Check out the books: Returning to My Mother's House, Feminist Art and the Maternal, and In Her Own Sweet Time.
Approximate transcript after the jump.
First up, Returning to My Mother's House, by Gail Straub. I met Gail at the last Omega Institute Women & Power conference and she was one of those really calming, super wise ladies who make you feel like everything is going to be just fine. Don't you love those ladies?
In any case, she wrote this book about her global search to reclaim the feminine, which she defines as the creative, emotional, slow part of each of us--man or woman. I'm normally pretty resistant to these sorts of dichotomies, but I found the writing really beautiful and I wanted to read you a passage:
The loss of my mother's authentic self has shaped my life, propelling me around the globe to reclaim what she left behind, to retrace the series of small deaths she suffered each time she abandoned more of her instinctual wisdom. I, too, betrayed my feminine, paying blind allegiance to the flag of the masculine with its bold stripes of workaholism, speed, and overdrive.
Next up is Feminist Art and the Maternal by Andrea Liss. It's got this awesome cover by photographer Catherine Opie. I saw this print at Site Santa Fe, a really cool modern art museum where my parents live, and it's never left me. We should all upload this one to Facebook huh?
Anyway, it's a great book for the art lovers out there. It's fairly academic, but it's short and includes a diverse range of feminist artists grappling with issues of the maternal.
And finally, we've got In Her Own Sweet time by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt which is a memoir/investigative journalism journey through one woman's reproductive journey. Rachel is a great writer, very relatable, and takes all of this post 35 baby panic and puts it into perspective with a sense of humor and a very straight forward approach.
So there you have it. Happy Mother's Day to all you mamas out there, especially my own.
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Aw, you totally made my eyes water at the end of this! I'm such a sucker for mother-gratitude emotions.