The
Mother Dance
How Children Change Your Life.
Written from her dual perspective as psychologist
and mother, Dr. Lerner puts the spotlight on the mother's experience
as it has never before been told. With personal stories and vivid
case studies that run the gamut from the hilarious to the heart-wrenching,
Lerner spells out what children evoke from the past and demand from
the present. When two become three, we see why her new life is so
different from his new life--and how children inevitably help us
to discover things about ourselves and our partner that we would
otherwise never know.
Lerner's own experience taught her the basic lessons
of motherhood; that we are not in control of what happens to our
children, and that this fact needn't stop us from feeling totally
guilty and responsible, that matters of life and death turn on a
dime, and that most of what we worry about doesn't happen (although
bad things happen that we fail to anticipate). Lerner shows us how
kids are the best teachers of life's most profound spiritual lessons.
From birth to the empty nest, Lerner draws upon
her three decades of work as a psychotherapist and expert on the
psychology of women, to help mothers distinguish between what we
can change, (and how to do it) and when we need to surrender to
the fact that our lives--and our childrens'--don't go the way we
expect or plan. Her book is filled with reassurances and good advice about being a mother in today's world.
Praise
"Lerner writes with charm, precision and at
times almost unbearable honesty about what motherhood is. This book
shows us the way."
-
Mary Pipher, Ph.D.
Author
of Reviving Ophelia
"The Mother Dance is one of the wisest and
most honest books on parenting I have read. As a parent myself,
I ate up story after story, insight after insight."
-
Thomas Moore, Ph.D.
Author
of Care of the Soul and The Soul of Sex
"I love The Mother Dance; it's wonderful-true,
touching, practical, spiritual, sanity-saving, and I laughed out
loud a number of times, with recognition, surprise and gratitude."
-
Anne Lamott
Author
of Operating Instructions
"Harriet Lerner pioneers on behalf of women's
whole humanity. Each chapter in The Mother Dance is worth the price
of admission."
-
Gloria Steinem
"In The Mother Dance, there are no mistakes
in parenting -- only learning experiences told with a great sense
of humor."
-
Benjamin
Spock, M.D.
A Note from the Author:
Your kids
will make you love them in a way you never thought possible. They
will also confront you will all the painful and unsavory emotions
that we try so hard to avoid. Children will teach you about yourself,
and about what it's like not to be up to the demands of the most
important responsibility you'll ever have.
When you become a mother,
you learn that you are capable of deep compassion, and also that
you're definitely not the nice, highly evolved person you fancied
yourself to be before you became a mother. The novelist Fay Weldon
puts it best. "The greatest advantage of not having children
must be that you can go on believing you are a good person. Once
you have children, you realize how wars start."
Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
A popular psychotherapist writes with grace and striking candor about what it is like to be a mother. Lerner (The Dance of Deception, 1993, etc.) has two sons, both now grown and out of the house but still friends with their mother and father, and with each other. That is no small accomplishment, and while Lerner gives herself and her husband (also a psychologist) appropriate credit for what they did right, she also looks back regretfully on what she did wrong. "Readers . . . [of] my other books may be surprised to learn that I can behave so badly with my own children," she writes. Lerner looks at issues of control ("we are not in control of what happens to our children"), at the decision to have children ("a leap of faith"), at how the reality of the baby in the bassinet at home affects the relationship with a spouse (it changes, not always for the worse, but it changes). She also describes the wild extremes of emotion that many new mothers entertain, from "intense elation" to murderous rage, and roller coasters of guilt and fear. Entertaining and revealing. Lerner's committed readers will enjoy and perhaps be reconciled to their own parenting styles from this view of her as a mother who is sometimes irrational, sometimes wise, but who loves her children "beyond words." -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com
How does motherhood change you? Who or what do you become when you become a mother? "We can't begin to know what our children will evoke in us until we have them," says psychologist and psychotherapist Dr. Harriet Lerner, author of the bestselling The Dance of Anger. Lerner set out to write a book on parenting, and ended up with a thoughtful and honest book focusing on the experience of being a mother--a woman's experiences, needs, and changes as she travels through the trials and pleasures of pregnancy, birth, power struggles, guilt, anxiety, relationship challenges, sibling struggles, and separation. Filled with personal stories and case studies, The Mother Dance offers mothers-to-be a guide for the road ahead, and women who are already mothers will recognize their own dilemmas and situations, and gain clarity about their experiences. Throughout, Lerner is wise, personal, and truthful about her own failings. This book is a welcome addition to the recent discourse on the mothering experience. --Ericka Lutz--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Lerner may characterize motherhood as a dance, but what she describes is more of a rollercoaster ride... a splendid reassurance for women in the thick of it.
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