Current Issue of MotherVerse Magazine: Mothering Magazine Focused on Literature and Art

Cover Art by Lahib Jaddo

A Selection from the Current Issue

Interview with Vicki Glembocki,
author of The Second Nine Months
Interview by Kris Underwood

What (or who) prompted you to write The Second Nine Months?

I’d just about made it through the second nine months with my daughter when a friend of mine told me a story about how, one day, she was so exhausted during the “active and alert time” for her three-month-old twin boys that she called her sister to come over and wave something over their heads while she slept, as if the boys would grow up stunted without it. That’s when I thought, “Hey, there are a lot of women out there who kind of lost themselves when they became moms. Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about it? I should write this story.”

The book is pretty raw. Did you ever think that his might not get published because of its content and subject?

Not at all—the rawness was the juiciest part in terms of selling it. What I was worried about was that publishers wouldn’t even get to the rawness because they’d see the title and assume it was “just another mommy book.” Because it really isn’t “just another mommy book.” So many of moms have said that to me—“I haven’t read anything like this ever before.” And you know how new moms read everything. I did. I hunted for this book for the first two months of my daughter’s life. I needed it—something that didn’t give any advice at all, that was more the voice of a funny girlfriend telling you about the crazy stuff she was going through. And, believe me, that book wasn’t there.

Click here to read the rest of the interview in the current issue...

Essay "Mourning My Belly"
by Melissa Stanton

    "The day after giving birth to my twin daughters, I stood before a full-length mirror in my hospital room and cried.
    Standing naked, supporting myself against a shower wall, I viewed my post-delivery body. My once taut belly was now pendulous, so much so that my sagging skin covered all evidence of the cesarean incision and bandage across my pelvis. Seeing my bloated and misshapen body, I knew my former figure was gone to me forever.
    A few weeks earlier, while lying on an exam table, and nearly being crushed by the 40-pounds of weight erupting directly from my middle, I had commented to my doctor: “I can’t believe my skin can stretch like this and still go back.”
    His response: “It won’t.”Although I regained my shape after the birth of my son four years earlier, my daughters’ gestation, it seemed, was pulling my skin and muscles to a point of no return.
   “Thin women usually don’t get their figures back after going full-term with multiples,” my doctor continued, acknowledging that my 5’2” frame had once carried only 110 pounds. “The only way to get your skin and belly to go back is to have a tummy tuck.”
   Seeing my resigned interest in the repair work, he warned that a tummy tuck is a very painful operation, with a difficult recovery. He added, unnecessarily, that it’s not a procedure one undertakes while caring for a preschooler and infant twins.
   Looking at my worn, ravaged figure in my hospital room mirror, I couldn’t help but think I had sacrificed my sex appeal and my youth to my new daughters, each of whom weighed 7 pounds 6 ounces at birth. I had produced two full-sized, full-term newborns at once. I had carried 15 pounds of baby, plus their placentas and fluids. My reward was two amazingly robust and beautiful girls. The cost was my body.
   Looking pregnant after delivery is a cruelty few first-time moms are prepared for. But with the twins, the balloon-like remains of my pregnancy were so pronounced that a doctor on rounds charged with checking on me dared to declare, “Are those twins still in there?”"

Melissa Stanton is a former senior editor at LIFE and People magazines in New York. Now a stay-at-home mom living in Maryland, she is the author of The Stay-at-Home Survival Guide, to be published Spring 2008 by Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon/Perseus Books. www.stayathomesurvivalguide.com.

Click here to read the rest of Melissa's story in the current issue...

We carry
Hathor the Cow Goddess Comics
in every issue!

MotherVerse Magazine features diverse mother-writers from across the globe. In our pages you will find women combining creativity and motherhood in the form of captivating personal essays, fiction, and poetry as well as through reviews, interviews, artwork, and humor. We hope you will join us by subscribing to the magazine or submitting your work today.

Click here to read about our regular features >>

Leesa Gehman lives in Pennsylvania with her son and two misnamed animals - a spastic dog named Betsy and a sedate cat named Spaz. She has had other work appear in ParentGuide News, Healtheseas.com and Eerie, Pennsylvania.

