The Benalish Momma was sent a book by one of her girlfriends. And–not for the first or last time–I promptly stole it and finished it before she got more than halfway through. It’s a collection of essays on motherhood & midlife by Jessi Klein, writer for a number of TV shows.

I highly, highly recommend this book. First, more books should be essays. It’s a lot more compatible for the parenting lifestyle, where sneaking 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading is quite the treat. Second, it hits the sweet spot of dealing with weighty issues but with humor and flair. Example from the text:

…I urgently flagged down one of his teachers. “Asher probably isn’t gonna wear his costume,” I whisper-screamed into her ear. “Don’t take it personally.” “Okay,” Sharon said, with that calm voice teachers use when they have to talk to parents who think they’re successfully hiding that they’re having a nervous breakdown.

Needless to say, this really hits the sweet spot for my approach to parenting & life. Just because it’s serious and important, doesn’t mean it’s not also ridiculous and hilarious.

I think it also has some really important pieces of fathers, despite having “motherhood” in the title. Some of the essays deal with What Clothes Do I Wear Now?, the post-partum Underwear Sandwich, and other things that I am sort of aware of in the abstract, but holy hell does it give me an additional appreciation for everything my wife puts up with. There’s a loose connective thread of the archetype of the Hero’s Journey that does a good job of grounding the work.

Amazon Link for your convenience: I’ll show myself out

Several months ago my father pushed a book into my hands. Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood. I carefully explained to him that Lil’ Chandra isn’t even in preschool yet. With a haunted look in his eyes (I have a younger sister), he carefully enunciated, “You cannot begin to prepare too early.” So it sounds like I have *that* to look forward to.

But the good news is that the read was both highly entertaining and pretty interesting. The author is a therapist at an all-girls school, so she interwove stories (some highly amusing) with the academic literature. The basic conceit comes from Anna Freud, that teenage girls transition into adulthood along seven dimensions: ending childhood, finding a new tribe, harnessing emotions, contending with adult authority, forward planning, romance, and self-care. Any given young woman might be at different developmental stages among the strands, it’s not like they move in lockstep.

One interesting side-effect of checking out ebooks from the library is that by the time the book arrives, I completely forget who recommended it or why. But Kindle told me that Positive Discipline was checked out, so off I went.

The good news is that it started off with a bang. It made a really fascinating distinction: discipline and punishment are actually two very different words that get blurred together when talking about parenting. Think of the discipline of a samurai or monk; it’s not really about punishment per se.

Unfortunately that was the peak. The rest of the book was just recycling the most generic parenting advice you could possibly imagine. Be nice to your spouse. Have a shared plan. Don’t physically harm your child. In fact, there’s probably some sort of literary drinking game where you take a shot each time the authors exhort you to “not spank”. You probably won’t make it out of chapter 2 without acute alcohol poisoning, but you’ll have a lot more memorable experience.

The shallowness of this book was kind of a mystery to me until I realized that the original book is just “Positive Discipline”. So this version, ages one to three, is either filling in a gap or a delightful cash grab to help cover the authors’ second mortgage. So I’ll read the real version (by process of elimination appropriate for 4+) when we get a little closer to that particular Rubicon.