Bearing Meaning

Last week I finished reading Bearing Meaning: The Language of Birth by Robbie Pfeufer Kahn. This had been on my wishlist for ages and I was excited to read it. As it goes with most dissertations-turned-books, it was a somewhat dense and heavy read and I worked through it kind of slowly. I've quoted from it on the CfM blog already and plan to also write about it on Talk Birth. I enjoyed it, but it was different than I expected. I was looking for an analysis of the language used surrounding birth and though I suppose the book addressed that, it was more about the embodied connection between mother and baby and how that is denied/suppressed/ignored/thwarted. So, interesting, but not quite what the title let me to believe. There was an extensive analysis of Williams Obstetrics and also of Our Bodies, Ourselves (and the contrast between the two books attitudes towards the female body).

She also talks about the term "womanist," which I've always liked (comes from Alice Walker), as an more inclusive definition of feminist: "Womanist acknowledges women like the early activists who honor the maternal body ('roundness') within 'women's culture'...a womanist woman experiences the maternal body ('loves roundness') as connected to nature ('Loves the Moon') and the divine ('Loves the Spirit')."

I also finished reading Sheila Kitzinger's Education and Counseling for Childbirth. I'm going to write about it on the ICEA blog.

At least I managed to make a post this week, albiet an incomplete one. I'm working on an article right now that needs to be submitted by the 30th, plus working on some book reviews for a journal, so my writing energy is diverted in those directions...

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Homeschooling

The current issue of Natural Life magazine has some more good homeschooling articles in it (the last two issues have had some really good ones as well. I hadn't been planning to renew my subscription, but I think I'm changing my mind!). The first was called "Education is Not Something That's Done to You" and it addresses the (false) assumption that learning "can and should be produced in people." (emphasis mine) It addresses the assumption that children won't learn on their own, but must be made to learn by being kept in confinement with others their own age day in and day out. She notes that even homeschoolers often fall into the trap of thinking education must be "done to" children. I marked the conclusion to share: "What we should not do is create new schools--be they charter schools, private schools, or home schools--which perpetuate old assumptions of how children learn or who controls children's learning." I have to remind myself of this sometimes--if I start to feel like L "should" be doing something specific, or "most 5 year olds can XYZ..." or if someone asks him if he's in school or remarks on how "is your mommy or your daddy your teacher," that I reject that *system*--why would I try to use its values to define our experiences?

The other article was a cool one called The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Rocks the Boat: Life learning as the ultimate feminist act. In it, the author quotes social commentator Susan Maushart as asserting that "motherhood needs to be at the center of human society, from which all social and economic life should spin. Society needs to 'acknowledge that bearing and raising children is not some pesky, peripheral activity we engage in, but the whole point,'...Warehousing kids in daycare or school so mothers can get on with what they see as their real lives is not part of that vision, but we need to find ways to ensure economic security for women of all classes, and extend the vision to include fathers as well."

Speaking of feminism and homeschooling, I had an epiphany this week. I am facilitating a women's spirituality workshop and the theme of this week's session was "womanpower." A point was emphasized several times that in feminism the view of power is different. A patriarchal view of power is that of "power over" or control over--you have power, someone else doesn't. You can use your power to control others, or to take their power away, etc. A feminist view of power is of cooperation--"power with" as well as inner power. When you have inner power, you do not need power over someone else. A hierarchical version of power falls away and is unnecessary. I reflected on the times I have heard women say, "I'm not a feminist, but..." and how I've always *boggled* at that. How can you NOT be a feminist, I'd wonder. Now, I think it is because of a misinterpretation of values--an interpretation that views feminism as wanting to "take over" or to "dominate" men or to prove that "women are better than men." This is flaw in understanding--using a worldview rooted in "power over" concepts, instead of a totally different worldview or a reinvention of how society operates/what it's values are. My epiphany is that this is just like homeschooling--you can't use the "lens" of public school to understand homeschooling and you can't use the "lens" of patriarchy to understand feminism. These different lenses are why you feel like you are banging your head against something when you speak to someone who is coming from a fundamental misinterpretation of the values at work. Feminism and homeschooling both involve alternate value systems to that of mainstream society and a revisioning of social structures into new kinds of systems (healthier ones).

The previous issue of Natural Life had an interesting article about free schools called U of Free. Some points I liked: "most come with the free school philosophy of solely pursuing an interest, rather than for a degree or other recognition of knowledge. They resist the consumer-driven mentality sweeping traditional schools, where students vie for exam hints and quick solutions to get to the next step, with their ultimate goal being an exit out – their graduation. At Anarchist U, the students are all about learning itself. Without the pressure of exams and marks, students can relax and savor their learning moments."

