ROSENBERG, Debra Gilbert

PERSONAL: Married Alan Rosenberg; children: Jill, Lynn, Mark. Education: Smith College, A.B., 1974; University of Chicago, A.M., 1980.

ADDRESSES: Home—1206 North Kenilworth Ave., Oak Park, IL 60302. E-mail—debra@momscompanion. com.

CAREER: Licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist. Lectures and conducts workshops on parenting issues and teaches sociology at the college level; coordinator of a discussion and support group for new mothers, 1989—.

WRITINGS:

(With Mary Sue Miller) The New Mom's Companion:Care for Yourself while You Care for Your Newborn, Sourcebooks (Naperville, IL), 2003.

Motherhood without Guilt: Being the Best Mother YouCan Be and Feeling Great about It, Sourcebooks (Naperville, IL), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Debra Gilbert Rosenberg brought extensive experience as a clinical social worker and counselor to her first book, The New Mom's Companion: Care for Yourself While You Care for Your Newborn. Rosenberg has lectured on parenting issues—her speaking engagements have included the Parent's Journal on National Public Radio—and enjoyed a successful career as a psychotherapist to individuals and families. For thirteen years she ran a support group for new mothers. With Mary Sue Miller, Rosenberg wrote a manual for women who have recently given birth that emphasized the mother's psychological well-being as well as that of her child.

In an interview with Laura Stuart for the magazine Chicago Parent, Rosenberg discussed her motivations for writing on the topic of new motherhood, which she stated stem from her own personal difficulties after experiencing childbirth, as well as those of the women in her motherhood support group. "It's three a.m. and the baby's crying. You adore this child, but you also want to throw her out the window, and you worry, is this normal? Yes, it's normal. New moms walk a tightrope. It's o.k. to admit that sometimes it's difficult, but you also don't want to forget that it's really wonderful, too." Rosenberg told Stuart, "If you look for books about motherhood, you find ones about breastfeeding and taking care of the baby, or books by journalists who became moms and write about their own stories. What I wanted—and what I wrote—is a book like Dr. Spock about being a new mom."

Rosenberg and Miller's The New Mom's Companion was reviewed in Library Journal by Mirela Roncevic, who compared it with the classic text What to Expect When You're Expecting in concept. Roncevic felt that the text is "a bit rushed" and found the question and answer format "difficult" to navigate as a reference but concluded that the book could provide a "diversion" for mothers-to-be and new mothers. Chicago Parent's Alena Marguia, however, noted that the book's format made "it a wonderful resource for a mom with a specific worry," and found that the author's tone "reassures readers throughout." Rosenberg, for her part, seems to have intended her text to be both broadly appealing and intensely personal. "Motherhood changed many of my friendships, my attitudes about work, my sense of myself as a woman, just about everything that made me me," she writes on her Web site. "The New Mom's Companion was written to help all first-time mothers adjust to becoming a mother, whether you are the first or fourteenth among your circle to have a baby, whether you are twenty-two or forty-two, whether you live next door to your mother or a thousand miles away. It's for any new mother with questions about mothering. It's not about the baby; it's about you."

Rosenberg told CA: "I'm a clinical social worker by training. As a psychotherapist, I am the person who helps others, and my family life, my own personality and preferences are largely invisible. I am always in an intimate, but one-way relationship with others. My clients, after working on their issues, sharing their feelings and experiences, learn to understand themselves, feel better, and deal with their own life concerns, and then they move on in their own lives. My personal life is largely kept separate.

"In addition to being a psychotherapist, I have also led discussion groups for first-time mothers since 1989, and I knew that mothers needed a book that addressed how they can deal with their own transition to motherhood, not just volume upon volume of books about how to care for their babies. I had never really thought of myself as a writer before, but I knew that I needed to write this particular book.

"So writing a book for and about first-time mothers was an altogether different experience for me. The writing itself was very solitary, and the material was very personal. I loved putting my thoughts on paper. I loved trying to find the best way to convey an idea, to share individual experiences and express the nearly universal but often unspoken feelings a woman has when her identity shifts as a result of becoming a mother.

"Being able to write the book I wished I had when my first child was born was immensely rewarding. I could include all the issues I knew, from both personal and professional experience, that most women experience when they become mothers for the first time. It was tremendously satisfying to organize my thoughts, lay everything out, and be able to offer new mothers what was unavailable to me. I hope that The New Mom'sCompanion: Care for Yourself while You Care for Your Newborn offers first-time mothers all the support and advice they need while adjusting to the emotional, physical, and relationship changes motherhood demands.

"Becoming a published writer has been wonderful and surprising in a few ways. I have been delighted how supportive friends and colleagues have been. People in my life seem tremendously enthusiastic and impressed. They have also begun sharing their own stories, their desires to write themselves. I have become closer to people with whom I had previously had rather superficial relationships.

"The best part of getting my book published, though, was the experience of following through with a dream. Once I thought about writing this book, I was driven to make it a reality. I could nearly see and feel this book; I knew I had to do this, in a way I've rarely felt about anything before this. It took years from the moment I decided to write this book to seeing it sitting on a shelf in a bookstore. I had to deal with numerous rejections and disappointments along the way, but I stuck to it and got it published. It was worth every day of self-doubt. And now I'm about to have a second book published, Motherhood without Guilt: Being the Best Mother You Can Be and Feeling Great about It, in 2004. Writing is hard, isolating work, but when it's what you want to do, when you have something you have to say, there's nothing else like it. You have to do it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, May 1, 2003, Mirela Ronceric, review of The New Mom's Companion: Care for Yourself while You Care for Your Newborn.

Marriage Magazine, September-October, 2003, review of The New Mom's Companion, p. 41.

ONLINE

Chicago Parent,http://www.chicagoparent.com/ (August, 2003), Laura Stuart, interview with Debra Rosenberg; (September, 2003), Alena Marguia, review of The New Mom's Companion.

Debra Rosenberg Home Page,http://www.debrarosenberg.com (March 28, 2004).