Soul Mothers' Wisdom

Book excerpt: Clinical social worker Bette J. Freedson shares seven key insights she has identified through years of workshops, counseling sessions, and her own self-examination as a single mother. Millions of heroic single mothers around the world, poor and rich, are rearing their own or someone else's children. Deaths, separations and divorces, and military deployments send many more women into single mother status every year, while other "hidden" single mothers bring up children virtually alone as fathers are ill, disabled, disengaged or just plain disinterested. In Soul Mothers' Wisdom: Seven Insights for the Single Mother Bette Freedson gently guides often-overwhelmed single mothers to a strong personal identity, a rediscovery of resilience, strength, and courage, and an affirmation of parenting purpose. Soul Mothers' Wisdom helps the woman parenting on her own understand that she can create the life she wants and become the woman she desires to be, transforming challenges into opportunities and solutions, chaos into calm, and discovering (or re-discovering) all she has to offer to her children and her self. Mental health professionals agree—children have a better chance of becoming emotionally healthy adults when their mothers' choices are guided by the wisdom that emanates from a solid core of self, i.e., "soul." Soul Mothers' Wisdom: Seven Insights for the Single Mother offers single mothers the knowledge, counseling and affirmation to help them and their children thrive. "This is a fine book full of support for single parents who have to face the job of raising children alone, and having to share them with another caregiver when they return to work," says T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., .former host of the Emmy-award-winning TV show What Every Baby Knows. "I would advise all single mothers to read it."