Returning to My Mother's House: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine

Gail Straub had a record of success: foreign exchange student to Paraguay; Peace Corp worker in Africa; co-creator with her husband of Empowerment Training Programs, a business with an international clientele. By the time she was in her thirties, however, she was seeing the "ample underbelly" of success: a life out of balance. Ironically, while she was teaching other people how to achieve their dreams, her own life was in great part motivated by the desire to live her own mother's "unlived life." Regaining proper balance required Straub to examine her relationship with both of her parents and consider how they influenced the choices she had made. In Returning to My Mother's House: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine, Straub describes her journey, both physical, spiritual, and emotional, to reclaim her feminine wisdom and for the first time begin to live her own life. Straub remembers a childhood of "abundant happiness" in a home that was a "creative partnership" between her mother, a former artist, and her father, a teacher and woodcrafter. During those years, her mother was imaginative, loving, and "at home with herself." By the time Straub was in her early teens, however, Jacqueline Straub had become obsessed with fitting into the "upscale conservative society" to which her wealthy neighbors belonged. At this time, says Straub, the "subtle interior compass that guided her was replaced by exterior standards and outer status symbols," and her mother "began to leave her own house." Straub responded to the family's tension over money and her mother's fragile health by retreating with her father into the "rational masculine," denigrating the emotional feminine exemplified by her mother and focusing on achievement--and, in the process, abandoning her own authentic self. Following her mother's premature death, Straub continued to be driven to achieve. She would later see this as an attempt to live out her mother's unfulfilled dreams: both the unconventional (living in a hippie commune) and the conventional (gaining social and economic status). But finally, she crossed the "fine line between passion and workaholism," and became engaged with her partner-husband in "an archetypal power struggle of reason over emotion, sharp insight over diffuse awareness--masculine over feminine." In therapy after her father's death, she came to recognize that in her youthful desire to please him and "the dominant culture he was inextricably linked to," she "had pledged [her] allegiance to the masculine--reason over emotion, doing over being, the universal over the personal..." Cultivating a "conscious relationship with [her] own masculine," she set out on the "journey back to [her] mother." Healing trips to Bali, Russia, China, and Ireland in the company of feminist friends helped her to "reclaim [her] own wisdom and understand [her] mother more fully." Recognizing the "footprints" of her Catholic mother's mysticism, but rejecting the patriarchal church for

On first read, I was jealous that Gail had a mother that at least opened up the idea of the feminine. Growing up with a German heritage in a family dominated by the masculine, the feminine was hard to find. Thanks to this book, after a lifetime of resentment, I can begin to let my mother "off the hook." I can now see that nothing in her lifetime offered her a lifeline to herself. And, more importantly, it showed me how crucial it is for me to pass on to the next generation every possible piece of feminine wisdom I have gathered. I can't wait to read it again!

I was inspired on so many levels. I felt a particular, deep lesson repeating itself, that relieves me from my conscious, deliberate planning of the future. In Gail's reclaiming of her feminine soul, we see how one piece of her life births the next piece of life. It is an uraveling and building of heartfelt, unpredictable steps toward wisdom and grace. She could not have planned or known this staggeringly amazing journey from the beginning. And so, I am clearly reminded of the organic, magical and mysterious path of life and the trust I must have in its unfolding, in absolutely the right way. What a reflief!

I totally love my mom -- in many ways she's my hero -- but nobody presses my buttons the way she does. Reading Gail Straub's book, Returning to My Mother's House, was like a year of therapy for me. Straub weaves together her own story and that of her mother in a way that is both intimate and highly readable. Her life as a global activist is a fascinating story, but what really touched me was how she gradually uncovered the power of her mother's influence, the magnetic pull of a mom's unlived life. Each insight that Straub uncovered seemed to trigger one in me too, and in the days since reading it, I find myself rethinking my relationship with my 80 year-old Mom in ways that I'm hoping will make the ever-smaller time we still have together a little richer. Does this add up to capturing the wisdom of the feminine? That's a big question, but I sense it's nudging me along in that probably lifelong process. This is a book I'm recommending to a lot of my closest friends, and I'm nagging them to read it soon! Cause I can hardly wait to curl up and have a long conversation with them about all the thoughts and feelings it kicked up for me. If you're like me, cherishing your mom yet longing for a very different life, you will love this book.

In her book "Returning to My Mother's House" Gail Straub offers us amazing insight into the importance of linking understanding of life relationships to living a life free from the wounds of the past. Her lyrical writing is an added bonus that makes this a compelling read. Vera Salter Ph.D.