"What Mommy Needs"

The number of women losing their lives to prescription drugs rose 400 percent between 1999 and 2010 - Harvard Health Publications  

The rate of alcohol-related deaths for women ages 35 to 54 has more than doubled since 1999, accounting for 8 per cent of deaths in this age group in 2015. – The Washington Post  

Experts believe possibly 20 per cent of women, are manic, compulsive shoppers. Most shopaholics are seriously in debt, and the condition has led to family break-ups, depression, homelessness and even suicide – The Observer 

It's statistics like these that motivated me to ask a diverse group of fifty-two women from across the country what they were doing to make it through the mothering. “What Mommy Needs,” was written using my face-to-face conversations with those mothers. I listened to their answers to my questions and then crafted this collection of monologues; literary narratives that represent the plurality of mothering perspectives present in Canadian society today.

Like Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” “What Mommy Needs,” is based on conversations with women about a subject that until now has been taboo: How do mothers actually survive motherhood? What is it about the mothering that brings us to our knees, and what do we do to struggle to our feet so we can put another load of laundry in?