By the Secret Ladder: A Mother's Initiation.

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

There are many books being published in the motherhood genre, and most of them are witty, wry, and biting. They are motherhood books for women who had lucrative careers in arts and media and love to drink specialty coffees from Starbucks. This is not that sort of book.

Frances Greenslade is a university-trained creative writer with a love of myth and meaning. She lives in a 600-square-foot bungalow on the Prairies, and when she takes her son out for a winter walk, she straps him onto a plastic sled. Greenslade is a brilliant, honest, no-nonsense sort of woman whose parenting experience does not include Kindermusik or Gymboree. In By the Secret Ladder, she posits that the journey to motherhood has much in common with the Hero myth, and she shares all the nitty-gritty details of her own travels along that path.

Written in three parts, the book describes Greenslade’s first year of motherhood as the “Hero’s Departure, Initiation, and Return.” Her Departure involved the birth, complications after the birth that resulted in a hysterectomy, and an understanding that her old identity was no longer relevant. This loss of identity was her true Initiation. Greenslade spent some time in isolation, and although she rejects the term “clinical depression,” her feelings of sadness and disconnectedness were definitely all-consuming. She focused on her love for her son, and that love pulled her through to the Return stage, where she came back to herself and began to embrace the world around her once more.

This is a very different sort of mothering book—one that will offer great comfort to intellectual women becoming mothers for the first time. Greenslade’s truthfulness will give these readers a shoulder to lean against, and her resilience will give them hope.