And on the same topic: "In his classes at U of T, he encounters a chorus of students whose sing-song refrain 'is this on the exam?' puts his pedagogical ideals out of tune. The classroom conductor laments that these U of T students are looking for a quick study guide 'because they need the credit from my class to get the piece of paper.' Instead of enjoying the educational experience, his students are disengaged, shrewdly seeking the quickest route out of the system."

If I am indeed going to be teaching college classes within the next year, the above is something I feel worried about coping with--I want to work with people who are excited to learn, not people who are trying to just get the grade and get out. I see this as the whole point of homeschooling/unschooling--to create a way of life that involves learning for intrinsic reasons, not extrinsic ones. This was very much true for me as a homeschooler and I carried it over into college--I didn't understand why people were there for other reasons than to learn. It didn't make any sense to me to hear someone recommend a class because it was an "easy A" (but had a teacher who was so boring and so pointless as to make you wish to be unconscious under a rock rather than listen to him any longer). What is the point of an easy A?! Hello! It also didn't make sense to me to have to take classes that I wasn't interested in (and I did have to do this), but I made the best of them by studying the stuff and trying to get it/like it. Someone at our craft camp this year expressed surprise that I was "self-taught" at the classes I was teaching--"so, you just learned this by teaching yourself?" Yes! Why? Because I like to learn stuff--no one has to make me do it or show me how! I study and learn things all of the time, because I like it. I'm a very self-motivated, self-disciplined, self-directed person and credit that to my homeschooled/unschooled background (thanks, Mom!). I had a friend tell me a while ago that if "no one is making me do it, I won't do it/learn it." I thought that was incredibly sad as well as incredibly telling about the drawbacks of our current social methods of education as something that is "done to" people, rather than a self-directed process.

Okay, whew! Time for bed!

Christmas books

Finished reading two of my Christmas gifts:

Womanspirit: A Guide to Women's Wisdom--this is another example of an older book with gifts to offer. It was pretty good and I collected several ideas from it to use for future blessingways. It also had several good guided visualization exercises.

Zen Parenting: The Art of Learning What You Already Know--This is snarky of me, but I guess I DO already know it all, because I didn't really learn anything new from this book. I did like this daily Zen practice they suggested:

*Stay.
*Stay with the moment.
*Stay with your attention on your inner awareness.
*Pay attention. Remember, emotions pass. Bodily needs pass.
*What stays is the essence of you and the pure spirit of your child.

Time to get off the computer, because I have piles of more important things to be doing!

Books

I just finished reading Brain, Child mag this month and there was an ad in the front for posters and bookmarks and things from a store called Owl Square Press. Anyway, one of them was a poster of a huge stack of books with this sort of monster-ish looking character sitting by it reading and below it it says:

Books to the ceiling, books to the sky
My piles of books are a mile high.
How I love them!
How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.

Aside from the beard point, I think I wrote this...LOL! ;-)

There was another poster that quoted Charles de Montesquieu:

"I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve."

I don't think I ever read for a solid hour any more (I used to sometimes put in practically a solid day!) I still read an awful lot of books each year for how disrupted it is.

And, on an unrelated note, in the thought-provoking Brain, Child feature article The Mom Job (about cosmetic surgery for mothers):

"Consider our culture's fixation on women's breasts. 'Tits are really for tots,' says Freedman bluntly. 'But we don't think of them that way. We think of breasts as being for men.'"

I keep getting a mental image of a cartoon rabbit saying, "Silly men. Tits are for tots!" ;-)

The Mother Knot

Last week, I finished reading The Mother Knot. I actually got it for Christmas last year, but it languished on my to-read shelf for quite some time before it caught my eye as my next read.

This book was originally written in 1976--Jane Lazarre's memoir of her early years of motherhood. Aside from a (very) few dated references, the book has a very contemporary feel and could have been written only a few years ago. Since this book was written, a whole genre of mother-written books has been launched and I believe the voices of mothers and their experiencing of mothering are more visible than they once were (though still invisible in a larger cultural and social framework). The author is a feminist and her experiences with motherhood are filtered through that lens (which is one I identify with), so the book is overlaid with a feminism theme in addition to a mothering theme. To specify, this book is not about parenting nor is it about the author's child, it is about her, and her complicated emotional reactions and experiences with being a mother, the act of mothering, and cultural framework surrounding the role, as well as her frustrations with that role). From the preface: "that sense that her experiences might reflect those of other women, might even help to demolish that impossible set of standards which oppresses us all--the motherhood mystique."

