Returning to My Mother’s House, Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine by Gail Straub is a book for us. It is a book for us as women, mothers and daughters to take a journey inside ourselves. As a longing cried out to Gail Straub to take her journey, she cries out to us in her prologue “With all my heart I urge you to fully re-inhabit this house for yourself, for your children and grandchildren, and for our earth. Do this before it is too late.”

She speaks of a house that is who we are, who we still long to be, a house of many rooms and levels, a house similar to one our own mothers lived in before us and one which our daughters will inhabit after us. It is a house which our daughters naturally would long for us to live in to give our lives meaning and for them to learn how to give their lives meaning. It is a house that we’ve lost the key to or abandoned somewhere when we lost our way.

Early on in Returning to My Mother’s House, Gail Straub starts her book with her revelation, after her mother’s death, that “my mother had a whole life before I was even around.” So began a journey with this realization in her twenties that her mother was someone quite different than she thought, she was a real multi-faceted human being. How she wished she could have given a piece of that back to her mother. She recounts wanting to freeze frame her mother in a particular place and time surrounded by her creative tools. The reader immediately does the same if they’ve learned anything about their mother and so begins our journey guided by Gail Straub.

Some journeys are meant to be taken and Gail Straub recounts decades of a journey searching for something she knew was lost. What she found was collected together from pieces of her mother’s life and her own struggles, the same struggles many of us have as women. As someone who works with women Gail learned much about her mother and herself through their stories, much in the same way we will learn something about ourselves and our relationships through her candid sharing.

Returning to My Mother’s House shares not only Gail Straub’s experiences, but a world view of women and their choices. After leaving Bali, her tales of the exuberant Russian women, astonished and quizzical at her choice to be childfree, inspired further travels to China, then Ireland, to learn even more about who we are.

Her well thought out four part journey from living in her mother’s house, to leaving her mother’s house and losing her family, then her search on returning to her mother’s house, ends with a great awakening and peace. The stories shared at the end lead you and somewhere Gail grabs hold of you and you no longer hear longing or cries, it is more a hope you’re left with at having found pieces of yourself along the journey.

Gail Straub is also the author of these self-help books:

Empowerment: The Art of Creating Your Life As You Want It
The Rhythm of Compassion: Caring for Self, Connecting with Society
Circle of Compassion: Meditations for Caring for the Self and the World

For more information on Gail Straub’s work visit her website www.empowermenttraining.com.

Returning to My Mother’s House, Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine by Gail Straub with a foreword by her friend and colleague, Christiane Northrup, M.D. (author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom and Mother-Daughter Wisdom), is available at Amazon and other book sellers, published by High Point and distributed by Chelsea Green Publishing.