Terrible Angel: Surviving the First Five Years of Motherhood

By Patricia Hart Clifford

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809131927
• ISBN13: 9780809131921
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Paulist Pr
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.5" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Wonderful, intelligent book on parenting and motherhood

I read this book aloud to my wife in the evenings after we found it at a library book sale. It is poignant, hilarious, melancholy, and insightful. Published by Paulist Press in 1990, it is an excellent example of what engaged, Catholic scholarship on parenting used to be like before the turn to the pedantic. The author incorporates a good amount of psychoanalysis, feminism, and parenting literature as she tells her own account of what it is like to experience the work of motherhood, and she leads the reader to encounter a series of problems without demanding that the reader forego critical reflection. Even if one is not Catholic, one can benefit from her experience and her realistic struggle with identity and with hoping to benefit her child. This book is for all parents I think (not just mothers), but it nicely complements later works on motherhood by figures such as Julia Kristeva and earlier works by Edith Stein, Melanie Klein and D. W. Winnicott.