The Mother Letters: Sharing the Laughter, Joy, Struggles, and Hope

The Mother Letters: Sharing the Laughter, Joy, Struggles,and Hope
by Amber C. Haines and Seth Haines
Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2016

 

Are you searching for a Mother’s Day gift for a mother of young children or a touching baby shower gift? Perhaps you yourself are in need of some uplifting encouragement on your motherhood journey? If so, The Mother Letters: Sharing the Laughter, Joy, Struggles, and Hope may be the perfect book. 

Back in 2008, Amber Haines was the mother of three children under three years old. Her husband Seth wanted to create a meaningful Christmas gift for her and reached out to mom bloggers on the internet to write letters on the topic of motherhood. Seth shares, “I hoped the letters would include words of encouragement and mothering wisdom while perhaps providing Amber a toehold for the hard days. . . Over the next two months, letters poured in. Each letter represented a particular narrative, a different story.” I was one of the moms who responded to this original request. In 2012, some of the letters were compiled into an e-book and now Revell Publishing has created a gift book out of them. 

These letters are beautiful and heartbreaking. They speak of the good days and the hard days, the sleep-deprived nights, and the feeling that children grow up so quickly. There are letters from expectant mothers and mothers of grown children and everything in between. There are letters from adoptive mothers and step-mothers, those who struggled with infertility, and those who found themselves unexpectedly pregnant. Each mother shared a piece of herself. Read this book with a box of tissues close by. You will laugh and cry and share in the journey. 

While social media and the “mommy wars” can often pit us against each other – stay-at-home versus working mothers, breast versus bottle-feeding, homeschooling versus public school, free-range versus helicopter, vaccinate versus non-vaccinate, this book offers us the all-important reminders that we are all in this thing called motherhood together and that God is in charge. I was honored to be a small part of it.