“Mother Shock” by Andrea Buchanan

Every once in a while I run across a book that I have to tell everyone I know about. “Mother Shock” by Andrea Buchanan belongs at this category… at the top of the list.

It was probably the best book on actual parenting I’ve read – not like what to do when babies have fevers and how to change diapers, but about what it’s really like to be a parent. For me, at least, motherhood is not always easy, and it was quite a shock in the beginning. This book tells the story much more frankly and clearly than I could, and it was very heartening for me to discover that I wasn’t (completely) nuts.

Here’s the official book description:

According to Andrea Buchanan, “mother shock” is the state in which many new parents exist during those first confusing, chaotic, and often comical years of parenting. It is the clash between expectation and result, theory and reality; a twilight zone of 24-hour-a-day living where life is no longer neatly divided into day and night. It is the stress of trying to acclimate quickly to the immediacy of mothering; of formulating a new conception of oneself, one’s role in the family and in the world; of shouldering a fearful new level of responsibility and a new delegation of domestic duties. In this much-needed and delightfully funny collection, Buchanan shares the insight she gains as she moves through the stages of mother shock. From “Fear of the Double Stroller” and “Confessions of a Bottle Feeder” to “I’m an Idiot” and “Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Playgroup,” Buchanan details the unimaginably difficult and unbelievably rewarding process of becoming a mother. Spanning the first three years of her daughter’s life, these amusing ruminations on mothering will strike a chord with every new mother.

Head over to Amazon and pick it up… I highly recommend it!