GREENSBORO, Md., May 25, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- The miracle of life is greatly depicted when a baby is born. Author Katherine Dickson shares her experience of the 12 months after the birth of her first child through her memoir Conscious Motherhood, a semi-autobiography that follows the journey toward increasing psychological and emotional wholeness and the role of motherhood in this process.
Conscious Motherhood is Dickson's personal account of how having a child changes one woman's life. Immediately after the birth, she experiences her body as an instrument in the titanic force of life. In the early days at home with her baby, she feels she has left civilization and has descended psychologically to a place which is very close to both life and death. A sense of emptiness within, loss of her center, and loss of control of her own life is felt. In her isolation she feels the presence of her mother and grandmother and seeks role models and mentors in her friends. Her mind is filled with images of women and mothers as well as images of daughters recapitulating their own mothers' experiences. She questions how she would like her experiences to be different from those of her mother and what utopian motherhood could be like, and how these expectations are shaped by one's early experience of home and domesticity.
What makes this book so fascinating is that it is beautiful contemplation on motherhood both from a personal viewpoint, wherein the mother meditates on her own upbringing, and from cultural understanding wherein current events serve as milestones in time. Conscious Motherhood is a memoir of the year 1968, a tumultuous year when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the Women's Movement began, students riot, and many protests were staged against the Vietnam War. Dickson's reflections on her first taste of motherhood while important national events surround her are captivatingly told with honesty, amusement, and passion making this book a wonderful read for mothers.
About the Author
Katherine Murphy Dickson was born and raised in Boston where she graduated from Simmons College. Her first diary at age fifteen began her lifelong fascination with journals. Behind graduate school, a career in professional librarianship, marriage, birthing and raising three children, the journal has been the intact line of her life. She lives in Maryland with her husband, William Dickson.
Conscious Motherhood -- by Katherine Dickson
One Woman's Journey
Publication Date: March 17, 2005
Trade Paperback; $22.99; 313 pages; 1-4134-6543-9
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