Book Spotlight & Guest Post by Ashley Rae - Author of Not My Mother

Ashley Rae has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and resides with her precious 3 year old in gorgeous Sarasota, FL.  She leads weekend retreats for psychics, kids, and writers, and teaches workshops on using writing as a self-healing tool, developing intuition, and about The Incredible Vagina, which is simply the best title anyone has ever come up with for any class, ever. She is presently working on her second memoir, tentatively titled “Sentence Interrupted: Memoir of a Moody Mama.” Also a professional psychic, energy healer, and a Love-Your-Life Coach, there is plenty to check out on her website at http://AuthorAshleyRae.com.

Not My Mother: A Memoir

Genre: Memoir/Non-Fiction

Release Date: July 13, 2012

By the age of twelve, Ashley Rae had survived incest, child abuse, and the deaths of both her biological parents. Born to Baptists but raised by Buddhists, Rae found peace and healing on a Pagan spiritual path while obtaining her college degree and starting the career of her dreams.

Rae thought the hardships in her life were over...until she lost her job, started a new relationship, and found out she was pregnant with another man's child all in the same week. Terrified of cesarean surgery, Rae vowed to give birth to her child at home – but first, she had to find one.

Alternately haunting, humorous, and heart-warming, Not My Mother: A Memoir follows Rae over a nine-month quest to break her family's generational pattern of abuse and victimhood in order to become for her unborn child the mother she had always wanted for herself.

Excerpt:

From the moment Dad rushed us through the dark living room, too quickly for me to see her body, I'd been looking for my mother.  Even after her funeral in Virginia, I kept looking for my mother.  She came to me in my dreams and told me it had all been a mistake, and she wasn't really dead at all.  I'd wake up and jump out of bed in a hurry to continue our conversation, then freeze and fold in half, hyperventilating as reality hit me.

At twenty-two, I had not yet explored how the violence that I couldn't remember witnessing affected my life and my relationships.  Ike died when I was five.  Mom hated him.  His mom loved him.  I, on the other hand, had never given myself permission to have feelings about this man who'd loved me and killed my mother. Until I saw him staring back at me through my mirror in the flickering light of a white candle.

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 Guest Post.

Topic: Self-Healing for the Wounded Mama

When I was pregnant, I knew that I wanted to be a loving, nurturing, respectful mother.  I was terrified that I would be abusive, like my mother had been, so I set myself on a nine month quest to understand and forgive my mother.  On the way, I learned how to re-parent myself.

I wrote all about that quest in my first book, Not My Mother: A Memoir.  But here, today, I want to focus just on the re-parenting aspect.

Raise your hand if you can vividly remember a time your own mother left you feeling powerless and hurting.

*raises hand

Everyone is raising a hand, right?

Even the best mamas lose their tempers and lash out at some point.  Then, the best mamas realize what they've done, and apologize to the ones they hurt, giving extra nourishment and love to help heal that damage.

Even if our moms didn't do that for us, we can do it for ourselves.  And we can start doing it for our children.

We can relive the most painful memories of our childhood and we can comfort ourselves, the mothers we are today comforting and healing the little girls we once were.

And when we need comforting as adults, we can let Mother Earth cradle us, rock us, soothe us, as She pulls all our fear, anger, guilt, doubt, pain into Her and transmutes it into energy that nourishes us all.

When I was the most depressed and out of control, I didn't feel like a loving mother.  I didn't feel capable of nourishing my child all by myself.  When I caught myself screaming like my mother, or saying something disempowering and cruel to my child, or to myself, I would give myself a time out to breath deeply and calm myself down.  I went outside if I could.  I asked the pure, unconditional love of the Goddess, The Earth Mother, to fill me, heal me, and to use my body to nourish and heal my child.

I didn't call the Goddess into me often, at first.  I felt silly, undeserving.  But I noticed that when I did call Her into me, the bond between my child and I would feel stronger.  My child's mood would mellow out, as would mine.  We'd sleep better, and be more affectionate.

And then I realized that the Sacred Mother had been inside me all along.

I wasn't pulling Her into me from the earth or the moon.  I was finding that spark of unconditional love inside my soul and allowing it to expand until it filled my heart.

Every time I found that place inside myself, the path to it grew shorter and easier to travel.  I used that unconditional love to see my mother as the wounded child that she was, and I felt compassion for her.  I forgave her.  I looked through the eyes of the Mother at the wounded child that I was, and I forgave myself for lashing out, for making mistakes, for hurting myself and my child. 

The Mother within me took the Maiden within me into her arms, cuddled her, rocked her, stroked her hair and wipes tears from her cheeks.  The Mother I was held the broken child I had been and gave her the love and comfort that she deserved.  “I love you,” She whispered.  “You are precious to me.  I'm sorry.  I love you.”

 

Giveaway 

Ashley Rae is also hosting two giveaways! The rafflecopter codes are below if you would like to enter!

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