For best selling author Jennifer Lauck, confronting the unfinished business of childhood is the most important step toward motherhood. Her earlier books, Blackbird and Still Waters detailed breathtaking losses, including the early death of her parents, her brother's suicide, sexual abuse, and unsuccessful attempts to reach her birth mother. In this memoir of short stories, Lauck reveals a gallant and inspiring process of creating meaning in her painful legacy. Lauck's vivid scenes from memory and motherhood evoke psychologist Selma Fraiberg's idea of the "ghosts in the nursery." Scenarios range from subtle to disturbing to slapstick with her sense of humor always intact. She describes how nipple shields saved the day and the diamond studded, power-suited woman in Starbuck's who watched in horror as Lauck reached for a vomit stained wallet while her children spilled a sea of chocolate milk on the table. She writes, "My juggling act is over. I am the poster of the anti-mother who makes the case for contraception." Lauck is a gifted, engaging writer who leads readers to the busy intersection where parenting and personal history meet. While the details of Lauck's story are strikingly unique, every mother will identify with her unvarnished view of motherhood and with the self-discovery that awaits each parent. --Barbara Mackoff


From Publishers Weekly
Lauck tells of her struggle to raise her children and come to terms with the circumstances of her own harrowing upbringing in short, captivating stories alternating between past and present. This is Lauck's third book, and it focuses less on her past than did Blackbird and its follow-up, Still Waters. The author recaps her life in snippets related to her present status as a wife and mother of two children. Her childhood was hard, to say the least: her mother died when she was seven, her father when she was nine, and her brother committed suicide in her first year of college; yet she's levelheaded and conscientious about the way her past will play out in relation to raising children. At one point she describes her laborâ€""A deep pain digs at my back and catches my breath. I want to keep looking back, but I can't anymore"â€"essentially summing up her theory that it's important not to endow children with parental history. Lauck is not self-indulgent and does not invoke pity; she does, however, command respect and provide inspiration as she honestly continues to teach herself how to be a mother, all the while fighting to listen to intuition. Through this exploration of motherhood, she ends up teaching readers something about raising children, keeping in mind that no matter how hard a parent tries to prevent it, a child is inevitably affected by his or her parents' past. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Lauck follows two highly acclaimed memoirs with a candid look at new motherhood. Opening with the premature birth of Spencer, her firstborn, Lauck engages the reader immediately with her frank opinions on hospital versus home delivery and the "manipulative" health-care system that requires her "premature but normal" baby to spend four extra and expensive days in the hospital. She switches between the present and her painful past, familiar to readers of her earlier books, including the early deaths of her adoptive parents, her subsequent abuse, and her brother's suicide. In the present Lauck confronts postpartum depression, a brief cancer scare, and Spencer's behavioral problems related to the birth of his sister. Her strong feminist voice carries her through one crisis after another, whether questioning her pediatrician's overprescribing of antibiotics or elucidating to her husband her need to return to writing. Lauck doesn't offer anything earthshaking, just a lucid, sympathetic, and often humorous portrayal of experiences to which many readers will be able to relate. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
Carl Jung said, "Children are driven, unconsciously, in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the life of their parents." It is this very statement that haunts Jennifer Lauck, and inspires Show Me the Way, a marvelous book of honest, funny, and touching stories from the trenches of motherhood. Having lost both of her parents at an early age, Jennifer Lauck, acclaimed author of the memoir Blackbird, as well as its follow-up, Still Waters, has in Show Me the Way come to terms with her past in order to move forward as a mother to her own children. A luminous writer who is always observing, whose self-examination is frank, poignant, and never cloying, Lauck's stories touch upon themes common to so many of her readers: labor, delivery, and the physical details of giving birth; the decision to have a second child; the struggle to maintain independence against the pull of motherhood; the tenuous work/life balancing act; the gossamer threads holding family together; the soul-defining nature of caring for children; and the ultimate surrender of finally "getting it." Illustrating the author's wonderful insight, irreverence, and core of inner strength, Show Me the Way is a book for all mothers, and a rewarding conclusion for fans of Jennifer Lauck.


About the Author
Jennifer Lauck is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Blackbird and its sequel, Still Waters. She lives with her husband, son, and daughter in Portland, Oregon.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Carl Jung said, "Children are driven, unconsciously, in a direction that is intended to compensate for everything that was left unfulfilled in the life of their parents." It is this very statement that haunts Jennifer Lauck, and inspires Show Me the Way, a book of honest, funny, and touching stories from the trenches of motherhood." "Having lost both of her parents at an early age, Jennifer Lauck, author of the memoir Blackbird, as well as its follow-up, Still Waters, has in Show Me the Way come to terms with her past in order to move forward as a mother to her own children." "Lauck's stories touch upon themes common to so many of her readers: labor, delivery, and the physical details of giving birth; the decision to have a second child; the struggle to maintain independence against the pull of motherhood; the tenuous work/life balancing act; the gossamer threads holding family together; the soul-defining nature of caring for children; and the ultimate surrender of finally "getting it."" Illustrating the author's insight, irreverence, and core of inner strength, Show Me the Way is a book for all mothers, and a rewarding conclusion for fans of Jennifer Lauck.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly