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The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy PDF Author: Lara Freidenfelds
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019086981X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
When a couple plans for a child today, every moment seems precious and unique. Home pregnancy tests promise good news just days after conception, and prospective parents can track the progress of their pregnancy day by day with apps that deliver a stream of embryonic portraits. On-line due date calculators trigger a direct-marketing barrage of baby-name lists and diaper coupons. Ultrasounds as early as eight weeks offer a first photo for the baby book. Yet, all too often, even the best-strategized childbearing plans go awry. About twenty percent of confirmed pregnancies miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Statistically, early pregnancy losses are a normal part of childbearing for healthy women. Drawing on sources ranging from advice books and corporate marketing plans to diary entries and blog posts, Lara Freidenfelds offers a deep perspective on how this common and natural phenomenon has been experienced. As she shows, historically, miscarriages were generally taken in stride so long as a woman eventually had the children she desired. This has changed in recent decades, and an early pregnancy loss is often heartbreaking and can be as devastating to couples as losing a child. Freidenfelds traces how innovations in scientific medicine, consumer culture, cultural attitudes toward women and families, and fundamental convictions about human agency have reshaped the childbearing landscape. While the benefits of an increased emphasis on parental affection, careful pregnancy planning, attentive medical care, and specialized baby gear are real, they have also created unrealistic and potentially damaging expectations about a couple's ability to control reproduction and achieve perfect experiences. The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy provides a reassuring perspective on early pregnancy loss and suggests ways for miscarriage to more effectively be acknowledged by women, their families, their healthcare providers, and the maternity care industry.

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy PDF Author: Lara Freidenfelds
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019086981X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
When a couple plans for a child today, every moment seems precious and unique. Home pregnancy tests promise good news just days after conception, and prospective parents can track the progress of their pregnancy day by day with apps that deliver a stream of embryonic portraits. On-line due date calculators trigger a direct-marketing barrage of baby-name lists and diaper coupons. Ultrasounds as early as eight weeks offer a first photo for the baby book. Yet, all too often, even the best-strategized childbearing plans go awry. About twenty percent of confirmed pregnancies miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Statistically, early pregnancy losses are a normal part of childbearing for healthy women. Drawing on sources ranging from advice books and corporate marketing plans to diary entries and blog posts, Lara Freidenfelds offers a deep perspective on how this common and natural phenomenon has been experienced. As she shows, historically, miscarriages were generally taken in stride so long as a woman eventually had the children she desired. This has changed in recent decades, and an early pregnancy loss is often heartbreaking and can be as devastating to couples as losing a child. Freidenfelds traces how innovations in scientific medicine, consumer culture, cultural attitudes toward women and families, and fundamental convictions about human agency have reshaped the childbearing landscape. While the benefits of an increased emphasis on parental affection, careful pregnancy planning, attentive medical care, and specialized baby gear are real, they have also created unrealistic and potentially damaging expectations about a couple's ability to control reproduction and achieve perfect experiences. The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy provides a reassuring perspective on early pregnancy loss and suggests ways for miscarriage to more effectively be acknowledged by women, their families, their healthcare providers, and the maternity care industry.

The Good Mother Myth

The Good Mother Myth PDF Author: Avital Norman Nathman
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 1580055036
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
In an era of mommy blogs, Pinterest, and Facebook, The Good Mother Myth dismantles the social media–fed notion of what it means to be a “good mother.” This collection of essays takes a realistic look at motherhood and provides a platform for real voices and raw stories, each adding to the narrative of motherhood we don’t tend to see in the headlines or on the news. From tales of mind-bending, panic-inducing overwhelm to a reflection on using weed instead of wine to deal with the terrible twos, the honesty of the essays creates a community of mothers who refuse to feel like they’re in competition with others, or with the notion of the ideal mom—they’re just trying to find a way to make it work. With a foreword by Christy Turlington Burns and a contributor list that includes Jessica Valenti, Sharon Lerner, Soraya Chemaly, Amber Dusick, and many more, this remarkable collection seeks to debunk the myth and offer honest perspectives on what it means to be a mother.

What No One Tells You

What No One Tells You PDF Author: Alexandra Sacks
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501112570
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Your guide to the emotions of pregnancy and early motherhood, from two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists. When you are pregnant, you get plenty of advice about your growing body and developing baby. Yet so much about motherhood happens in your head. What everyone really wants to know: Is this normal? -Even after months of trying, is it normal to panic after finding out you’re pregnant? -Is it normal not to feel love at first sight for your baby? -Is it normal to fight with your parents and partner? -Is it normal to feel like a breastfeeding failure? -Is it normal to be zonked by “mommy brain?” In What No One Tells You, two of America’s top reproductive psychiatrists reassure you that the answer is yes. With thirty years of combined experience counseling new and expectant mothers, they provide a psychological and hormonal backstory to the complicated emotions that women experience, and show why it’s natural for “matrescence”—the birth of a mother—to be as stressful and transformative a period as adolescence. Here, finally, is the first-ever practical guide to help new mothers feel less guilt and more self-esteem, less isolation and more kinship, less resentment and more intimacy, less exhaustion and more pleasure, and learn other tips to navigate the ups and downs of this exciting, demanding time

Expecting Better

Expecting Better PDF Author: Emily Oster
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143125702
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
“Emily Oster is the non-judgmental girlfriend holding our hand and guiding us through pregnancy and motherhood. She has done the work to get us the hard facts in a soft, understandable way.” —Amy Schumer What to Expect When You're Expecting meets Freakonomics: an award-winning economist and author of Cribsheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected disproves standard recommendations about pregnancy to empower women while they're expecting. Pregnancy—unquestionably one of the most pro­found, meaningful experiences of adulthood—can reduce otherwise intelligent women to, well, babies. Pregnant women are told to avoid cold cuts, sushi, alcohol, and coffee without ever being told why these are forbidden. Rules for prenatal testing are similarly unexplained. Moms-to-be desperately want a resource that empowers them to make their own right choices. When award-winning economist Emily Oster was a mom-to-be herself, she evaluated the data behind the accepted rules of pregnancy, and discovered that most are often misguided and some are just flat-out wrong. Debunking myths and explaining everything from the real effects of caffeine to the surprising dangers of gardening, Expecting Better is the book for every pregnant woman who wants to enjoy a healthy and relaxed pregnancy—and the occasional glass of wine.

Pregnant Darkness

Pregnant Darkness PDF Author: Monika Wikman
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.
ISBN: 0892545690
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
Author, psychologist, and astrologer Monika Wikman has worked for decades with clients and their dream symbols and witnessed the presence of the divine hand at work in the psyche. In The Pregnant Darkness, Wikman shows readers that the best way to cope with their darkest hours is by fostering a connection to the deeper current of life, those mysteries that give life form and meaning. Wikman's analysis of dream material leads readers into a practical explanation of alchemical symbolism. Far from being a quaint, ancient practice, The Pregnant Darkness shows that alchemy is at work in contemporary, everyday life. Alchemical symbolism, properly understood, can be applied to unraveling the meaning of visions in meditation, active imagination, and dream work. Wikman shows how readers can participate in the divine energies to help miraculous changes occur in their lives. Wikman writes: "In Greek mythology, Pegasus, upon taking to the air, pushed hard with a back hoof and penetrated the earth. A spring rose up where his hoof dashed the earth, and in this hole . . . the muses reside. One of the roles of the "religious function" of which Jung speaks is to bring us toward that inner spring of the muses where something beyond ego resides, instructs, and inspires. Like a hole created from Pegasus' leaping foot, contact with this inner spring often entails a crack in our field of ordinary consciousness. In the inner world, the spring of living symbols and accompanying presences is the source of dreams and visions, as well as the fountain of inspiration at the heart of poetry, art, ritual, mythology, and even religion."

The Mommy Myth

The Mommy Myth PDF Author: Susan Douglas
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743260466
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
Now in paperback, the provocative book that has ignited fiery debate and created a dialogue among women about the state of motherhood today. In THE MOMMY MYTH, Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels turn their 'sharp, funny, and fed-up prose' (San Diego Union Tribune) toward the cult of the new momism, a trend in Western culture that suggests that women can only achieve contentment through the perfection of mothering. Even so, the standards of this ideal remain out of reach, no matter how hard women try to 'have it all'. THE MOMMY MYTH skilfully maps the distance travelled from the days when THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE demanded more for women than keeping house and raising children, to today's not-so-subtle pressure to reverse this trend. A must-read for every woman.

