[.ca] Breeder: Real-Life Stories from the New Generation of ... (ISBN 1580050514)

From Amazon.com:
The voices of mothers--the real in-the-trenches voices of mothers--always threaten the status quo. Tell the truth about your ambivalence, rage, and passion--whether about miscarriage, breast pumps, or (as profiled here) your welfare-avoidance job as a stripper--and watch the general public recoil. But as every mother knows, there is nothing more comforting than finding another woman who is willing to sit in your kitchen and share the honest-to-God truth about mothering. So it takes a lot of best-girlfriend loyalty to write the gut-wrenching motherhood stories that you'll find in Breeder. And fortunately, coeditors Bee Lavender and Ariel Gore (The Hip Mama Survival Guide, The Mother Trip) had enough grit and pluck to get them published. (Both women are also the editors of the online and print magazine Hip Mama.) This collection of Gen-X essays is especially courageous because of all the taboos it shatters. Writer Julie Jameson confesses that she was talking on the phone with her mom when she looked up and discovered that her teething son had found her newly purchased vibrator and was gnawing on the tip. Gayle Brandeis boasts about the heroic treks she's taken through the hidden folds of her children's bottoms, searching for pinworms like a cave explorer. Sara Manns writes about the desire to have a child with her lesbian wife, which leads her through the terrain of sperm donors, then miscarriage, and finally international adoption. And we can all be grateful to Peri Escarda for helping us find the "Perfect Name" to offer a daughter when she points between her legs and asks, "What's dat?" Not all the stories are masterfully rendered. Some rely on raw urgency, such as Alex McCall's "Bomb Threat," in which she anxiously retrieves her daughter from a federal-building childcare facility on the same day as the Oklahoma City bombing. Yet many offer mature crafting as well as tender narration. When Min Jin Lee became pregnant, she thought about her own Korean immigrant upbringing and her downtrodden mother's enormous sacrifices. She writes, "These were my fears: One day my child would feel the need to make my life whole through her accomplishments, or worse, as an adult, she would be unable to ever remember me smiling at her as a little girl." Jessica Rigney writes a chillingly exquisite story about altering her family's legacy of suicide and silence through the conscious mothering of her son. These are the rough-and-ready voices of the next wave of motherhood, and like the generation of feminists before them, they continue to break new, fertile ground. One can hardly wait to hear the voices of their daughters. --Gail Hudson

Read this:
I can't get over the guilt or whining of some of the soccer moms. The majority of the parenting books cater to YOU! This book was a refreshing anthology of different mamas, different breeders. I usually buy this book and _Mothers Who Think_ for my pregnant friends under about 35. I think this book speaks to various people and not just the mini-van crowd, who have shelves of books to choose from in any bookstore!

Pardon the cliche, but big waste of trees:
I would give this zero stars given the chance. First, the title is very misleading. These are not essays by "the new generation of mothers," but rather teen, welfare and wanna-be hippie moms. These flighty, immature, irresponsible writers do NOT represent my generation. (I am 30.) Just take a glimpse at the biographies in the back before you decide to read this drivel. One author is described as a "second generation welfare mama." Now there's a source of pride. These essays include the story of a teenage birth mother who led a potential adoptive couple to believe she was going to give them her baby, then changed her mind after the baby was born, as well as the story of a woman who aborted her baby after she decided to let her body be a pawn to the patriarchy. I am paraphrasing, but trust me, the actual language is even more ridiculous. There are a couple of semi-decent essays here, but it's not worth wading through the rest to find them.

I guess being unprepared for having kids makes you hip.:
I can't say that some of the essays weren't well-written, because they were. My problem was the content. I'm not Mrs. Brady by a long shot, I thought I was forward-thinking, a feminist, a hip-mama, but apparently, if you want to stick to the confines of this collection, if you aren't on welfare, a single-mom, or a teenager, in an alternative relationship or all of the above, you aren't from the "New Generation of Mothers". Personally, that's okay with me. I'll just go on being a good mother with a secret punk rock past & realise that by having planned out my pregnancy with my husband when we could afford it that I'm just one of those supposed-SUV driving soccer moms that all the other parenting books cater to. Shame on Ariel Gore for being so narrow-minded in her view of the new generation of mothers. Shame on these supposive feminists for being irresponisble in their breeding & then claiming it a victory for feminism.

Good book for the untraditional:
This book was recommended to me by a friend who is hipper (or perhaps weirder, depending on your point of view) than I am. The quality of writing in this book is very high, and I enjoyed reading each piece. For me, the most moving parts were the bits about very universal feelings of joy, fear, anger, pain, etc. The specific situations the authors found themselves in frequently seemed quite foreign to me, but I read it very quickly and found myself quite absorbed. For me, I think "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" hit closer to home. I'd expected friends who are more conservative than I am to find little to relate to, but one of my most conventional friends (who recently suffered a miscarriage) was moved to tears by an account of a similar story in Breeder. After hearing how much this story moved my friend, I changed my mind and sent the book to my mother, who I'd initially thought would be too distracted by the specific situations and attitudes of the authors to enjoy the book. No word back from my mother yet! I think the moral is that there's something for everyone in this very well-written book. I applaud the editors for compiling stories to encourage mothers to give themselves a break, and for providing a much more diverse set of parent role models than mainstream publications do.

EXCELLENT:
I truly enjoyed this book and have passed it on to friends. It is a great read whether you have kids or not.