This guided journal helps expectant mothers explore--in their own personalized and creative way--the thoughts, feelings, and discoveries of their unique experience of pregnancy. With contributions from expectant mothers, and exercises to inspire readers, this book is a keepsake that will forever hold the memories of an extraordinary and precious time.

Discovering Motherhood is a warm, friendly, profound account of the mundane and the mystical in the life of a mother. Somehow, amid the dirty tube socks, the trail of Legos and the baby's mashed bananas, God is present. Annemarie Scobey takes us on a daunting journey that has no map. It is a high-energy trek with ups and downs and bumps in the road. The price of admission is three a.m. feedings, endless diapers changes and lost sleep. But the payoff comes in the profound relationships of mother and children, and in the love that gives life its luster. Scobey has recorded the journey with insight, humor and a sure sense of the Divine in the turmoil, troubles and triumphs of everyday life.

A story of fertility, feminism, and family Jenn Berney was one of those people who knew she was destined for motherhood—it wasn't a question of if, but when. So when she and her wife Kelly decided to start building their family, they took the next logical step: they went to a fertility clinic. But they soon found themselves entrenched in a medical establishment that didn't know what to do with people like them. With no man factoring into their relationship, doctors were at best embarrassed and at worst disparaging of the couple. Soon Jenn found herself stepping outside of the system determined to disregard her. Looking into the history of fertility and the LGBTQ+ community, she saw echoes of her own struggle. For decades queer people have defied the patriarchy and redefined the nuclear family—and Jenn was walking in their footsteps. Through the ups-and-downs of her own journey, Jenn reflects on a turbulent past that has led her to this point and a bright future worth fighting for. With clarity, determination, and hope, The Other Mothers gives us a wonderful glimpse into the many ways we can become family.

The adopted daughter of loving parents, Zara Phillips felt out of place since childhood. Although cherished, she grew up deeply insecure and alone, consumed by a void she found impossible to fill. Isolation led to alienation, until her talent brought her to the center of the heady London rock ‘n’ roll scene of the 1980s. Zara became lost in a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol and destructive relationships. An intense search for the truth of her birth led to an awakening and then to recovery. Zara’s activism for adoptee rights springs from a very personal passion. In the end, it was Zara’s experience of becoming a mother that revealed what being adopted really meant. For the first time, she gained deep understanding and compassion for both her birth mother and her adoptive mother and was able to start the healing process. Mother Me bravely illuminates the lifelong impact of adoption on every member of the adoption triad—adoptee, birth mother and adoptive mother—as well as the families of each. The tale of Zara’s search for her birth mother and her path to recovery is riveting, as are the stories of many people sharing her past.

Every year, millions of women have their lives turned inside out by the experience of pregnancy. A contemporary woman find herself caught in an absurd paradox: while in the grip of one of the most primal, lonely, sensual and, in some ways, psychologically debilitating and physically dangerous experiences, she is overwhelmed by invasive, trivialising and infantilising cultural messages about what is happening to her - and who really owns the experience.

A brilliant writer, first-time mother, and respected biologist, Sandra Steingraber tells the month-by-month story of her own pregnancy, weaving in the new knowledge of embryology, the intricate development of organs, the emerging architecture of the brain, and the transformation of the mother's body to nourish and protect the new life. At the same time, she shows all the hazards that we are now allowing to threaten each precious stage of development, including the breast-feeding relationship between mothers and their newborns. In the eyes of an ecologist, the mother's body is the first environment, the mediator between the toxins in our food, water, and air and her unborn child.Never before has the metamorphosis of a few cells into a baby seemed so astonishingly vivid, and never before has the threat of environmental pollution to conception, pregnancy, and even to the safety of breast milk been revealed with such clarity and urgency. In Having Faith, poetry and science combine in a passionate call to action.A Merloyd Lawrence Book

Describes the tremendous effort the female penguin makes to find food for her newborn.