A baby is born in Warsaw in 1939. Stalin has signed a pact of nonaggression with Hitler, marking the beginnings of the Second World War. As the city is attacked, Ola, a young nurse, escapes with her husband-to-be and their newborn baby to a small town in Soviet territory just across the border. Two years later, when the German forces attack the Soviets, she is separated from her partner and again has to flee. With immense courage and resourcefulness, Ola keeps herself alive, along with her baby Halina and the twenty injured soldiers she has to care for. For years following the deaths of her parents, Halina Rubin avoided looking inside two dusty boxes filled with letters, papers, photographs and notebooks. Finally, spurred on by her young daughter Annette, Halina unpacked these boxes and began discovering the details of her family's traumatic history. Through reading old papers and travelling to those long-forgotten places, Journeys with my Mother was born - a remarkably intimate memoir that would otherwise have been lost forever. 'Rubin, a writer of distinguished gifts, recreates the past with incredible immediacy and vividness.' - Lee Kofman 'Not merely an enthralling tale but told very, very beautifully.' - Jack Wodak

Twenty years after she lost her mother to breast cancer, Heather St. Aubin-Stout receives a postcard asking her to come back for magnifications of her recent mammogram. She asks for prayers from her family, friends, and neighbors. Prayers not for her to be cured but for her strength and wisdom. When she is diagnosed, she soon faces her memories of what she experienced with her mother's illness and death. However as she deals with her illness and treatments while she and her husband try to parent their three independent teenage sons she discovers that this is Not My Mother's Journey. Heather chronicles her journey with candid honesty discussing her challenges, confusions, and emotions with daily life while dealing with a potentially terminal disease. She engages the reader with everyday life experiences. She knows that each journey is unique, but she believes that we are here to help each other and by sharing our stories we'll make the individual path less painful, no matter what we're dealing with.

Describes the tremendous effort the female penguin makes to find food for her newborn.

New York Times Notable Book: A “beautifully written” memoir by the daughter of the brilliant, troubled poet (Detroit Free Press). This is an honest, unsparing account of the anguish and fierce love that bound a difficult mother and the daughter she left behind. Linda Sexton was twenty–one when her mother killed herself, and now she looks back, remembers, and tries to come to terms with her mother’s life. Growing up with Anne Sexton was a wild mixture of suicidal depression and manic happiness, inappropriate behavior and midnight trips to the psychiatric ward. Anne taught Linda how to write, how to see, how to imagine—and only Linda could have written a book that captures so vividly the intimate details and lingering emotions of their life together. Searching for Mercy Street speaks to everyone who admires Anne Sexton and to every daughter or son who knows the pain of an imperfect childhood. “Sexton forcefully communicates the fear, repulsion, neediness, and sorrow that filled her childhood, as well as the agony of her own mental breakdown and her terror of becoming like her mother, in lucid and vivid prose.” —The Boston Globe “A candid, often painful depiction of a daughter’s struggles to come to terms with her powerful and emotionally troubled mother.” —The New York Times

Kerry Alderuccio's introduction to all things of a psychic nature came to her relatively late in life. It was after the tragic loss of her adored nineteen-year-old son Sam in a car accident that she realised an instinct she'd always had might be something more profound. Throughout her life, Kerry had always been aware of changes in the energy around her: as her loved ones gradually passed away, she always remained aware of their presence. She had naively assumed that everyone felt such things. It was after Sam's untimely passing that Kerry decided to act on this instinct and look for answers as to where Sam was and how contact could be made. She began her mediumship studies at Arthur Findlay College in the United Kingdom, and her career in mediumship progressed quickly from there. This is Kerry's first book and is the result of her desire to share her amazing story, her moment of truth and her hope that others may find answers and peace in her words.

A moving account of a mother and daughter who visit Germany to face the Holocaust tragedy that has caused their family decades of intergenerational trauma, from the author of Brothers, Sisters, Strangers Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award In 1938, when Edith Westerfeld was twelve, her parents sent her from Germany to America to escape the Nazis. Edith survived, but most of her family perished in the death camps. Unable to cope with the loss of her family and homeland, Edith closed the door on her past, refusing to discuss even the smallest details. Fifty-four years later, when the void of her childhood was consuming both her and her family, she returned to Stockstadt with her grown daughter Fern. For Edith the trip was a chance to reconnect and reconcile with her past; for Fern it was a chance to learn what lay behind her mother's silent grief. Together, they found a town that had dramatically changed on the surface, but which hid guilty secrets and lived in enduring denial. On their journey, Fern and her mother shared many extraordinary encounters with the townspeople and—more importantly—with one another, closing the divide that had long stood between them. Motherland is a story of learning to face the past, of remembering and honoring while looking forward and letting go. It is an account of the Holocaust’s lingering grip on its witnesses; it is also a loving story of mothers and daughters, roots, understanding, and, ultimately, healing.

