086: 18 brilliant books about motherhood & 25 questions to bring you closer to your mom

Plus: the healing power of postpartum food rituals, a poignant essay about a perinatal mental health condition & 9 thought-leaders on what moms need

Welcome to Two Truths, a bestselling newsletter & media brand exploring the many truths of motherhood from journalists & maternal health advocates Cassie Shortsleeve of Dear Sunday Motherhood & Kelsey Haywood Lucas of Motherspeak. Two Truths is rooted in the healing & affirming principle that two (or more) things can be true. It’s a “best parenting Substack” per Motherly and The Skimm says you should subscribe; also seen in Vox, The Bump, Popsugar & more.

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A little truth about Mother’s Day: Every year, when it’s time to plan this newsletter’s Mother’s Day edition, we find ourselves a little... stumped. Not because we don’t care—on the contrary. We write about maternal health, women’s policy, parenting products, and the full spectrum of motherhood in every single issue. We don’t need a holiday to remind us that mothers matter and deserve real support. We know you don’t either.

And while we’re being honest, it feels strange to “celebrate” motherhood this year as federal and state programs that support moms are being slashed, and essential data and research are disappearing.

A gift guide feels inadequate.

A tribute feels incomplete.

If you’ve been here a while, you know what we really want: sweeping, systemic change. (Just last week, we were both in Washington, D.C., with Chamber of Mothers—the nonpartisan nonprofit we co-founded with a group of mother advocates—lobbying for exactly that. If you’re feeling like we are, here’s something you should know: Despite the headlines, despite the politics, despite the despair, we actually left feeling hopeful. We’ll tell you more about this soon.)

All of that being said, instead of trying to sum up motherhood in a single post today, we’re spotlighting writers who do what we do: explore, challenge, and reimagine motherhood in all its depth. Some of these books you’ve seen here before. Some may be new. All are worth your time. (Including a few interesting articles examining lesser-explored sides of motherhood.)

This Mother’s Day, we’re wishing you whatever it is you need most: peace, rest, joy, space, solitude, community, love. However you spend the day, it’s yours.

—Cassie and Kelsey

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Preorder now (a little treat for your future self)

• We truly cannot wait to get emotionally wrecked by Kate Baer’s recently-announced new poetry collection, How About Now (coming November 4). You can pre-order at your local bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever else books are sold. Our suggestion? Go for the signed copy, available here.

• It’s easy to read Hannah Rosenberg’s poetry and think “same, girl, same,” so it’s very fitting that Same is the title of her debut collection (out October 21). It’s “a celebration of one thing we all have in common: a desire to be seen and understood” that touches on girlhood, marriage, motherhood and beyond.

• Marie Rutkoski’s Ordinary Love (out June 10) is a sweeping and seductive novel that examines queerness, friendship, motherhood, longing, and ambition as one woman risks everything for a second chance at love.

• Independent play is the holy grail of parenting: It’s great for kids’ development and gives you a bit of space to breathe. Myriam Sandler, founder of Mothercould, wrote the complete guidebook in Playful by Design: Your Stress-Free Guide to Raising Confident, Creative Kids through Independent Play (out May 13). It’s a beautiful trove of inspiration and easy-to-execute ideas that will boost creativity and connection.

New releases (read these immediately)

• When you read this description of Mother: A Graphic Memoir from Rachel Deutsch, you’ll understand why we’re such longtime fans of her work (be sure to follow @weirdmomart on IG): “The Mother is about the constant dualities and contradictions of motherhood.” (Two things can be true, as we say so often in this newsletter.) “The collision of future Rachel and past Rachel. Desperately wanting to get pregnant while fearful of being pregnant. Loving a new identity while missing an old one. Celebrating a new family while mourning the previous incarnation of a partnership.”

• Ever dream of starting a “mommune” with your friends? All The Mothers is a novel by Domenica Ruta about “three single moms who share the same baby daddy finding each other on social media—then deciding to live together to make an alternative family without men.”

• In Three Minutes for Mom: 365 Days of Empowerment, Encouragement, and Growth for a More Connected Motherhood, Erin Morrison (who you may know as @itstheconsciousmom) offers a daily, three-minute dose of support to feel calmer and more connected in motherhood.

• In Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, essayist Nicole Graev Lipson “untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters.” Topics tackled include fidelity, friendship, solitude, fertility, and acceptance.

• In Normalize It: Upending the Silence, Stigma, and Shame That Shape Women’s Lives, Jessica Zucker, Ph.D. (of @ihadamiscarriage) speaks up about “the all-too-common, but under-acknowledged, taboos women navigate throughout their lives.”

• In Mind Your Body: A Revolutionary Program to Release Chronic Pain and Anxiety, psychotherapist and chronic pain expert Nicole Sachs, LCSW teaches you to “free yourself from chronic pain, anxiety, fatigue, and myriad debilitating conditions through the transformative process of nervous system regulation.”

• In Then Comes Baby: An Honest Conversation about Birth, Postpartum, and the Complex Transition to Parenthood, Jessica Vernon, M.D. “draws from her own experience as an OB/GYN and mom to delve into the physical and mental parts of birth and the postpartum journey that new and expecting parents aren’t prepared for because they just aren’t talked about.”

• In Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, Amanda Hess explores the technology that shapes and defines the journey into motherhood (think: fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, “freebirth” influencers, and hospital reality shows). “The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.”

Books so good, we’re sharing them again

• Will never get over the sweet, searing simplicity of Poems of Parenting by Loryn Brantz. Read our beautiful interview about the book with Brantz here; read an exclusive part of our chat on Fast Company here.

• In Mama Needs a Minute!: A Candid, Funny, All-Too-Relatable Comic Memoir about Surviving Motherhood illustrator Mary Catherine Starr (who you probably know as @momlife_comics) “captures the chaos, joy, exhaustion, guilt, well-intentioned-but-clueless partners, and infinite loads of laundry that come with being a mom.”

• In The Mother Code: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us, journalist Ruthie Ackerman “blends history, science, and cultural criticism to uncover whether motherhood outside of society’s rigid rules and expectations is possible—and whether she fits the mold for what a mother should be.”

• Shout-out to

  Rachael Shepard-Ohta
  of
  Nap Trapped
  for influencing us to move Boy Mom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman back to the top of our TBR pile. Listen to their recent podcast here.

• I discovered Neha Ruch’s Mother/Untitled platform back in 2019—right when I was leaving a full-time, all-encompassing career I adored to take a pause and try out “stay-at-home” motherhood for a while. The way she positioned this choice as an empowered, ambitious move was radical at the time—and resonated deeply with me. In The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids—and Come Back Stronger Than Ever by Neha Ruch, Ruch offers a necessary, paradigm-shifting guide to the ins and outs of planning a career break to prioritize time for parenting. —K

• There are a lot of opinions out there on what it means to be a “good” mom—and this is exactly what Nancy Reddy unpacks in her latest book, The Good Mother Myth, where she debunks “studies by ‘the experts’—mostly male scientists” and “explains why mothers are right to prioritize their intuition, common sense, and individual path to happiness.”

Plus, a few excellent mom reads from the web…

Articles, round-ups, and carousels that went far behind your typical gift guide & truly spoke to us this Mother’s Day: a poignant essay from a mom who experienced a perinatal mental health condition; the healing power of postpartum food rituals; 25 questions to bring you closer to your mother; nine writers, policymakers, and big thinkers on what women want and need from their village; a motherhood studies sociologist’s view on the tension around Mother’s Day, and more.

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