The Second Nine Months: One Woman Tells the Real Truth about Becoming a Mom. Finally.
The Second Nine Months: One Woman Tells the Real Truth about Becoming a Mom. Finally.
Finally, one mother gives the unvarnished truth about those first months, from the worry over whether you’re bonding, to the suspicion that you’re the only woman on earth who lacks the “maternal gene.” Funny and brutally honest, Glembocki lets new moms know they’re not alone and reassures them that when someone coos, “Aren’t you just loving every minute?” it’s perfectly normal to think: “No, actually, I’m not!”
And you and your child will still turn out just fine.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars the second nine months
Great personal account of the second nine months! Definitely made me realize that my feelings are normal 
4 Stars Funny!
I heard an interview on Sirius radio with this author and had to buy the book. Of course, it’s a bit tongue and cheek. She goes for shock value, but the underlying message rang true with me. Having a baby rocked my world - in both positive and negative ways. It was a rough start for me. C-section, major reactions to the drugs, daughter in the NICU. Coming home she did not sleep for more than 20 minute stretches, was colicky, it was the dead of winter in Iowa, stuck in the house….it was ROUGH! Two years later I’m reading this book cracking up. Definitely some good truths to it, but in a funny presentation.
3 Stars Does Your Experience Compare?
My wife and I had a baby boy just about ten months ago. It was a first for both of us and was a dramatic experience, without question. The latter months of the pregnancy were more difficult than expected and the delivery was a tough one. But, hey, the kid weighed in at 9 pounds, 9 ounces and it was a vaginal birth! My wife should get a medal!
In any case, our lives since the birth have undergone a radical change. There was the crying, the poop problem and sleep deprivation, to mention only a few things. However, I guess we had a real easy time of it. There were no medical difficulties, either at birth or thereafter. All checkups were totally positive. The feeding sessions gradually grew farther and farther apart and it wasn’t but about four months until he was sleeping the whole night in his own room. He only cried for a few reasons: he was hungry, he was soiled or he was tired. That’s about it. Pretty boring, I guess. Oh yes, he was a happy, bright and alert kid who smiled and laughed a lot and everyone loved being around him. We took him everywhere and never had problems, except for the amount of attention he gathered. We referred to him as the “Gerber Baby.” My wife and I had a lot of adjusting to do, that’s for sure, but the “second nine months” were a very positive experience.
In the past several days (my wife is in Alabama at a doll conference, and I’m taking care of Junior), I read “The Second Nine Months” by Vicki Glembocki. It’s a somewhat depressing book. A real downer. Poor Vicki with all the problems her little daughter presented. The “first five months” in her naration was rather compelling reading and I was so thankful that our child somehow escaped or had only minimal difficulties as compared to those chronicled by her. Oh, my wife suffered some depression, we both had the uneasy feeling that we might be inadequate as parents and the “natural feeding” thing gradually gave way to formula feeding. There were minor guilt feelings. But, all and all, there just weren’t any major problems and the little one became more of a delight day by day.
The second half of the book trails off into a somewhat uninteresting series of anecdotes about coping with her little girl in a variety of situations with the help of her friends, husband, relatives and daycare. Here and there the book is humorous and a few laughs are welcome relief. Vicki’s style of humor is one of exaggerations and it wears a bit thin after a while. I suspect Vicki’s story telling and writing style is also one of exaggeration, but perhaps this is unkind.
It’s an interesting book and an easy read. It’s subtitled as “the real truth.” Perhaps so, but it doesn’t fit our own experiences except in a very limited way. I suppose every baby presents it’s own unique tale. Perhaps I should write up our experiences, but I suspect they would be too boring for compelling reading. If you’re a new parent, I would suggest reading this book after “the next nine months” and looking backward, not before. Then read and compare your own experiences. Maybe you compare. Maybe you don’t. Hopefully, your experiences are much more like ours.
Gary Peterson
5 Stars Excellent!
I read this book and it was excellent. I thought it was truthful and hysterical. I was so happy that she had the courage to share her story and not sugar coat anything.
Motherhood is not a picnic and she did a great job expressing her true emotions its not like most parenting books its reality.
4 Stars An Interesting & Worthwhile View into One Mom’s Turned-Upside-Down World
Let me say first: I’m so glad that Vicki wrote this book. Like the others of this genre that I’ve read in the past couple of years since I had my first child, Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers and A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, it adds to a reassurance of sorts that I’m not utterly alone. And that’s what I’m looking for really.
