10 books like God and Jetfire

This beautifully told tale of an adoptee searching for her original family is set against her ongoing relationship to the Southwest’s most awe-inspiring terrain, and the people who bring her there. I loved this book because it showed her evolution as a wilderness lover, romantic partner, and mother as she navigated fitting into various incarnations of family, which felt just as perilous, frustrating, and rewarding as finding the right footholds in the natural world. While we are all from Mother Earth, our earthly parents can be critical to a deeper understanding of who we are as people.

The pioneering godmother of the open-adoption movement in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Silber did ground-shaking work to bring transparency to the adoption process, which ultimately, is better for the mental health of all parties involved. In Dear Birthmother, a primer of sorts, she helps adoptive parents understand the love, humanity, and loss intrinsic to placing a child for adoption. I love this book because it shines a light on the much-deserved compassion to these women who give up so much in search of a better life for themselves and their children.

First of all, Nia Vardalos is just hilarious. She could write an Ikea assembly brochure and it would probably be side-splitting. But in the book, she tells about being a rising star (a great story on its own) who had it all – except a baby. After a grueling battle with infertility, she eventually came around to the idea of adoption, and started to learn more about the fost-adopt process of taking an older child who is unlikely to reunite with their original family. With great heart, she tells the roller-coaster story of bringing a 3-year-old with attachment challenges into her life—and the inevitable universality of motherhood. “Nothing prepared me for the life I would feel for my child. Nothing prepared me for how quickly it happened for me. And here’s what I just figure out now: no one is ever prepared. In a way, we’re all instant moms.” She’s… show more.

In this exquisitely written poem of a memoir, Jillian Lauren splays her heart wide open, on every page as she transforms from an addict whose used up most of her luck to a mother whose role requires great stores of grit, determination, and love. We’re right there with her as she and her husband decide to adopt a boy from Ethiopia, and we’re along for the bumpy, often painful, occasionally joyful, ride through the challenges of parenting this tiny person who has already lost so much, but has so much to give. Outside of motherhood, she’s so funny and interesting I kind of want to be best friends with her. Not in a weirdo-stalker way, though.

Documenting a year of Clover Stroud’s fierce mother-love as her family expands with the arrival of her newborn son, this searing memoir veers far from the saccharin version of motherhood so often portrayed in fiction and on socials. 

That her five children span almost the entire breadth of childhood allows the reader a rare insight into what it means to mother simultaneously across a multitude of ages, from the visceral bond with the baby to the inevitable distance that comes with adolescence as older children begin to both rebel and repel.

Stroud’s intimate writing is as raw and euphoric as labour and something I turn to when I want to be reminded of just how deeply words can make you feel.

Adrienne Rich’s book was a clarion call for second-wave feminists to rethink the history of motherhood in the Western world. It inspired and reflected a wave of scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s that rethought the traditional depiction of childbirth before the advent of male-doctor-dominated hospitals as crude and dangerous. Adrienne Rich examined the idealization of mother love as the purest kind of love and exposed the psychic tensions this had created for generations of mothers who could not live up to this ideal. In her chapter "Hands of Iron, Hands of Flesh" she offered a poetic and stinging rebuttal of the notion that childbearing women were safest in the hands of the male medical establishment.

In this exceptionally well-written and engaging book, the author, an evolutionary anthropologist and feminist, shows that women need to mother but that successful mothering is highly contingent on context. Mothers are primed to bond with their infants, but this process can be short-circuited when the conditions for successfully rearing an infant are poor. Infanticide is a common practice throughout the world but is most likely to occur when there is a lack of sufficient resources, when the infant is defective, when a mother lacks social support, or when there are doubts about paternity.

This anthology brings together diverse Black women’s voices to discuss motherhood, they range from mothers who celebrate their role to women who ask why motherhood is cast upon all of us as a necessary step, they explore the joys as well as some of the painful realities of loss and postpartum depression. Reading these stories from varied perspectives in short essay formats makes it approachable and allows you to move through it at a pace that is comfortable for any reader.

There are plenty of ‘how to’ books on being a mother but this looks at how having children changes you and what you learn about yourself. What makes this book profoundly helpful is that Lisa in a Jungian Analyst and she is not afraid to look at the dark as well as the light side of mothering. In my podcast, The Meaningful Life with Andrew G Marshall she talked about the moments where she crossed a line with her son and daughter and how owning ALL parts of you helps you learn and grow.

From one extreme to another!

The Push is a fast-paced suspense that had me on tenterhooks from start to finish and I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s about a woman, Blythe, who is determined to be a loving and kind mother to her new baby. But as the stress and relentlessness of early motherhood takes its toll, Blythe becomes increasingly convinced there’s something wrong with her daughter. The problem is that no one believes her.

This book reminded me of my early days of parenting, when I was sleep deprived, overwhelmed, and paranoid that I was a terrible mother. Looking back now, it really does feel like a distant memory and if you’re a new mother reading this, I promise you that this too shall pass. (Unless you’re Blythe perhaps…!)