How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

By -
How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, by Jancee Dunn

As soon as I heard of this book, I had to have it.  Really, that has got to be one of the best parenting/family-advice book titles of all time.   I had to read it despite the fact that my kids are now teenagers and we have sort of passed the time of small children that this book mostly talks about (and anyway it was still full of good stuff).

Dunn almost comes off as a project author: "I will do X for a year and write a book about it!"  Except, it's not so frivolous; she really did need to spend a year or so working on her marriage and figuring out how to re-negotiate their workloads.  He tended to withdraw and not live up to his part, while she was angry all the time and had a serious yelling problem.

So Dunn tried various things: a marriage counselor who will brutally tell you what's up in one gruelling afternoon, hostage negotiation techniques, and some interesting stuff like that.  She talks about how her marriage improved, and uses that as a springboard to talking about the usual issues: equal chores, getting kids to do chores, money, intimacy, and all that sort of thing.

It is a really, really New Yorky book.  Dunn is a New Yorker and never quite wraps her mind around the possibility that some of her reading audience might not be.  This is a trait of New Yorkers that I find kind of irritating, but it's a general complaint and it's not like the book is ruined.

What I mostly liked was that she really does capture the frustration and yes, rage that I should think nearly all married moms feel every so often.  So I think it's a pretty good read -- one that both women and men can profit by.


Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 30, 2017 at 4:08 PM

    Hahahaha, I apologize on behalf of New Yorkers. They DO do that, and when I was living there I gave it my all not to give in to that instinct. :p

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more