Like a Mother

I learned about so many things I didn't know like did you know if you breast feed your baby's saliva sends information to the mother's body and that can cause the breast milk to adapt to suit your baby's needs? Wild. This book covers topics about breast milk, the pelvic floor, miscarriage, the importance of care for birthing persons and support, postpartum depression, anxiety and psychosis and many other aspects of being pregnant, labor and the body after birth. And not only what the body goes through but the mind. I listened to the audiobook which took a while to like cause the narrator wasn't very engaging but the stuff I was learning about was so interesting I got used to her tone. I'd recommend reading this book just to learn all the cool bits of information. There are some incorrect medic terms used but overall it was a good read.

Kind of a memoir crossed with something like Expecting Better (which Goodreads won't let me link to, but everyone who may be pregnant someday should absolutely read) crossed with a Mary Roach book. The writing is engaging and fun; I definitely learned a lot that I didn't know before, even after having been pregnant. Some of this is just fun trivia, like facts about the placenta and the composition of breast milk, but I'm actually kind of upset that I got through an entire pregnancy and almost a year of motherhood without ever being taught about the anatomy of the pelvic floor. A recurring theme of the book is the shocking lack of attention or research focused on pregnancy and birth - there's still so much that we don't know about these things, because no one has ever cared enough to fund the research into it. I really enjoyed this, especially the chapter about microchimerism.