Demeter Press took on the challenge of discussing multiples through On Mothering Multiples: Complexities and Possibilities, a book that promised to “(re)explore, (re)present, and make meaning of the process of conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering experiences with multiples”. Under the editorship of Kathy Mantas, and through diverse contributions of research, artwork and narrative pieces, this topic is explored with diverse voices that elicit nuance towards a subject that often suffers from cliché and overt charm. Daring to taunt the reader who may be beguiled by the blessing of multiples with an unflinching look at subjects such as fetal demise, disability, post-partum depression, the beauty and the beast of the post-twin maternal body, and the society’s obsession and derision with multiples conceived through assistive reproductive technology, this book is a foundational text on the topic of the messiness of multiple births and mothering. This collection manages to be both intensely personal while maintaining the scholarly distance necessary to offer an important contribution to the field of motherhood studies as well as intersecting with grief work and disability studies. Published in 2016, this book remains provocative, and stealth in how it unfurls its wisdom, providing both clarity and further

This three-part story illuminates an introspective process in coming to terms first with breast cancer and mastectomy and then gradually with the long-term subjective components underlying the disease. Part I documents my first attempt to make sense of breast cancer. I show how I dealt with the diagnosis and treatments, payng particular attention to the nature of my thoughts, feelings, dreams, and fantasies. I show how, amid the terror, anger and sadness, my creative self-expression in journalling, active imagination, poetry, ceramics and colored drawings made a positive difference. Part II asks the questions, What was going on in my life in the months prior to the diagnosis that would predispose me to breast cancer? How was I living my life? Were there warning signs? Drawing from minutely recorded details in my journals, I explore my breast cancer experience in a larger context. I show that, in ways fairly typical of our society, I inadvertently participated in the disease process by way of compulsive attention to others and inadequate consideration of myself. My journal exposes a sordid picture of alarming dreams, warped inter-personal patterns, distorted self-evaluations and chronic psychological and somatic disturbancesin my life, all signaling danger for this late 20th century woman. What better metaphor than breast cancer to represent habitual self-defeating patterns of mothering, running madly out of control. What does it take to fully come to terms with breast cancer? What does it take to illuminate the disease of the soul? In a final attempt to make sense of breast cancer, I follow the metaphor to its source-to the nature of mothering and being mothered. Does the compulsion to "mother" the world and neglect oneself arise from excess or deficiency? What are the implications of selfessness? How does it arise? Part III reconstructs my childhood steeped in my parents' Jungian milieu. It offers a rare and intimate look into the influences of intellectual and psychological immersion on early childhood development. It exposes the precariousness of generations of women in my family who have been, in one way or another, motherless. It remembers my relationship with my overpowering but vulnerable mother who was too much with me-yet still missing. It recognizes the life urge to differentiate from the biological mother and connect with the great, life-affirming Mother spirit. This candid story of consciousness building and psychological reconstruction will appeal to adult readers who are searching for meaning in illness and adversity. This is not a book on definitive causes of breast cancer. It is not a book on how to have breast cancer and be happy. It is not a guidebook solely for breast cancer patients, though they will likely be guided and inspired by what I tell. It is the tapestry that honors the complexity of life, the intra-psychic, interpersonal, and archetypal worlds rolled into one. The psychological perspective I offer invites the reader to own and embrace the shadow at work in the psyche. It provides a mirror for serious self-reflection, written in accessible language.

Learn how to access the root of feminine energy and power to heal from pregnancy and birth and discover joy within yourself and your family. Create new forms of mothering and learn to facilitate daily access to the power, spirit, and joy that mothering from the center brings. Building on themes from Tami Lynn Kent’s award-winning Wild Feminine, Mothering from Your Center takes a groundbreaking, holistic approach to women’s health as Kent provides gentle guidance through the emotional and physical transformative process of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. Revealing her own soul-filled journey from miscarriage to motherhood, Kent offers an intimate and comprehensive guide to reclaiming the energetic center of the female body. Drawing on her work with thousands of women and the energy of the pelvic bowl, Kent teaches you to access the creative potential of your center and the profound medicine it contains for all aspects of mothering and living creatively. Learn how to • engage the energetic power of the pelvic bowl; • heal from pregnancy and birth; • strengthen the bond between mother and child; • create holistic family harmony; • find balance between work and home; • enhance creativity and joy. Whether you are pregnant, trying to conceive, recovering from childbirth, or raising children today, Mothering from Your Center will help you tap into your core feminine energy and explore your full creative range.

