Writing a book on motherhood (find a link to pre-order Managing the Motherload below) has been a humbling experience to say the least. It was a constant practice of balancing sharing what I know with understanding that I still have so much to learn.
That’s why I’m so grateful to all the other brilliant, inspiring, and HONEST mother’s out there who are sharing their wisdom with us through their own books. For Mother’s Day (but isn’t every day a celebrate moms?), I put together a list of my seven favorite books to gift to yourself or another mom in your life.
Memoirs (my favorite book genre), self-help, and lifestyle are all covered. I’m incredibly excited about The Bold World by Jodie Patterson because she’s also the mom of a trans son. While her little one is only a couple of years older than my Sunny, I learned so much from her about how to navigate these unknown waters. And we both have five kids. Who does that?!
You will love these books, guaranteed. Pick them up for yourself, buy them for all the special women in your life, or grab them from the library. They’re ALL must-reads ❤
✶ All book descriptions have been shared from their Amazon.com listings.
LIFESTYLE
1. Woman of Color by LaTonya Yvette
“LaTonya Yvette, the blogger and stylist behind the eponymous site, is unapologetically candid about life’s trials, including motherhood, love, death, and racism. Her first book, Woman of Color, is part memoir, part lifestyle guide—packed with moving essays, gorgeous original and archival photographs, and practical style and beauty advice. At the very heart, though, it’s about LaTonya’s experience growing up as a woman of color in Brooklyn.
“Each beautifully designed chapter covers a different topic—the meaning behind her name, how vitiligo has shaped her definition of beauty, her childhood hairstyles, raising her children as a 20-something mom—and ends with thoughtful advice and lifestyle takeaways like how to tie a headwrap or incorporate new, bold colors into your wardrobe. Woman of Color is real life, real style for women from all walks of life. In it, LaTonya has written a love letter to women, filling this book with vulnerable, imperfect truths from a black woman blogger, a voice not often seen on bookstore shelves.
2. Own Your Glow by Latham Thomas
“Own Your Glow is an inspirational, actionable, and wildly enriching companion for change. Celebrity wellness and lifestyle guru Latham Thomas provides soulful principles that offer an illuminated path for examining life’s challenges, helping you curate your path to greatness, while embracing your uniquely feminine attributes. Packed with rituals, meditations, and snackable lifestyle tips, Thomas provides a clear framework for harnessing your passion, developing spiritual fitness, and embracing true vulnerability. This guide is for anyone who wants to witness her own life transform and contribute to the positive change of the world around her.
“Combining spiritual, psychological, and self-reflective tools, Thomas offers an antidote to the hustle-hard, make-it-happen mainstream culture and fosters slowing down, intentionality, and self-care as a pathway to empowerment. How much more potent and powerful would we all be if we embraced our inherent talents, strengths, and feminine edge, rather than dwelling in patterns of self-criticism, doubt, and catty competition?
“Thomas invites you to step into a soulful, fulfilling life of freedom, transcending self-destructive habits and creating a blueprint for a more gratifying, centered, and bountiful way of living. Own Your Glow is an awakening roar for women to mobilize, become the masters of their lives, and hold their crowned heads up high, letting their relentless light from within shine bright for the world.”
BUY IT IN PRINT KINDLE GET THE AUDIO VERSION
MEMOIR
3. On Being Human by Jennifer Pastiloff (pre-order for June 2019)
“An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff’s years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how hearing loss taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness.
“Centered around the touchstone stories Jen tells in her popular workshops, On Being Human is the story of how a starved person grew into the exuberant woman she was meant to be all along by battling the demons within and winning.
“Jen did not intend to become a yoga teacher, but when she was given the opportunity to host her own retreats, she left her 13-year waitressing job and said ‘yes’, despite crippling fears of her inexperience and her own potential. After years of feeling depressed, anxious, and hopeless, in a life that seemed to have no escape, she healed her own heart by caring for others. She has learned to fiercely listen despite being nearly deaf, to banish shame attached to a body mass index, and to rebuild a family after the debilitating loss of her father when she was eight. Through her journey, Jen conveys the experience most of us are missing in our lives: being heard and being told, ‘I got you.’