Before I had children, the closest thing I had to exposure of mothers and babies consisted of those things you witness in a store. And there’s usually two kinds of mothers (with a small fraction falling in between, and thus being less-noticeable) - the ones that are flogging overtired screaming kids at a time when any reasonable mother would have their child in bed, and you’re thinking “Oh, poor kid, I am SO not going to be *that* kind of mother.” And then there are these placid-looking women, their hair is done, they wear make-up and pretty (clean) clothes, and everything their kids say, they respond to with a sentence that ends in a high lilt. I don’t suppose I really thought I’d be that kind of mom, but since I’ve had children, I’ve wondered, are these women really as happy and engrossed as the lilt would have you believe, or is it just part of the social we’re-in-public script?
I’ve wondered how many women enter parenthood, having all their lives been utterly prepared to be independent, feminist, autonomous beings, only to have no preparation at all for the realities of motherhood?
As evidenced by the birth and rearing of my second child, preparation for the for the absolute worst case scenario can allow you to enjoy having any child-rearing situation that is the exception. Our first was 2 weeks sleepy, 5 months colicky (8-10 hour screaming spells. daily). Our second, though I expected her to be the same, was an entirely different - though not blissfully easy - baby. But I was prepared, and overall was better able to cope with the difficulties she presented (like when she developed eosinophilic proctocolitis at 4 months of age and began pooping blood).
So, unlike many of the terrified readers of this book, I think it should be mandatory pre-childbirth reading. I wish I had read this *before* having kids. Like my dad always said (almost jokingly, mind you), “Keep your expectations low and you’ll rarely be disappointed.” I mean, if you go into this whole venture knowing that you might not sleep for 5 months, that the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding contains only one true statement - and that’s the title - and by the way, that some of just don’t have what it takes to be great ‘artists’ - And if you know that babies sometimes don’t just cry, they scream and scream and scream until your brain feels like its been in a blender, and you don’t remember your own name, and you find yourself browsing the refrigerator when you intended to go pee, and you can’t remember just how long you’ve been sitting there staring at that bottle of ketchup not understanding what you’re seeing, and then… wait, what was I supposed to be doing again? When your life is turned freaking upside down, you can comfort yourself by saying you knew this could happen, and it isn’t like a meteor dropped out of the sky and blasted everything you thought you knew and understood about the world out of existence. Maybe it could prevent that massive train wreck of disappointment, inadequacy, and self-loathing when all the sometimes-half-truths you read in the Sears’ books turn out to have no relevance to you or your current situation.
So, I think that in a world where we don’t communicate ‘real’ things as often as we should, that a book which lays out one woman’s truth for all to pick apart and critique and maybe glean some profound new knowledge of motherhood from - whether it’s applicable to your own situation or not - is an act of bravery and kindness to all women. I know that I still censor myself in daily conversations, and that I’ve avoided altogether writing about my experiences as a mother because I simply don’t have the confidence to overcome the inevitable negative comments and blatant judgments (i.e. Vicki would have bonded with her baby if only she’d had a midwife) that this account of mothering and others like it draw.
So, why did I give it only four stars?
I wish I’d read it sooner. There were things in the book that didn’t ‘click’ for me, because of differences in viewpoints, parenting styles, and there are certain parts of the book where Vicki portrays her attitude as being really cavalier on a number of occasions. I’m not sure if this is how she actually felt or what was conveyed by her style of writing and the distance she had from her situation when she began writing.
Too, I couldn’t relate to virtually anything in the second half of the book. I’ve never gone back to work. And, in spite of my reservations about allowing the whole breastfeeding, co-sleeping, stay-at-home-mom thing (and all the many many details of trying to attain perfection in that area) rule my entire existence, they are things which for all practically purposes have swallowed the person I used to be an spat her out in some murky form I don’t recognize or know what to do with. So maybe I’m a little envious of Vicki’s release from a good percentage of the day-to-day drudgery and repetition of motherly duties, and her ability to find herself again. I don’t think this works out so quickly for stay-at-home-moms. Or maybe I’m wrong and the rest of them are ‘loving every minute of it’
In any case, I certainly wouldn’t write the book off just because you, as a reader, might not agree with or understand every moment of it. The truths and the honesty it contains are worth far more than these small differences.
Filed under: Parenting Advice Book Reviews