Another quote that made me think about the whole SAHM, WAHM, WOHM thing, this describing her mother-in-law's situation (6 kids): "I thought of Marie, working at the cleaning, washing, and ironing while three babies played in the playpen. She had not 'stayed home with the children.' They had stayed home with her as she did her work." I liked that flip in perspective--my ideal situation is one in which all of us our home together and each going about our own business, so to speak (as in, kids play, DH works on his projects, I work on mine and there is a harmonious interplay of work and family life. No artificial, segregated division, and also each member of the family having their needs met).

Towards the end of the book she shares an anecdote about her OB that I think carries a huge ring of truth still today:

"My obstetrician had whispered a secret to me on a sunny afternoon. I had come to the office prepared with my written list of questions. Why was I feeling nauseated, I asked, and what was all this pain in my thighs? And he had answered wearily, 'If you want answers to questions, have a miscarriage, or toxemia, or let something else go wrong with your pregnancy. We don't know anything about normal births.' So much for technological know-how."

I have a variety of notes written about this book in my notebook and I'm going to transcribe them at some point, but I need to just go ahead and post this for now and add more later! (later today, hopefully!)

Home by Choice

One of the books I read last week was Home by Choice. I had had this on my library requests list for some time, but it was of low priority. I happened to see it at a friend's house last week though and then borrowed it. I had several notes to share about it, but then I realized that I don't really want to bother. I didn't like the book very much at all--the author seemed hypocritical at times, I objected to her objections to and critiques of "feminists" (and speaking positively about women who "opposed the Equal Rights Amendment." Hello? WTF?!). Also, she goes on and on about how mothers need to be home with their children, etc. and then casually references, "Though Kris spent a couple of hours each day at the local day-care center after morning kindergarten..." She failed to explain how this is so much more superior than a mother being at work most of the day while the kids are at school--yes, the author was home, but the kids WEREN'T! LOL! Also, she actually WASN'T home when her girls were babies and toddlers, though she has many many opinions that that is when mothers are of vital importance and should "come home." So, even though I absolutely agree with her that mothers are of vital importance to their babies and that it is best to be with with them and that stay-at-home-mothering is important and valuable work, her approach was off-putting and I didn't like the book.

A Reasonable Life

Yesterday I finished reading A Reasonable Life. Basically, I didn't really like it very much. I found the overall tone to be depressing & negative & I should have stopped reading it in the middle. (I have a book problem in that I find it incredibly difficult to stop reading something once I start it--I feel compelled to finish it, like I "owe" the book the chance of a complete "hearing"). The subtitle is "toward a simpler, secure, more humane existence," which appeals to my interest in simple living. I found the author to be excessively sentimental about the "simple life on the farm," which I think in many ways is a myth (nothing wrong with being self-sufficient as possible, but to romanticize life on the farm or in the "good old days" as superior, neglects the fact that farming is HARD WORK, relentless, and wears you out). He also claims that early America was the "ideal" village culture, which to me proves that this book was written by a man--he overlooks the fact that women were not considered worthy of educations, were considered property, could not own their own land, couldn't vote, had very restricted opportunities, were burned at the stake, etc. Yeah. Ideal.

Anyway, this book was a critique of American culture--particularly consumerism, but also of television, education, friendships, cities, lifestyle, etc. The author had a consistently histrionic tone and doomsday attitude that I found to be a turnoff. He also interjects lots of "humor," but I found it to be of the belittling, scornful type. His shrill and critical tone really began to wear quickly. Considering that I'm part of the simple living "choir," I can only imagine what an "unconverted" reader would respond to his tone!

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

I didn't end up having much time to write about this book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, when I read it on 9/22. So, suffice to say it was very, very good. Really interesting. It is by Sue Monk Kidd, who wrote Secret Life of Bees. I accidentally stumbled across this one at the Columbia book sale last month. The subtitle of this book is "From Christian Tradition to Sacred Feminine." Anyway, I marked two quotes to share and that will have to do for my comments about this one:

"As a formed my critique, I came face to face with a system of social governance, a vast complex of patterns and attitudes within culture, religion, and family. The name of the system is patriarchy. It's important to emphasize that patriarchy is neither men nor the masculine principle; it is rather a system in which that principle has become distorted." (emphasis mine--something I've always wanted to explain, but couldn't quite. Basically, explaining how it is that one can be a feminist and not "hate men.")

Later, when discussing her reluctance to embrace the Father-God image of her church with a minister:

"He thought we should forgo recovering Divine Feminine images and move directly toward abstract, androgynous images; we should neuter the language and symbol of the Divine. He said we should use only the word God, not Father or he or his. 'But the word God does not register in us as neuter,' I said. 'Technically it may not imply any particular gender, but registers and functions in the mind is male.' As McFague says, androgynous terms only 'conceal androcentric and male assumptions behind the abstraction.' How many times had I heard someone say, "God is not male. He is spirit.'?

Side note: I think my beloved Wayne Dyer does a good job of using gender neutral language for the Divine that does not make me have a knee-jerk "down with patriarchy!" reaction.

Misconceptions

I finished reading Misconceptions for the second time before our trip to Chicago. I had lots of thoughts, but no time to share them when I finished the book, so I'm back now editing this post today. (It was originally posted in tiny form on 8/10.)

This book has deep meaning for me, because I read in in my first weeks postpartum after the birth of my first baby. though I had been very prepared for birth and *thought* I was prepared for having a newborn, I felt like postpartum was a huge slap in the face and my adjustment was very difficult. The giving up, the laying down of self, the realization that my life was no longer about me anymore and never would be again, the anxieties and uncertainties, the glimpse of how irrevocably my life had changed. It was a rough time for me and I cried a lot (I also had to recover from an unexpected birth injury that left me feeling very fragile, weak, permanently wounded, and like an invalid). Anyway, at one of my postpartum checkups I saw a doctor that I had never seen before and she suggested I read Misconceptions. This was my first introduction to the world of "momoirs" and I was hooked for good. I voraciously devoured up any and all related books at the local library and wished I had known to read some of them *before* having the baby. So, reading this book again brought all that back for me--it is inextricably linked to my early memories of life with my first little baby and as a new mother. (and, as such, this will be an extremely long post!)

Misconceptions: Truth, Lies, & the Unexpected on the Journey to Motherhood, is Naomi Wolf's account of her first pregnancy and birth experience, her early months postpartum, and her subsequent research and study about pregnancy, birth, and mothering in our culture. This is primarily her personal narrative of her experiences, thoughts, feelings, and theories. The author feels fragile, weak, insubstantial, and invalid as a pregnant woman. In contrast, during my pregnancies, I felt strong, mighty, powerful, present, full, magic, substantial. I also felt potent and magic, as well as supported, cherished and honored. During my births, I felt triumphant and powerful (she felt abused, ignored, weak, defective, assaulted, and ruined with pain, anger, frustration, anger, shame, confusion, and neglect. She also ends up with two cesareans). I have to wonder how our emotional states during pregnancy and the types of caregivers and birth settings we each chose, contributed to our birth experiences? (A LOT, I'd wager!) This is a reason why I hope to design my birth classes around emotional preparation for birth (and motherhood) and not only the physiology of pregnancy and birth.

Interestingly, in postpartum, despite our dramatically our differing experiences of pregnancy and birth, our reactions become similar. In postpartum, i did feel week, wounded, dissolved, invalid, and fragile.

One favorite quote of many: "A woman is not a mother just because she has had a baby, a mother is not born when a baby is born; a mother is forged, made."

I like this concept--I do feel forged in the fires of motherhood! :-)

Another good one, when reflecting on an ordinary street scene and suddenly understanding the web of life and the universality of motherhood (even the squirrels!) : "We were all held, touched, interrelated, in an invisible net of incarnation. I would scarcely think of it ordinarily; yet for each creature I saw, someone, a mother, had given birth....Motherhood was the gate. It was something that had always been invisible to me before, or so unvalued as to be beneath noticing: the motheredness of the world."

"Babies...are sort of leaky little understudies for God. With each baby the human species gets the chance to break out of the self into the service of something so 'other' that the reasons for conditional love can give way to faith in unconditional love. ..with babies, we get the chance to take one manageable baby step on the long hard path of the saints...when I was pregnant I could suddenly see the good sense of worshiping God in the guise of a human baby...Like so many of the feelings of pregnancy and new motherhood, it was paradoxical: sometimes I felt the brightness and the darkness at the same time."

The author notes something that I was unaware of--apparently ACOG has recommended that routine continuous fetal monitoring be dropped from the standard of care for low-risk pregnant women and instead recommends intermittent FHT listening. (still, at least 85% of women giving birth in the US have continuous monitoring even though their own trade union [ACOG] does not recommend it? Weirdness!)

She also notes that no matter how it is perceived in society today, a cesarean is not a routine procedure, but is instead the equivalent of any other major organ surgery and suggested cesareans are more accurately termed "open uterine surgery" (most women don't know that their uterus is literally taken out of their body during repair).

Quoting a quote by Robbie Kahn, "the job market holds out an all-or-nothing prospect to new mothers: you can give your body and heart and lose much of your status, your money, your equality, and your income; or, you can keep your identity and your income--only if you abandon your baby all day long and try desperately to switch off the most powerful primal drive the human animal can feel."

Then, a classic quote (quoting another mother regarding taking care of little kids): "I sometimes feel I am getting pecked to death by ducks."

After some uncalled for digs at LLL, the author also makes a good point about the myth of "choice" regarding breastfeeding (specifically with regard to lack of supports for breastfeeding while working outside the home): "...it was unconscionable for our culture to insist that women 'choose' to leave their suckling babies abruptly at home in order simply to be available for paid work."

"We need to ask the question: what do mothers deserve if they are to mother well? We need to answer: Everything. Everything that is due them."

With regard to a Mother's Movement: "We also need this movement to create...new kinds of civic spaces and social structures, bringing children closer to the work place and the world of adults, and bringing the engagement and world of adult economic activity closer to the hermetically-sealed world of mothers and small children. women should not have to choose between two such starkly exclusive worlds as 'work' and 'home with kids' as they now must, and children would benefit from the better, happier parenting this change would bring about."

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety

Last week I finished reading Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. I have lots and lots and lots to say about this book and started to write a post about it, but it got to be almost 1:30 a.m. and I went to bed instead. Now, this week I posted about the books I read since then and so again it goes unremarked. I need to get better about succinct summaries, because my pile of things to be blogged about is growing larger and larger and is starting to make me feel stressed instead of having fun! I will definitely edit this later to add my real comments about this book.

Okay, now it is 10/6 and this is still in my unblogged pile and I think I'm going to have to let go of writing about it. I'm mostly caught up otherwise and this is kind of hanging over my head, which is just plain silly! I will say that reading this book makes me feel like a "double agent" between the AP and non-AP worlds--while my heart lies in AP, my brain actually identifies with the author's criticisms and sometimes outright mockery of that style. I think my personality style and my tendency to be driven and ambitious might actually make me better suited to a work-out-of-the-home life, but my heart and biological connection compels me to be with my babies. The author articulates what I've felt, but haven't really been able to express--the need for something in between staying at home and working full time (basically, that working and mothering simultaneously is the most natural and fulfilling approach, but our society does not make that combination often feasible or comfortable):

"Which means that 'natural' motherhood today should know no conflict between providing for our children (i.e. 'working') and nurturing them (i.e. 'being a mom'). Both are part of our evolutionary heritage; both are equally 'child-centered' imperatives. What's 'unnatural' about motherhood today, if you follow Hrdy's line of thinking, is not that mothers work but rather that their 'striving for status' and their 'maternal emotions' have been compartmentalized. By putting the two in conflict--by insisting on the incompatibility of work and motherhood--our culture does violence to mothers, splitting them, unnaturally, within themselves...For they show that the so-called 'choices' most of us face in America--between more-than-full-time work or 24/7 on-duty motherhood--are, quite simply, unnatural. They amount to a kind of psychological castration: excessive work severs a mother from her need to be physically present in caring for her child, and excessive 'full-time' motherhood of the total-reality variety severs a mother not only from her ability to financially provide for her family but also from her adult sense of agency, as it sucks her so deeply down the infantile realm of her children."

This is what I'm talking about. There needs to be a third, realistic option (and not just for women. For men too. For families!). I have often expressed the desire to find a balance between mothering and "personing." I'm seeking a seamless integration of work and family life for both Mark and myself. An integration that makes true co-parenting possible, while still meeting the potent biological need of a baby for his mother and a mother's biological compulsion to be present with her baby. Why is the work world designed to ignore the existence of families?

Circle of Stones

A couple of weeks ago, I read Circle of Stones but it has been sitting in my to-blog-about pile for quite some time (I'd started a post, but didn't get beyond the title, LOL!) My mom had an earlier version of this book when I was a little girl and it always had a certain allure for me. So, I saw it on Bookins and couldn't resist adding it to my list. Basically, it is a weirdly written book--way too Jungian analyst for my taste. The subtitle is "woman's journey to herself" and it sort of (theoretically) guides you through a life journey imagining "a place for you" in a circle of women during each of your transitions.

