular. With unflinching honesty, she explores not only the question of whether or not she wants a child of her own, but also her identity as her mother’s child and her position as a descendant of Holocaust survivors.

I found so much to relate to in these pages; I often set out to underline a sentence and ended up underlining an entire page, feeling like Heti had put her finger on something I’d experienced but had never articulated so well.

Kenison wrote this book when she was in her forties, after she nudged her husband to sell their long-time family house and move to rural New Hampshire with their two teenage sons. The book gives voice to being uprooted, letting go of the familiar, and the profound transitions of mid-life. Kenison writes beautifully of the stirrings and longings that prompt us to see our lives from a new vantage point, ultimately allowing us to move on with grace and grit.  

Finally, the truth about motherhood in an easy-to-read, entertaining style. I picked this gem up before I went down to the shore and my girlfriend and I read it to each other in front of our spouses on the beach. My favorite part of the book is the honest, hilarious quotes from the women who were interviewed. Their insights were thought-provoking! (Especially the gal who stated quite clearly what is not foreplay!)