Spotlight: Not My Mother : A Memoir by Ashley Rae

 

By the age of twelve, Ashley Rae had survived incest, child abuse, and the deaths of both her biological parents. Born to Baptists but raised by Buddhists, Rae found peace and healing on a Pagan spiritual path while obtaining her college degree and starting the career of her dreams.

Rae thought the hardships in her life were over…until she lost her job, started a new relationship, and found out she was pregnant with another man’s child all in the same week. Terrified of cesarean surgery, Rae vowed to give birth to her child at home – but first, she had to find one.

Alternately haunting, humorous, and heart-warming, Not My Mother: A Memoirfollows Rae over a nine-month quest to break her family’s generational pattern of abuse and victimhood in order to become for her unborn child the mother she had always wanted for herself.

Excerpt:

From the moment Dad rushed us through the dark living room, too quickly for me to see her body, I'd been looking for my mother. Even after her funeral in Virginia, I kept looking for my mother. She came to me in my dreams and told me it had all been a mistake, and she wasn't really dead at all. I'd wake up and jump out of bed in a hurry to continue our conversation, then freeze and fold in half, hyperventilating as reality hit me.At twenty-two, I had not yet explored how the violence that I couldn't remember witnessing affected my life and my relationships. Ike died when I was five. Mom hated him. His mom loved him. I, on the other hand, had never given myself permission to have feelings about this man who'd loved me and killed my mother. Until I saw him staring back at me through my mirror in the flickering light of a white candle.

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About the Author:

Ashley Rae has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida and resides with her precious 3 year old in gorgeous Sarasota, FL. She leads weekend retreats for psychics, kids, and writers, and teaches workshops on using writing as a self-healing tool, developing intuition, and about The Incredible Vagina, which is simply the best title anyone has ever come up with for any class, ever. She is presently working on her second memoir, tentatively titled “Sentence Interrupted: Memoir of a Moody Mama.” Also a professional psychic, energy healer, and a Love-Your-Life Coach.

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