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| Category: Family | |
| About the Book | |
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My
Mother's Apron is about coping, caring, love and parent-child
relationships and ultimately- the survival of the human spirit in
the face of unusually dark adversity. It's about care providing, doing
what needs to be done to provide the necessary care-complete with
all the associated head and lifestyle changes, and how one writer/teacher
found her way through it. The picture painted here shows the incredible
strength found in the triumph of the human spirit coming through the
natural instinct to survive when turmoil wreaks havoc-running rampantly
unchecked throughout a life for a prolonged period of time. The writer
of My Mother's Apron, Jeanann Rader, has chosen humor
for her survival defense mechanism when life threw curveballs her
way. Here, Ms Rader describes the extraordinary love and care found
at the core of a large Italian family. In My Mother's Apron, we find a professional who has been uprooted from her life as an Educational Sales Consultant to return home to care for her mother who is terminally ill with Breast Cancer. She has left her job and moved 600 miles home to Penns Grove, N. J., to the house where she grew up to care-provide for her dying mother-who is not your normal run-of-the-mill mom. Instead, Jeanann Rader portrays her mother as being rascally with an off-the-wall personality that sustained nearly everyone to the conclusion of her three-year transition. Later care provision expanded to include her father who died seven years later. After a total of 11 years of care providing the author is left suddenly alone and wondering what happened as there is both nothing and everything to do simultaneously. There is a lot of laughter and love found in each short story, painting a portrait of unusual hilarity in the zany antics found within the confines of this family. Each story was written years later when her father was engulfed in major illness, and the author was again called upon to care provide. She refers to My Mother's Apron as her "Refuge" -- the alternative to the anguish of loosing another parent. After her father overheard laughter one night as she sat writing, the cat was out-of-the-bag. Then, she brought each story to him, and they both laughed together. It proved to be a beneficial healing for them both. Therefore, Ms Rader explains that her stories have already served a primary purpose of controlling the focus brought to remembrances of our departed loved ones. We can dwell on unhappy experiences or jump over those deliberately to happier times by choosing experiences to remember. How we recall our loved ones is not just simply how they in fact really lived their lives, but also, how we choose to think about them once they're gone. In addition to laughter, cooking and good food were key aspects of her mother's Italian heritage. As an additional celebration of both of her parent's lives, Ms. Rader includes delicious treasured family recipes at the end of each chapter. In My Mother's Apron, we're privileged to peer into a mind on tumultuous overdrive, beset with life and death choices where the final choice is life and it's infinitely innumerably potentially pleasurable experiences. My Mother's Apron shows what can happen during the worst of times when you choose to remember the best of times!
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| About the Author | |
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Jeanann Rader lives in Penns Grove, N. J. She has worked as a teacher for the last 11 years at Camden County College, Blackwood, N. J. where she presented Adult Basic English Writing and Reading Skills. She is also affilliated with Educational Testing Services, ETS, in Princeton, N. J. grading various tests. She also worked for the New Jersey Board of Higher Education, and as an Educational Sales Consultant for Arista and later the Prentice Hall Division of Simon and Schuster Publishers. She completed her undergraduate studies at Rowan University and did graduate work at Rutgers University. My Mother's Apron is her first book. |