"This will cast a spell on fans of Cheryl Strayed and Glennon Doyle." - Publishers Weekly Between Two Kingdoms meets Wild. In this heart wrenching and inspirational memoir a woman and her mother, who is suffering from dementia, embark on a road trip through national parks, revisiting the memories, and the mountains, that made them who they are. Steph Jagger lost her mother before she lost her. Her mother, stricken with an incurable disease that slowly erases all sense of self, struggles to remember her favorite drink, her favorite song, and—perhaps most heartbreaking of all—Steph herself. Steph watches as the woman who loved and raised her slips away before getting the chance to tell her story, and so Steph makes a promise: her mother will walk it and she will write it. Too aware of her mother’s waning memory, Steph proposes that the two take a camping trip out to Montana—which her mother, on the urging of Steph’s father, agrees to embark upon. An adventure full of horseback riding, hiking, and “tenting” out West quickly turns into one woman’s reflection on childhood, motherhood, personhood—and what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite remember the person she spent her lifetime becoming. A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.

A full-scale investigation of the controversial and often misunderstood science of attachment theory, inspired by the author’s own experience as a parent and daughter. “A profound and beautiful work . . . searingly honest, brazenly fresh, and startlingly rich.”—Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon When professional researcher and writer Bethany Saltman gave birth to her daughter, Azalea, she loved her deeply but felt as if something was missing. Looking back at her lonely childhood, dangerous teenage years, and love-addicted early adulthood, Saltman thought maybe she was broken. Then she discovered the science of attachment, the field of psychology that explores the question of why—from an evolutionary point of view—love exists between parents and children. Saltman went on a ten-year journey visiting labs, archives, and training sessions, while learning the meaning of “delight” from Mary Ainsworth, one of psychology’s most important but unsung researchers, who died in 1999. Saltman went deep into the history and findings from Ainsworth’s famous laboratory procedure, the Strange Situation, which, like an X-ray, is still used today by scientists around the world to catch a glimpse of the internal workings of attachment. In this simple twenty-minute procedure, a baby and a caregiver enter an ordinary room with two chairs and some toys. During a series of comings and goings, a trained observer studies the minutiae of the pair’s back-and-forth with each other. Through the science of attachment, what Saltman discovered was a radical departure from everything she thought she knew—about love and about her own family, her story, and herself. She was far from broken—she saw that love is too powerful to ever break. Strange Situation is a scientific, lyrical, life-affirming exploration of love. Not only will readers be taken on an emotional ride through one mother’s reckoning with her own past and her family’s future, but they will also be given the tools with which to better understand their own life histories and their relationships today. Praise for Strange Situation “A fascinating deep dive into attachment theory . . . Carefully researched and with copious endnotes, this is an excellent resource for anyone interested in child development.”—Publishers Weekly “Honest and complex . . . A thoughtful engagement with a topic that affects all parents.”—Kirkus Reviews

Death and life beckoned her to travel the world to heal her grief. Journeys with My Mother’s Ashes describes the trauma faced by a daughter who has to manoeuvre the pitfalls and traps after the death of her mother. She realises that the only way toward her healing is to leave the country of her birth and travel the world taking her mother’s ashes with her. Join her on her Grand Tour through life, death, drama, family, healing and lots of travel. There are many moments of both darkness and light, fun and reflection, exploration and realisations and most of all a sense of direction to a brighter future through trusting her intuition. The journey has very few plans yet provides exactly what the author needs through trusting both a loving Universe and herself. So, pack your bags and hop on board you never know what this journey could bring.

The loss of a mother is one of the most traumatic experiences of a woman’s life. At any age, a mother’s death may leave a daughter with feelings of anger, abandonment and profound sadness that taint the way she views herself, her world and every other relationship around her. In this breakthrough book, author Patricia Commins, who lost her mother at 26, shows readers that the key to escaping the sorority of sorrow is by understanding their mothers as women and by feeling an ongoing connection with them. From this perspective —outside the parent-child relationship that is so fraught with conflict and complex emotions — women gain key insights into their mothers and themselves. By addressing the psychological and spiritual connection that remains after a mother’s death, Remembering Mother, Finding Myself offers the essential element that is missing from other books on motherless daughters. The Path of Understanding —a unique experiential process based on journaling, conversations with friends and relatives, and meditative exercises— does not seek to negate the loss a woman feels when her mother dies. It instead gently leads her beyond the grief and pain to a new awareness, freeing her from forever trying to be the perfect daughter. Through her own illuminating experiences and those of other women, Commins shows women how to reconnect their deceased mothers while finding peace and self-acceptance. Included are interviews with dozens of women, including such notables as writers Joyce Maynard and Nancy Friday and psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.