Belabored

Belabored PDF Author: Lyz Lenz
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1541762827
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
In Belabored, Lyz Lenz will "make you cry in one paragraph and snort-laugh in the next" (Chloe Angyal, contributing editor at MarieClaire.com). Written with a blend of wit, snark, and raw intimacy, Belabored is an impassioned and irreverent defense of the autonomy, rights, and dignity of pregnant people. Lenz shows how religious, historical, and cultural myths about pregnancy have warped the way we treat pregnant people: when our representatives enact laws criminalizing abortion and miscarriage, when doctors prioritize the health of the fetus over the life of the pregnant patient in front of them, when baristas refuse to serve visibly pregnant women caffeine. She also reflects on her own experiences of carrying her two children and seeing how the sacrifices demanded during pregnancy carry over seamlessly into the cult of motherhood, where women are expected to play the narrowly defined roles of "wife" and "mother" rather than be themselves. Belabored is an urgent call for us to trust women and let them choose what happens to their own bodies, from a writer who "is on a roll" (Bitch Magazine).

The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature

The Pregnant Male as Myth and Metaphor in Classical Greek Literature PDF Author: David D. Leitao
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107379342
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
This book traces the image of the pregnant male in Greek literature as it evolved over the course of the classical period. The image - as deployed in myth and in metaphor - originated as a representation of paternity and, by extension, 'authorship' of ideas, works of art, legislation, and the like. Only later, with its reception in philosophy in the early fourth century, did it also become a way to figure and negotiate the boundary between the sexes. The book considers a number of important moments in the evolution of the image: the masculinist embryological theory of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and other fifth century pre-Socratics; literary representations of the birth of Dionysus; the origin and functions of pregnancy as a metaphor in tragedy, comedy and works of some Sophists; and finally the redeployment of some of these myths and metaphors in Aristophanes' Assemblywomen and in Plato's Symposium and Theaetetus.

Making a Baby

Making a Baby PDF Author: Debra Fulghum Bruce
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307487911
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Book Description
You may have waited a long time. You may have tried and tried. Now your chances of having a baby are better than ever! For ten years, Making a Baby has been the definitive source for couples who want to get pregnant, offering vital information on fertility technology, advances in baby-boosting medications, and cutting-edge medical techniques. Written with compassion and clarity, and now with even more tips on the best ways to prepare the body to get pregnant, this invaluable book, in a newly revised and updated edition, reveals how to protect, increase, and extend your fertility. Inside you’ll find • the four basic requirements for reproduction • findings from the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study that explain dietary ways to boost fertility • breakthrough information connecting insulin levels with ovulation • updates on the importance of marine omega-3 fatty acids in your baby’s development • groundbreaking pregnancy advice for women over 35 • news about polycystic ovary syndrome—and the recommended fertility drugs that may temporarily override this condition and boost chances of conception • what every man should know about his long-term reproductive health, including the most recent findings on male infertility This detailed, insightful, and meticulously researched book will help guide you to a wonderful new beginning as a parent!

Cribsheet

Cribsheet PDF Author: Emily Oster
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525559256
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
From the author of Expecting Better and The Family Firm, an economist's guide to the early years of parenting. “Both refreshing and useful. With so many parenting theories driving us all a bit batty, this is the type of book that we need to help calm things down.” —LA Times “The book is jampacked with information, but it’s also a delightful read because Oster is such a good writer.” —NPR With Expecting Better, award-winning economist Emily Oster spotted a need in the pregnancy market for advice that gave women the information they needed to make the best decision for their own pregnancies. By digging into the data, Oster found that much of the conventional pregnancy wisdom was wrong. In Cribsheet, she now tackles an even greater challenge: decision-making in the early years of parenting. As any new parent knows, there is an abundance of often-conflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and strangers on the internet. From the earliest days, parents get the message that they must make certain choices around feeding, sleep, and schedule or all will be lost. There's a rule—or three—for everything. But the benefits of these choices can be overstated, and the trade-offs can be profound. How do you make your own best decision? Armed with the data, Oster finds that the conventional wisdom doesn't always hold up. She debunks myths around breastfeeding (not a panacea), sleep training (not so bad!), potty training (wait until they're ready or possibly bribe with M&Ms), language acquisition (early talkers aren't necessarily geniuses), and many other topics. She also shows parents how to think through freighted questions like if and how to go back to work, how to think about toddler discipline, and how to have a relationship and parent at the same time. Economics is the science of decision-making, and Cribsheet is a thinking parent's guide to the chaos and frequent misinformation of the early years. Emily Oster is a trained expert—and mom of two—who can empower us to make better, less fraught decisions—and stay sane in the years before preschool.