The parent's anti-advice book, it's chicken soup for the spleen of all those ex-best friends bumped for baby.
A rural, attachment-parenting single mom and a married, urban working mom--best friends estranged by their polarized parenting perspectives—take on the mothering taboos that alienate women from themselves and each other. This comic Rashomon journey through Trials by Parenthood blazes a trail for every mom shoveling through the dogma-doo in search of her own personally-correct answers. By defying the dogmas and doublespeak of Big Mother, these fugitives from the Mommy Police launch a conspiracy of validation for all women hiding in the closet of the parentally-incorrect.
About The Author
Linda Cohen and Joan Bechtel, friends for 17 years and partners in Personalized Parenting, use their award-winning comedy background to promote self-acceptance and compassion in their workshops and forums.
Linda Cohen is a Los Angeles playwright, novelist, SAG actress, and mother of a Little League second baseman. She holds a Masters Degree in Rehabilitation Counseling and teaches ESL in Watts. Linda worked with Joan on “Reel Independent Women” and “Televisionaries,” social satires laced with Existential Psychology.
Joan Bechtel is an award winning stand-up comic and film-maker. A guilt-ridden parent for a continuous 37 years, Joan has been an unwed teen mom, a married working mom, a single homeschooler and a visiting noncustodial parent. Mother of a surgeon, a psychiatric nurse, and a homeschooling video game wizard, Joan also has a Bachelor's Degree in Television Writing, and studied human development at Rudolf Steiner College and The Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. She created a Waldorf-inspired nursery school and a Jungian-based arts program for elementary age children.
Bechtel and Cohen are ardent advocates of empathy as a tool for self-realization and social healing.
Reviews
“Goes where few books have dared, revealing what happens when intelligent women crash headlong into the dogmatic expectations of motherhood.”
SOURCE: Joni Golden, Editor, Michigan Women’s Forum
Like the story of the Brothers Nile, MOTHERHOOD CONFIDENTIAL is a fruitful collaboration of opposites. In this case, best friends polarized by parenthood.
In Egyptian lore, the Blue Nile Brother is calm, the White Brother wild. One rushes down mountains gouging out mineral wealth. The other meanders through valleys collecting organic treasure. When they join, the riverbanks overflow with fertile new soil.
Like the river brothers, Bechtel and Cohen face parenting obstacles and unearth insights from opposite ends of the ideological and lifestyle spectrum. They contradict, mirror and challenge each other before they finally reconnect after nine alienating years.
Joan, a slightly paranoid, single homeschooling mother, criticized for her “overprotection,” frets she’s not mothering enough. Linda, a married working mom, suspects her immunity to guilt is a symptom of maternal deficit disorder. After years of drifting apart, they stumble onto common ground: the deeper, universal conflict of Everymother, the conflict between who she’s “supposed to be” and who she really is.
At the heart of MOTHERHOOD CONFIDENTIAL is its vulnerability. Despite toxic taboos and pressures to conform, the heroines journey into the gaping maw of self-doubt, in a search for truth that may not fit with what’s “supposed to be.” The medium of dueling voices underscores not only the rift between friends, but the internal battle between personal authenticity and conditioned beliefs. The contrapuntal style of a dual narrative illuminates opposite dark corners in the collective and personal shadows of Motherhood Noir, interweaving a memoir of friendship lost and found with a Clash of Subliminal Titans.
MOTHERHOOD CONFIDENTIAL unites a White Nile and a Blue to spread fertile soil for a new way of thinking about parenthood, sisterhood and personhood.