Create new forms of mothering and learn to facilitate daily access to the power, spirit, and joy that mothering from the center brings. Building on themes from Tami Lynn Kent’s award-winning Wild Feminine, Mothering from Your Center takes a groundbreaking, holistic approach to women’s health as Kent provides gentle guidance through the emotional and physical transformative process of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. Revealing her own soul-filled journey from miscarriage to motherhood, Kent offers an intimate and comprehensive guide to reclaiming the energetic center of the female body. Drawing on her work with thousands of women and the energy of the pelvic bowl, Kent teaches you to access the creative potential of your center and the profound medicine it contains for all aspects of mothering and living creatively. Learn how to • engage the energetic power of the pelvic bowl; • heal from pregnancy and birth; • strengthen the bond between mother and child; • create holistic family harmony; • find balance between work and home; • enhance creativity and joy. Whether you are pregnant, trying to conceive, recovering from childbirth, or raising children today, Mothering from Your Center will help you tap into your core feminine energy and explore your full creative range.

Drawing on both sociological and anthropological perspectives, this volume explores cross-national trends and everyday experiences of ‘parenting’. Parenting in Global Perspective examines the significance of ‘parenting’ as a subject of professional expertise, and activity in which adults are increasingly expected to be emotionally absorbed and become personally fulfilled. By focusing the significance of parenting as a form of relationship and as mediated by family relationships across time and space, the book explores the points of accommodation and points of tension between parenting as defined by professionals, and those experienced by parents themselves. Specific themes include: the ways in which the moral context for parenting is negotiated and sustained the structural constraints to ‘good’ parenting (particularly in cases of immigration or reproductive technologies) the relationship between intimate family life and broader cultural trends, parenting culture, policy making and nationhood parenting and/as adult ‘identity-work’. Including contributions on parenting from a range of ethnographic locales – from Europe, Canada and the US, to non-Euro-American settings such as Turkey, Chile and Brazil, this volume presents a uniquely critical and international perspective, which positions parenting as a global ideology that intersects in a variety of ways with the political, social, cultural, and economic positions of parents and families.

Updating family therapy with dream and body work, Arnold Mindell applies Process Oriented Psychology to relationship work. He explores hologram theory, the collective unconscious, and the discoveries of modern physics and biology, to show how each individual's awareness affects the whole.

Compelling and heartrending, this personal memoir chronicles the author's decision not to put her mother, who has Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, in "one of those homes" and relays the far-reaching consequences this choice has on her entire family. Detailing the challenges of reversing roles and learning to mother one's own mother, this refreshing and entertaining autobiography will help those struggling with their own decisions on elder care in the home. It touches on the importance of relationships—such as how they impact our souls and beliefs about ourselves and the quality of life—and explores the larger questions of faith, hope, and ultimately death.

Single or married, working mothers are, if not the norm, no longer exceptional. These days, women who stay at home to raise their children seem to be making a radical lifestyle choice. Indeed, the women at the center of The Paradox of Natural Mothering have renounced consumerism and careerism in order to reclaim home and family. These natural mothers favor parenting practices that set them apart from the mainstream: home birth, extended breast feeding, home schooling and natural health care. Regarding themselves as part of a movement, natural mothers believe they are changing society one child, one family at a time. Author Chris Bobel profiles some thirty natural mothers, probing into their choices and asking whether they are reforming or conforming to women's traditional role. Bobel's subjects say that they have chosen to follow their nature rather than social imperatives. Embracing such lifestyle alternatives as voluntary simplicity and attachment parenting, they place family above status and personal achievement. Bobel illuminates the paradoxes of natural mothering, the ways in which these women resist the trappings of upward mobility but acquiesce to a kind of biological determinism and conventional gender scripts.

For every day from Shrove Tuesday to Easter Day, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. Lent is a time to reorient ourselves, clarify our minds, slow down, recover from distraction and focus on the values of God’s kingdom. Poetry, with its power to awaken the mind, is an ideal companion for such a time. This collection enables us to turn aside from everyday routine and experience moments of transfigured vision as we journey through the desert landscape of Lent and find refreshment along the way. Following each poem with a helpful prose reflection, Malcolm Guite has selected from classical and contemporary poets, from Dante, John Donne and George Herbert to Seamus Heaney, Rowan Williams and Gillian Clarke, and his own acclaimed poetry.

Every day, human beings tell and are told stories, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not. Most of our communication with each other, direct or indirect, involves narrative production and reception. Narrative is constitutive of human being. However, whose narratives are heard? Feminists argue that the relations between language, knowledge, gender and power, particularly the question as to whether man-made and controlled language is a material fit to receive and convey woman’s stories, are critical issues, because historically, patriarchy has worked to silence women’s dialogue. Male knowledge, unsurprisingly, created and continues to create unrepresentative maternal narratives which lead to unreal expectations of mothers and motherwork. It is, therefore, disconcertingly significant for mothers that neither mothers nor their motherwork have been considered worthy of historical record; nor are historical records usually written from a mother’s perspective. Hence, the narrative research in this book, which gives recognition to motherhood, mothers and/or the work they do, is valuable. It adds to the rapidly accumulating maternal research—research that is now available for the historical record. Mothers are speaking up, developing a canon of literature/research narrated in maternal language and claiming maternal knowledge and power.