Customer Reviews

Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts

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If you're at all familiar with the Hip Mama website or the Mamaphonic website, then you know that this book rocks! This book is a wonderful anthology filled w/ honest excerpts about women's lives.
Some of the essays are heartbreaking and poignant and others will make you laugh so hard that you'll cry. I'm going to give this book to all my friends with kids. It's a perfect gift.
If you liked Bitch in the House, Slacker Mom or read zines like like Edgy Catin' Mama, Hip Mama, or East Village Inky then you'll "get" what these mamas are saying.

Read and enjoy!

Let me preface this by saying that I really appreciate that we are able to hear the voices of a variety of different mothers, and their parenting styles. I purchased this book because I thought I would get some input on how to balance the struggling-artist type lifestyle of my husband and myself, with new parenthood. The end sentence on the back of the book "...becoming a mother is an expression of creativity, not its silencing" really got me to buy this. Some stories are very good and touching, but others just weren't interesting and were poorly written. The editing is also poor, as there are mistakes in many of the stories. The vast majority of the stories were written by women attempting to balance a writing career with motherhood. I really questioned the judgment of a few of these women, since I don't think it's appropriate to feed your kids junk food all day and have frozen waffles for dinner so that you can have time to be 'creative.' Some stories read to me as if these mothers were more concerned with their own achievement than with raising their children, and that the goal of the day was usually to get away from the kids and find time to work. However, most of the mothers did mention that their children were incredible boosts to their creativity, and some were very insightful. I just got the overriding impression that the work of motherhood mostly sucks, but ends up paying off somewhere down the road.

This is a great collection of essays from different women in widely varying creative fields. Not a "how to" so much as a balm for the exhausted new mother's soul.

I didn't find this book very exciting. The writing styles were poor and none of the stories really caught my attention. I really question how these children turn out when their mothers are so focused on themselves.