Tag: self-care

7 books about motherhood from our Literacy and Learning Collection

- Beth Leave a comment

The Literacy and Learning Collection features a wide range of topics to help you navigate family life with infants through teens and beyond. Here are seven books that focus specifically on the experience of being a mom. (Descriptions from the publishers.)

The 30-minute money plan for moms : how to maximize your family budget in minimal time by Catey Hill – Catey Hill has created smart, simple strategies to help you maximize your money in minimal time. Drawing on extensive research on the actual cost of raising a child at each age, she’ll show you how to save in every area of your life, from lowering your grocery bill (without coupons!), to saving on education and childcare, to dealing with high-interest credit card debt, and more. And she’ll show you how to do all that in less than half an hour.

Being happy, raising happy : the empowered mom’s guide to helping her spirited child bloom by Maureen Lake – Being a mom is a lot of work. Being a mom of a spirited child can be exceptionally challenging. Moms who want to change their stress and anxiety levels and make a difference in the lives of their children and family need to take steps towards wellness. Being happy, raising happy is for loving and caring moms who somehow forgot about their own needs, desires, and the impact they want to make in the world and want to start their journey towards revitalizing the mind, body, and spirit.

The Better Mom : growing in grace between perfection and the mess by Ruth Schwenk – Mothering is messy. Our joy and hope in raising children doesn’t change the reality that being a mom can be frustrating, stressful, and tiring. But just as God is using us to shape our children, God is using our children and motherhood to shape us. In The Better Mom, author Ruth Schwenk, herself a mother of four children, says there is more to being a mom than the extremes of striving for perfection or simply embracing the mess. We don’t need to settle for surviving our kids’ childhood. We can grow through it.

Brave new mom : a survival guide for mindfully navigating postpartum motherhood by Jessie Everts – Brave New Mom brings a mindfulness-based approach to new parenthood that encourages self-exploration, self-compassion, self-care, and connection. It incorporates findings from research on postpartum mental health, practices for feeling your best after having a baby, and a warm and compassionate voice for new mothers everywhere. This book gives new moms permission to see, feel, and celebrate their amazing abilities and to gather the support they need.

Help, I’m failing as a mom : the survival guide to raising a child with a mood disorder by Tanya Trevett – Written for parents who want to learn how to live with their child’s mood disorder in a healthier way, author Tanya Trevett shares what she has learned in her fifteen-year journey. Among lessons learned: The secret to letting go of guilt so they can be a better (and happier) parent; Understanding the complexities of mood disorders and why it takes a village; Methods and activities for hope and healing; Rediscovering the joy, pride, and the unconditional love moms have for their children.

The Little Book of Support for New Moms – Doula Beccy Hands and midwife Alexis Stickland know what a challenge it can be to balance self-care with motherhood. In The Little Book of Support for New Moms, they bring together decades of experience to share invaluable tips and tricks to boost confidence and calm frazzled nerves-plus answers to all those questions new moms may be too embarrassed to ask. Tackle the fourth trimester with easy recipes to nourish your postpartum body and five-minute fixes to restore your sense of humor.

Mom Babble : the messy truth about motherhood by Mary Katherine Backstrom – In Mom Babble, Mary Katherine (MK) Backstrom offers up hope, humor, and spiritual inspiration to families in the trenches of parenthood. With laughter, crying, and eye-rolls MK’s, oh so, real essays about raising littles will delight all the not perfect, not always holy, not completely normal, messy, honest and wonderful moms that read them. MK’s conversational approach connects with readers like dear friends cozied up on a coffee date.

 

Pottering by Anna McGovern

- Callen Leave a comment

Do you feel twinges of guilt when you take a lazy day? Do you spend hours on your phone or computer and come away feeling dissatisfied with how you’ve spent your time? Did you use to have hobbies or household chores you enjoyed, but you’ve fallen out of the habit? Do you love British culture, especially cozy British voices? If your answer is yes to any of these, you may want to pick up Pottering: A Cure For Modern Life by Anna McGovern.

This slim volume, published in 2020, is a treatise and how-to guide on “pottering” (what we in the U.S. would probably call “puttering”). It’s the ultimate restful activity: moving around your home or community in a leisurely way, doing little tasks as they occur to you, savoring the process and not rushing or trying very hard at all. In the gentle chapters, McGovern describes the various aspects of pottering, including “Make Do With What You’ve Got”, “Don’t Try Very Hard”, “Movement”, “Keep It Local”, and so on, with lots of recommendations on how to make pottering work for you, both in terms of practical actions and mindset. It’s about being content and going with the flow, savoring the experience of taking your time and doing things you enjoy or are interested in, if not for long stretches at a time necessarily. Moreover, she’s very specific that phone scrolling and other digital activities are NOT pottering, as they take your attention away from the present time and place and keep you sitting still instead of moving around. As a whole, it brings to mind words like “self-care” and “mindfulness”, but is very grounded in everyday life and the physical reality of the home. It’s taking a rest and being kind to yourself — two things I think we could all do more of in life.