    "Today as we multitask through many moments, absorb information at an exponential rate, race through the day and at sunset combat the stressed exhaustion that threatens family life, it seems a quiet act of courage to pause and reflect on nurturing the inner life in ourselves and our children. It takes insight to recognize that this most delicate aspect of every person is worth considering and tending. It requires taking an intuitive stand in support of the inner life, knowing that nurturing it gives us a strong foundation from which we can regularly process, understand, renew, return.   Without an awareness of this valuable aspect, we risk having inadequate light in our inner sanctuaries for creating, loving, recovering, healing.
    Yet how shall we understand this elusive life in order to best encourage its growth in ourselves and our children? We must first accept that something so totally private and unique to each individual must ultimately be defined by each of us individually. For me, the inner life is the inward experience of the self and the world, including our thoughts, feelings, reflections, opinions, perceptions, our perceived talents and limitations. It seems intimately tied to spirituality: our sense of wonder, awe and mystery about life and how we ascribe meaning to experience. The inner life is so deeply private it cannot be truly known by anyone else, is consequently difficult to defend and so, most vulnerable. It has been called many names by many people in every culture: soul, spirit, heart, conscience, intuition, inner voice, self, even God.
    Discussing ways to supportively nurture the inner life in ourselves and our children is challenging because what is unique to each person will have to be nourished uniquely. What follows are simple discoveries I have made about myself and my family as we have tried to define, tend and nourish our inner lives. I share them here in honor of the countless parents and children I have met who, in the face of formidable cultural forces pulling us away from the inner life, have continued to preserve this part of life in their families."

Helene McGlauflin, MEd, LCPC is a counselor, educator and writer. She has been in public education for 25 years as a teacher and counselor and has written numerous articles on helping children for parents, educators and mental health professionals. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in books, professional and literary journals and magazines. Helene lives with her husband and two teenagers in Bath, Maine.

Click here to read more about nurturing your inner life in the current issue...

