Review - A Gift for New Mothers
Perfect Book for Any Mother or Grandmother
It's special. Share this read with your daughter, daughter-in-law, or just for yourself. It's a book filled with lore and fact. Delightful.
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A Gift for New Mothers -- by Deborah Jackson
Publisher -- Duncan Baird Publishers, London, 2005
ISBN 1-84483-128-0
$9.97 -- 128 pages
Reviewed by Maryan Pelland
When your daughter or daughter-in-law is pregnant yo're her mentor. You're qualified -- remembering new motherhood and what comes next. You have family stories, woman-memories, tried and true wisdom. I found a gorgeous book to help you.
A Gift for New Mothers by Deborah Jackson is an easy-to-hold and read encyclopedia of golden nuggets for moms and grandmoms. Before it's open the book appeals to the senses. Cheerful color scheme of gold, lavender and amber. P with good weight and a pleasing texture. Artful illustrations, including the cover, are rich in classic line design laced with expressive faces and chunky modern color blocking. Artwork by Jamie Bennett, with an assist from Fabien Negrin.
Delving inside won't disappoint you. Color, texture and eye-appeal carry through. I kept being surprised by attention to detail. The book, only about 7 inches square, has an index and an appendix of suggested readings.
Jackson's background is journalism. She writes for newspapers and magazines like Elle and Natural Parent. She runs workshops for a birth center in London and is a known parenting authority who lectures abroad. She's active in La Leche League. All of which qualify her as an expert, not just a researcher.
But the excellent research is there. I love the text full of folklore and stories about woman-specialness or why pregnancy matters. Jackson's writing style is easy, comfortable and not at all fatiguing.
She hands you facts with warmth and imagery: "Birth is a bridge from one world to the next, and the mother and child making this journey can be vulnerable travelers. On every continent women turn to midwives to help them in labor.... In English the word "midwife" is derived from the angle-Saxon phrase meaning simply with woman."
A Gift for New Mothers isn't a how-to book. It's niche is in relaxing us to motherhood, defining our place in the Cosmos, and waking our genetic memory all the way back to when caves were the womb of Mother Earth.
This is about an unbroken chain of births from Eve to you or your daughter. There are wise little instructions: "Everyday acts of caring such as soothing your little one to sleep, or holding her to your breast, create ties that will bind you forever." You'll read about birth trees, baby massage, or sweet lyrics of lullabies from other countries.
All of it is punctuated with lovely ideas: "There is no such thing as a baby, there is a baby and someone."
If forced to come up with a negative, I guess I'd pick on the title. The book is a gift not just for new mothers, but for every woman who has been a mother, will be one, or wants to be one.
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