Interested in reading on mom rage? Pamela Fox and Elizabeth Velez provide two book recommendations to check out.
Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood by Jessica Grose
PF: While there is a plethora of recent motherhood books that tackle the physical and psychological realities of parenting, I found journalist Jessica Grose’s startling research on working while pregnant during COVID-19 to be essential reading. Here is a section from the Introduction:
“I found out I was pregnant on my second day of that shiny new job, and I had about a week of grace before it all fell apart. I started vomiting uncontrollably, at least five times a day. Some days I held nothing down at all. I had breakthrough bleeding at seven weeks . My depressive and anxious symptoms came roaring back shortly after I started throwing up, ultimately becoming so extreme that I could barely leave the house because I was afraid of both barfing on the subway and sarin gas attacks.
Though I had covered family policy as a journalist, it had never fully registered for me that you needed to work somewhere for a year to qualify for even unpaid parental leave through the ‘Family and Medical Leave Act. I felt deeply stupid when I realized this–of all people, I should have known better. In fairness to my former self, this information is deliberately confusing and hard to access. Even in the states that offer paid leave, so many parents are leaving support on the table because they don’t even know that it is available to them” (2).
Chapter titles include “How Did We Get Here?”; “Pregnancy”; “Identity”; “Work”; “Social Media”; “Everything Falls Apart”; “How Do We Make Meaningful Change?”
Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood by Minna Dubin
EV: In her new book, Mom Rage:The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood, Dubin is screaming on the outside. She examines the literary history of what is now popularly described as "mom rage," and credits Annie Lamott and Adrienne Rich as predecessors.
Her new book (like her 2020 essay in The New York Times ) is sometimes hard to read; its brutal honesty is personal, but it is also political. Like Rich, she argues that the institution of motherhood provokes the anger and loss of self that many mothers normally experience.
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