Artwork byJudith Kuegler Webster A MotherVerse subscription is just $9 for digital and $21.95 for print.	MotherVerse Current Issue, #8 Cover Art by Lahib Jaddo A Selection from the Current Issue Interview with Vicki Glembocki, author of The Second Nine Months Interview by Kris Underwood What (or who) prompted you to write The Second Nine Months? I’d just about made it through the second nine months with my daughter when a friend of mine told me a story about how, one day, she was so exhausted during the “active and alert time” for her three-month-old twin boys that she called her sister to come over and wave something over their heads while she slept, as if the boys would grow up stunted without it. That’s when I thought, “Hey, there are a lot of women out there who kind of lost themselves when they became moms. Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about it? I should write this story.” The book is pretty raw. Did you ever think that his might not get published because of its content and subject? Not at all—the rawness was the juiciest part in terms of selling it. What I was worried about was that publishers wouldn’t even get to the rawness because they’d see the title and assume it was “just another mommy book.” Because it really isn’t “just another mommy book.” So many of moms have said that to me—“I haven’t read anything like this ever before.” And you know how new moms read everything. I did. I hunted for this book for the first two months of my daughter’s life. I needed it—something that didn’t give any advice at all, that was more the voice of a funny girlfriend telling you about the crazy stuff she was going through. And, believe me, that book wasn’t there. Click here to read the rest of the interview in the current issue...	MotherVerse has been publishing writing by mothers for over three years and each semiannual issue features a book's worth of great writing by contemporary women. Here are some excerpts from the current issue. Essay "Mourning My Belly" by Melissa Stanton "The day after giving birth to my twin daughters, I stood before a full-length mirror in my hospital room and cried. Standing naked, supporting myself against a shower wall, I viewed my post-delivery body. My once taut belly was now pendulous, so much so that my sagging skin covered all evidence of the cesarean incision and bandage across my pelvis. Seeing my bloated and misshapen body, I knew my former figure was gone to me forever. A few weeks earlier, while lying on an exam table, and nearly being crushed by the 40-pounds of weight erupting directly from my middle, I had commented to my doctor: “I can’t believe my skin can stretch like this and still go back.” His response: “It won’t.”Although I regained my shape after the birth of my son four years earlier, my daughters’ gestation, it seemed, was pulling my skin and muscles to a point of no return. “Thin women usually don’t get their figures back after going full-term with multiples,” my doctor continued, acknowledging that my 5’2” frame had once carried only 110 pounds. “The only way to get your skin and belly to go back is to have a tummy tuck.” Seeing my resigned interest in the repair work, he warned that a tummy tuck is a very painful operation, with a difficult recovery. He added, unnecessarily, that it’s not a procedure one undertakes while caring for a preschooler and infant twins. Looking at my worn, ravaged figure in my hospital room mirror, I couldn’t help but think I had sacrificed my sex appeal and my youth to my new daughters, each of whom weighed 7 pounds 6 ounces at birth. I had produced two full-sized, full-term newborns at once. I had carried 15 pounds of baby, plus their placentas and fluids. My reward was two amazingly robust and beautiful girls. The cost was my body. Looking pregnant after delivery is a cruelty few first-time moms are prepared for. But with the twins, the balloon-like remains of my pregnancy were so pronounced that a doctor on rounds charged with checking on me dared to declare, “Are those twins still in there?”" Melissa Stanton is a former senior editor at LIFE and People magazines in New York. Now a stay-at-home mom living in Maryland, she is the author of The Stay-at-Home Survival Guide, to be published Spring 2008 by Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon/Perseus Books. www.stayathomesurvivalguide.com. Click here to read the rest of Melissa's story in the current issue...
We carry Hathor the Cow Goddess Comics in every issue! MotherVerse Magazine features diverse mother-writers from across the globe. In our pages you will find women combining creativity and motherhood in the form of captivating personal essays, fiction, and poetry as well as through reviews, interviews, artwork, and humor. We hope you will join us by subscribing to the magazine or submitting your work today. Click here to read about our regular features >> Photo by Judith Kuegler Webster	Essay "Curse of the White Butt Tag" by Leesa Gehman "“Mommy!” I close my eyes and count to ten. I don’t answer. “MOMMY!” “What, Thomas?” “Come to my room. It’s important!” “Now what? You should be asleep!” I nearly shout. “It’s important!” He bellows from his bedroom with a note of hysteria. “Please!” “Okay, I’m coming.” I click save on my Spirituality and Wellness paper and reluctantly get up. At three, everything is ‘important’. Telling me he had a booger was important twenty minutes ago. Complaining about the cat being in his room was important 10 minutes ago. The most important thing, though, is procrastinating. It’s incredibly important and my son does it well. I walk down the hallway of our small ranch house and stand in his doorway. His room is dim, lit only by a Finding Nemo nightlight. I can see his slender figure lying on top of his comforter, clutching a small stuffed animal. “What’s up, honey?” He mumbles something unintelligible and I sigh. “I didn’t catch that, sweetie. You need to go to sleep. Goodnight.” I turn to walk out the door and he says just loud enough for me to catch, “There’s paper in my nose.” I stop, wondering if I heard that right. He’s been obsessed with tissues lately, even if he doesn’t have the whole blowing thing down yet. “A tissue?” “No. Paper.” “What kind of paper?”" Leesa Gehman lives in Pennsylvania with her son and two misnamed animals - a spastic dog named Betsy and a sedate cat named Spaz. She has had other work appear in ParentGuide News, Healtheseas.com and Eerie, Pennsylvania. Click here to read the rest of Leesa's essay in the current issue...	Essay "Nurturing the Inner Life" by Helene McGlauflin "Today as we multitask through many moments, absorb information at an exponential rate, race through the day and at sunset combat the stressed exhaustion that threatens family life, it seems a quiet act of courage to pause and reflect on nurturing the inner life in ourselves and our children. It takes insight to recognize that this most delicate aspect of every person is worth considering and tending. It requires taking an intuitive stand in support of the inner life, knowing that nurturing it gives us a strong foundation from which we can regularly process, understand, renew, return. Without an awareness of this valuable aspect, we risk having inadequate light in our inner sanctuaries for creating, loving, recovering, healing. Yet how shall we understand this elusive life in order to best encourage its growth in ourselves and our children? We must first accept that something so totally private and unique to each individual must ultimately be defined by each of us individually. For me, the inner life is the inward experience of the self and the world, including our thoughts, feelings, reflections, opinions, perceptions, our perceived talents and limitations. It seems intimately tied to spirituality: our sense of wonder, awe and mystery about life and how we ascribe meaning to experience. The inner life is so deeply private it cannot be truly known by anyone else, is consequently difficult to defend and so, most vulnerable. It has been called many names by many people in every culture: soul, spirit, heart, conscience, intuition, inner voice, self, even God. Discussing ways to supportively nurture the inner life in ourselves and our children is challenging because what is unique to each person will have to be nourished uniquely. What follows are simple discoveries I have made about myself and my family as we have tried to define, tend and nourish our inner lives. I share them here in honor of the countless parents and children I have met who, in the face of formidable cultural forces pulling us away from the inner life, have continued to preserve this part of life in their families." Helene McGlauflin, MEd, LCPC is a counselor, educator and writer. She has been in public education for 25 years as a teacher and counselor and has written numerous articles on helping children for parents, educators and mental health professionals. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in books, professional and literary journals and magazines. Helene lives with her husband and two teenagers in Bath, Maine. Click here to read more about nurturing your inner life in the current issue...