“Exuberant, triumphantly messy, and brave, On Being Human is a celebration of happiness and self-realization over darkness and doubt. Her complicated yet imperfectly perfect life path is an inspiration to live outside the box and to reject the all-too-common belief of ‘I am not enough’. Jen will help listeners find, accept, and embrace their own vulnerability, bravery, and humanness.”
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4. The Bold World by Jodie Patterson
“Inspired by her transgender son, activist Jodie Patterson explores identity, gender, race, and authenticity to tell the real-life story of a family’s history and transformation.
“As an African American growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1970s, when neighborhoods defined people, Jodie Patterson learned early on to engage with her community for strength and comfort. But then in 2009 this mother of five had her world turned upside down. Realizing that her definition of community wasn’t wide enough for her own child’s needs, Patterson forced the world wide open.
“In The Bold World, we witness a mother reshaping her attitudes and beliefs, as well as those of her community, to meet the needs of her transgender son, Penelope— and opening the minds of everyone in her family who absolutely, unequivocally refused to conform.
“As we walk alongside Patterson on her journey, we meet the Southern women who came before her—the mother, grandmothers, and aunts who raised and fortified her, all the while challenging cultural norms and gender expectations. She shares her family’s history—particularly incidents within the Black community around sexism, racism, and civil rights. We learn about her children, who act as a vehicle for Jodie Patterson’s own growth and acceptance of her diverse family, and her experiences as a wife, mother, and, eventually, activist. The result is an intimate portrait and an exquisite study in identity, courage, and love. Patterson’s relentless drive to change the world will resonate with and inspire us all, reflecting our own individual strength and tenacity, our very real fears, and, most of all, our singular ability to transform despite the odds.”
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5. Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou
“The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple best-selling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother.
“For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence – a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their reunion, a decade later, began a story that has never before been told. In Mom & Me & Mom, Angelou dramatizes her years reconciling with the mother she preferred to simply call “Lady”, revealing the profound moments that shifted the balance of love and respect between them.
“Delving into one of her life’s most rich, rewarding, and fraught relationships, Mom & Me & Mom explores the healing and love that evolved between the two women over the course of their lives, the love that fostered Maya Angelou’s rise from immeasurable depths to reach impossible heights.“
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SELF-HELP
6. Managing the Motherload by Rebekah Borucki (pre-order for August 2019)
“A candid, humorous, and heartfelt guide to self-care in motherhood from a meditation expert and mother-of-five.
“Managing the Motherload is a practical system for sanity from a happy, ultra-productive, and sometimes tired mother of five. This five-part system will help readers create a life that they love while allowing all the items on their to-do list to flourish in their own time.
“In the book, meditation guide and popular YouTuber Rebekah “Bex” Borucki features her favorite healing and stress-reducing modalities, including her signature 4-minute meditations.
“Deeply personal, heartfelt stories of her struggles and tender moments raising five children are highlighted throughout the book. As a birth doula and meditation guide, Bex offers a wealth of personal and professional experience in managing the demands of motherhood and the need for self-care and stress management.”
BUY IT IN PRINT KINDLE COMING SOON
7. Do Less by Kate Northrup
“This is a book for working women and mothers who are ready to release the culturally inherited belief that their worth is equal to their productivity, and instead create a personal and professional life that’s based on presence, meaning, and joy. As opposed to focusing on ‘fitting it all in’, time management, and leaning in, as so many books geared at ambitious women do, this book embraces the notion that through doing less women can have – and be – more.
“The addiction to busyness and the obsession with always trying to do more leads women, especially working mothers, to feel like they’re always failing their families, their careers, their spouses, and themselves. This book will give women the permission and tools to change the way they approach their lives and allow them to embrace living in tune with the cyclical nature of the feminine, cutting out the extraneous busyness from their lives so they have more satisfaction and joy, and letting themselves be more often instead of doing all the time. Do Less offers the listener a series of 14 experiments to try to see what would happen if she did less in one specific way. So, rather than approaching doing less as an entire life overhaul (which is overwhelming in and of itself), this book gives the listener bite-sized steps to try incorporating over two weeks!”
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SHARING IS CARING ❤
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Rebekah “Bex” Borucki, founder of BexLife.com and the Blissed In® wellness movement, is a mother-of-five, TV host, meditation guide, author, speaker, birth doula, fitness and yoga instructor, and popular social media personality. Her first book, You Have 4 Minutes to Change Your Life (Hay House 2017), is available now, wherever books are sold.
