Customer Reviews

The Single Mom's Guide to Finding Joy in the Chaos

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This book is a unique combination of wit, wisdom and encouragement to all single parents out there. Gives concrete ideas of ways to make life better as you do a job that sometimes feels very lonely, with a few laughs along the way.

Elsa was a single mom for quite awhile raising her daughter. She is also part of the Divorce Care videos that I just finished, which is a 13-week divorce healing and recovery course. I just love how she speaks, with such compassion, softness, and care. Her book is no exception. Right off the bat, I felt connected to her.

One of the things she talked about was her friendships with women. There was a point in her life she did not feel that she needed female friends, as most her friends were men. Starting in 2005, when I went to my first Women's Retreat, I had felt that way. Most of the time, I did not connect with other women unless they were engineers, technical, or business people. Forget it if you were the stay at home mom, liked all this girlie stuff, you were all a mystery to me.

Yet, I found as I became a mother in 2000, and as I allowed God to change me starting 2005, that I found good friendships with women who were very different than me. But, it wasn't until recently as I identified (with a lot of help from the Holy Spirit, counseling, etc) the root cause of my rebellion, and really took a friend's suggestion to deepen my friendships with women, that I began to find power and joy in this.

I'm truly beginning to really enjoy turning to my women friends for support rather than my male friends, as there is a bonding with another woman friend that I cannot get with a man. How I've listened to the lies of Satan over the years and lost out on so much. I'm finding that some of the women I'm connecting with are super girlie, but in the end, we all want to be loved, to be accepted, to be protected, to be cherished.

Not totally there yet, but I've found that I've not really had the chance to really be all the woman God created me to be. I actually do love feeling pretty and to be found attractive. I hope that I can help Hannalee be her very best, which is both feminine, strong, capable, intelligent, industrious. There's more.

I don't think this was a book on how to be a woman and to connect to other women, but that's where I am so far, also not very far into the book. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book and will continue this review as I read.

Single moms of preschoolers will find handy hints for managing the every day challenges of raising a toddler. Budget help and ways to make a dollar stretch are always welcome. And, of course, former partners can often be less helpful and far more aggravating than a slightly frazzled single mom imagined. To cope with all the challenges of single motherhood, no matter what the age of your child, check out The Complete Single Mother, recently published in a completely revised third edition.