Fruitful

On Tuesday, I finished reading Fruitful, by Anne Roiphe. The subtitle is Living the Contradictions : A Memoir of Modern Motherhood. Like, Of Woman Born, it was written before the more recent wave of "momoirs" (that is kind of a dismissive/derogatory term I guess, but it does help me classify the genre) and focuses heavily on feminism & its relationship to mothers/motherhood (so, different than momoirs in that the focus is less on personal experience of motherhood and more on motherhood and its social/cultural/political connections, I suppose). It was less "heavy" and depressing than Of Woman Born though. The focus of the book is on the tension between feminism and motherhood (i.e. can you be a "good" feminist and also be a "good" mother!) and she explores that issue throughout. She is a feminist and yet critiques some elements of the movement's impact on mothers and motherhood. She is also very pro-father and I appreciated her exploration of men/fathers as people vs. "evil patriarchy--down with them!"

Again, I have much more time to read than I have to write, so I'm going to have to cut myself off. I was just getting started too! Maybe I'll come back to this one...

I did have some more time--this is a quote about the crux of the mother/feminist issue: "Motherhood by definition requires tending of the other, a sacrifice of self-wishes for the needs of a helpless, hapless human being, and feminism by definition insists on attention being paid to the self. The basic contradiction is not simply the nasty work of a sexist society. It is the lay of the land, the mother of all paradoxes, the irony we cannot bend with mere wishing or might of will. "

This reminds me of my journal entry from my early months as a new mother--"is it possible to balance motherhood with person-hood?" I'm still figuring it out! (some days it seems to work, some days it really doesn't!)

Catching Up...

It is sometimes hard to keep straight when I finished reading things, because I go through them quickly. So, during the previous week, I read:

Winter 2006 issue of The Compleat Mother. I started getting this magazine when I was pregnant with my first son. It was a little on the "radical" side for me at that point and I got hung up on the sometimes poor editing/typos. I let my subscription end after getting it for two years. Well....I've become more radical myself since then and I recently purchased a bulk subscription with four of my playgroup friends. So, now I totally devour this magazine as well (I still get a little peevish about the typos). It is a hardcore "natural mothering" almost zine-like magazine. (I'm an Area Rep now too, so if anyone wants to buy a one year subscription, Paypal me $12 ;-)

The excellent feminist classic: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience & Institution
This book really clarified for me the "institutional" elements of motherhood that I sometimes find so oppressive and binding--it isn't the children themselves, in the climate of motherhood in which I find myself. I got a little ranty about the patriarchy and how it is holding me down and then felt depressed and oppressed. Got a handle on myself fairly quickly though. It was a great book and made me think about many issues, as well as feel a bit despairing...

I also read my newsletter from Attachment Parenting International, my newsletter from Mothers & More, and my alumni magazine from UMR

I borrowed Not Buying It from the library. It was an interesting memoir. Some of the reviews on Amazon were a little harsh--I do not think she promised anything other than what she delivered. It was a semi-journal type account of her "year without shopping." She did not pretend to be an expert on simple living, nor to give you fab tips on becoming one. It was her documentary of a personal experiment basically. My mom had checked out The Memory of Running at the same time, so after I finished my book, I read hers as well. It was fiction and I just gobbled it down. I usually read nonfiction, so some fiction is kind of a treat--I have a much easier time putting nonfiction down. When I read fiction, I get glassy eyed with having read "too much" and actually feel a little ill. It was an engaging story--loserish guy takes off on his bike to LA after losing all the members of his family. Loses weight and "finds himself" along the way. The character was one of those "unlikeable" characters that you enjoy anyway.

I know I read some other things as well, but the children's patience is waning greatly, so I'll have to catch up later (or not, I have many things in my to read pile, so I may just go forward in time from here).

Edited to briefly add two others I remembered: Breastfeeding Your Baby and Pregnancy Day by Day. Both by Sheila Kitzinger, both a little on the older side. I got them free from a stuff-swapping playgroup friend :-) They are both heavily illustrated--the breastfeeding one has some very nice photos. Probably the most photos of any breastfeeding book I own thus far. I'm taking back to playgroup to swap to someone else though, so I guess I won't own it for long! Hmm. Maybe I should rethink my plan. Making gingerbread houses with playgroup tomorrow--taking L's leftover parade candy to contribute to the bounty.