It reads with a hint of irony, of course, coming out of a year of pandemic, quarantine, and isolation in the home, but I think it puts a positive light on it, considering the long road left ahead before restrictions are fully lifted. As quarantine and isolation and being at home get extra stale, it doesn’t hurt to remember that being at home and taking our time can be a restful, enjoyable experience, a break from rushing and worrying and being over-scheduled. Even in small bursts, taking a step back to potter around the house can help reorder your thoughts, get a few little chores done, and just generally let you take a breather. I think one way I’d alter the definition of “pottering” to encompass our pandemic lives is to emphasize the “keep it local” and “movement” chapters, where she talked about the power of getting outside for a little walk. And, of course, never underestimate the value of taking a little while to sit and stare into space or out a window, maybe with a cup of something (which McGovern also recommends, occasionally). Pausing to be present and to reset helps to go into whatever’s next with a fresh perspective, and to process whatever emotion is going on – and crises both personal and global bring up a lot of emotions.

Whether pottering works for you in a moment of pandemic or not, the spirit of pottering is always good to remember: unplug from the digital sometimes and be kind to yourself, not obsessing and stressing over how productive you’re being, but trying to go with the flow and enjoy the moment you’re in.

Applause for the Late Mac Miller’s Heart-Felt Swimming

- Erin Leave a comment

Sonically and lyrically, “Come Back To Earth,” perfectly establishes the feel of Swimming and encapsulates all the thematic elements of the album: breakups, vulnerability, addiction,  despair, hope, and painful self-awareness. People connect with Mac Miller because he wasn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. He perfectly sums up what depression feels like when he wrote:  “And don’t you know that sunshine don’t feel right / When you inside all day / I wish it was nice out, but it looked like rain /Grey skies and I’m drifting, not living forever /They told me it only gets better.”

Now, the lyrics “I’ll do anything for a way out of my head” are just haunting.

It wasn’t until after Mac Miller died  from a powerful combination of cocaine, fentanyl, and alcohol that I heard his most recent album, Swimming, and immediately started listening to his other work, Best Day Ever, and The Divine Feminine, among others.  Like the inimitable artists who preceded him in death – Prince and Tom Petty, most recently – Miller’s reputation as a real-deal artist is not diminished due to his struggle with addiction. In a short lifespan, he managed to eat, breath, and sleep his craft, so much so that he was always writing, creating, performing, and improving. Just 26 years old after dropping his self-produced August 2018 album, Miller made an inspired appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series, mere months before his body was found.  His NPR performance immediately struck me as genuine as he bantered with his band and addressed the audience in between songs.  Plus,  Thundercat’s willingness to back you up is evidence of your awesomeness . But moreso: Mac Miller makes me feel  something, and simple though that criteria may appear, it’s an indicator for great artistry. Even though he suffered, he nobly shared his vulnerability, sadness, and hope through his music.

The late Mac Miller

Initially, the song “2009” was one of my fast favorites on the album, probably because of the self-reflective quality that the song conveys, both lyrically and instrumentally. The narrator appears to have looked back on his life having realized some hard-won truths but is ready to embrace a hopeful future. My favorite lyric is when he refers a conversation the narrator had with a woman and he cleverly characterizes her as an angel: “She tell me that I get her high ’cause a angel’s s’posed to fly”. The track has a dreamy wisdom about it that comes through the stripped-down instrumentation. Much of Miller’s music simply makes me feel good. 

Track number three, “What’s the Use” is a funky, laid back, feel-good groove featuring Snoop and that signature Thundercat bassline and  that hits in all the right places and might be my favorite tune on the album because, hello, FIVE STRING BASS in the house

Then you have the trumpet-heavy funk and disco dance tune, “Ladders”, that seems to encapsulate the hope and despair Mac embodied in his music. Such a big, bright song evokes a wild night living large in the city but against the backdrop of a sad truth looming in the near future: that the sun would rise and the fun would be over.  “Somehow we gotta find a way / No matter how many miles it takes / I know it feels so good right now / But it all comes fallin’ down / When the night meet the light /Turn to day.  Where was it Mac wanted to go? Check out his live performance of ladders and the all-star 11-piece band on the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Melodically and rhythmically, “Self-Care”(co-written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange)  is easily one of my favorite tunes on the album (but I’m hard-pressed to find a bad song on the album). Eerily, the music video portrays Miller lying in a coffin and nearly buried alive as he sings: “Somebody save me from myself, yeah /Tell them they can take that bullshit elsewhere / Self care, we gonna be good /Hell yeah, they lettin’ me go”. Given the trendiness of the concept of “self care” in a society marked by millenial backlash against the backdrop of growing social isolation in spite of vast widespread advancements in technology, Miller wanted to take better care of himself: he was envisioning a better life, but the question would be:  how am I gonna get there?

A review in Pitchfork states so eloquently that the feeling  of a work of art is indeed as valuable as the other more technical components of song crafting:  “As always, Miller remains a step behind the prestige artists he emulates—Chance the Rapper, Anderson.Paak, and, increasingly,Frank Ocean, whose nonchalant songcraft looms large here. Swimming is less virtuosic than those artists’ recent works, but no less heartfelt, and the album’s wistful soul and warm funk fits Miller like his oldest, coziest hoodie. He may be unable to escape his own head, as he laments on the opener “Come Back to Earth,” but he’s decided to make himself as comfortable as possible while he’s trapped there.”

Co-written by Pharell Williams (does he collaborate with everyone?) , “Hurt Feelings” (awesomely described in this article as “weirdly cocksure”)  is another super-catchy tune on the album with a beat that’s perfect for head bobbing, and oddly enough, one of the tunes I crank in the morning to psych myself up for work or life.

Check out “Swimming”  for honest, heart-felt poetry from a young soul who lived the life he rapped about only to die far too young, long before he had a chance to love himself back to life.