Book Review: “Mindful Motherhood”
This baby book is not about the things you need to buy before the baby comes home, or what will happen when you visit the doctor at week 22, or how to put a cloth diaper on a baby. It’s about your state of mind as you do all of these things. Your mental approach to motherhood.
Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year author Cassandra Vieten says that our own awareness and presence of mind will translate to the child-parent experience. Be mindful. “Mindful motherhood, simply put, is being present in your body and connected with your baby no matter what is happening,” writes Vieten. So if the baby won’t stop crying, the approach is not “what the hell should I do to make this baby stop crying,” but “the baby is crying right now because she is trying to tell me something, and if I can’t figure out what, we’ll ride it out together.”
It’s hard to be mindful all of the time. While reading this book, for instance, I was not mindful at all. It was 90-odd degrees and too hot to move, so I collapsed on the bed with the fan on and scanned chapters in between taking heat-comatose catnaps.
But we can aim to be mindful more, especially as mothers, and especially as mothers with financial woes pressing on us. Because even if you are broke, you still have a child, and though fiscal stability can soothe one’s nerves, taking the time to be fully present when you are with your child runs up no bills.
As me about all of this in six and a half months and we’ll see what I think of mindful motherhood then. But I do belive that staying collected, even at the cost of a clean bathroom or a weeded lawn or Ween playing in Bend in August, keeps us from losing our shit as often.
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