With more testimonials than you could shake a stick at, Motherhood Confidential: The Strange Disappearance of My Best Friend goes where few books have dared, revealing what happens when intelligent women crash headlong into the often dogmatic expectations of American motherhood.
In this unflinching co-memoir, Linda Cohen and Joan Bechtel - talented, well-educated women with no small amount of female angst - expose the dark realm of expectation a woman enters when she first utters the fateful words: "I'm pregnant."
How are we supposed to feel? What should we be thinking? Worse yet, what if...what if those motherly instincts everyone says will materialize never do?
Once our children enter the world, should we cradle and coddle them? Hold them close or at arm's length, to preserve our own identities? Must we lose ourselves in the growth of our children?
Divergent answers to those questions in their synchronous experiences with motherhood drove a wedge between Cohen and Bechtel. Their disconnection happened as one fell deep into the chasm of motherhood, as the other struggled to feel any maternal instincts at all.
Both questioned themselves and their abilities, second-guessed almost every parenting decision they made, struggled with their significant others and gradually came to understand the one thing they had in common had driven them apart.
Set for release on Friendship Day, August 7, 2005, Motherhood Confidential reflects a victory for two sadder but wiser girls, who grew into motherhood and friendship in a way neither of them expected. In alternating chapters, they describe an all too familiar battleground, as well as a plan to defeat our common enemies: self-doubt and cultural expectation.
"Writing this book helped Joan and I see our own struggles, each other, and other people with more compassion," Cohen writes. "We hope Motherhood Confidential will help inspire other mothers to honor their own growth as much as they do their children's, and to find and embrace their own unique answers in their continuing quests for self-acceptance."
Perhaps having accomplished their goal explains all those rave reviews.
For more information, visit Motherhood Confidential on the web. |