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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, there is plenty to check out on her
website at http://AuthorAshleyRae.com.
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Not My Mother: A Memoir
Genre: Memoir/Non-Fiction
Release Date: July 13, 2012
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 Memoir
follows 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.
Buy Links:
Amazon
/ Barnes & Noble / Smashwords
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Guest Post.
Topic: Self-Healing for the Wounded Mama
When I was pregnant, I knew that I wanted to be a loving,
nurturing, respectful mother. I was
terrified that I would be abusive, like my mother had been, so I set myself on
a nine month quest to understand and forgive my mother. On the way, I learned how to re-parent
myself.
I wrote all about that quest in my first book, Not My
Mother: A Memoir. But here, today, I
want to focus just on the re-parenting aspect.
Raise your hand if you can vividly remember a time your own
mother left you feeling powerless and hurting.
*raises hand
Everyone is raising a hand, right?
Even the best mamas lose their tempers and lash out at some
point. Then, the best mamas realize what
they've done, and apologize to the ones they hurt, giving extra nourishment and
love to help heal that damage.
Even if our moms didn't do that for us, we can do it for
ourselves. And we can start doing it for
our children.
We can relive the most painful memories of our childhood and
we can comfort ourselves, the mothers we are today comforting and healing the
little girls we once were.
And when we need comforting as adults, we can let Mother
Earth cradle us, rock us, soothe us, as She pulls all