What No One Tells You
A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Your guide to the emotions of pregnancy and early motherhood, from two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists.
When you are pregnant, you get plenty of advice about your growing body and developing baby. Yet so much about motherhood happens in your head. What everyone really wants to know: Is this normal?
-Even after months of trying, is it normal to panic after finding out you’re pregnant?
-Is it normal not to feel love at first sight for your baby?
-Is it normal to fight with your parents and partner?
-Is it normal to feel like a breastfeeding failure?
-Is it normal to be zonked by “mommy brain?”
In What No One Tells You, two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists reassure you that the answer is yes. With thirty years of combined experience counseling new and expectant mothers, they provide a psychological and hormonal backstory to the complicated emotions that women experience, and show why it’s natural for “matrescence”—the birth of a mother—to be as stressful and transformative a period as adolescence.
Here, finally, is the first-ever practical guide to help new mothers feel less guilt and more self-esteem, less isolation and more kinship, less resentment and more intimacy, less exhaustion and more pleasure, and learn other tips to navigate the ups and downs of this exciting, demanding time
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two reproductive psychiatrists address new and expectant mothers in their well-intentioned but misdirected debut. Sacks and Birndorf's primary concerns are to insist that pregnancy and motherhood do not necessarily mean "ultimate happiness," and to validate the less-than-blissful feelings and experiences common in the period. When they offer advice, though, it is often directive on topics outside the scope of emotional health, such as a push toward a "fed is best" philosophy on the question of whether to use breast milk or formula. They can also come across as patronizing, as when they issue a boldface reminder to do baby-related budgeting by the third trimester "if you haven't already." Though the book's basic organizing principle by trimesters, labor and delivery, early parenting, and the first year makes sense, the finer points of its organization are confusing, with some topics randomly relegated to FAQs at chapter ends, even when accorded pages of discussion. But most problematically, though the authors perform a needed task in absolving their readers of feeling guilt over difficult emotions, they also insist on their own expertise and neglect introspection in favor of practical fixes, in ways that could feel disempowering and alienating to mothers.
