Woodhall Press Donates to Charity Every Mother Counts

Alena Dillon and Woodhall Press are proud to donate 10% of profits from sales of My Body Is a Big Fat Temple during October 11-13 to Every Mother Counts, a charitable organization dedicated to decreasing the number of global maternal deaths by improving access to quality and equitable maternity care. Alena Dillon writes about this topic in the chapter "What To Doula," where she defends the importance of doulas in decreasing the maternal mortality rate.

Alena Dillon writes about more issues related to maternal health in My Body Is a Big Fat Temple.

My Body Is A Big Fat Temple, a memoir of pregnancy and early motherhood, follows a writer as she debates having children, miscarries, faces morning sickness, uncertainty, physical impairments, labor, breastfeeding, the “baby blues,” the heartache of not loving her son as she thinks she should, parenting through a plague, until finally (basically, mostly) blossoming into her new identity.

Creating life is a primal phenomenon. It requires grit, resilience, and a lot of bathroom breaks. There are dry heaves and darkened nipples, crotch lightning and brain fuzz, milk stains, sleep regressions, and equal amounts of despair and joy. It's a complicated magic. The undertaking is airbrushed to preserve the ideal of motherhood, and exacerbated by a culture that dictates what women can do and how they should feel. We don’t get the full story, so mothers with unromantic experiences feel like aberrations, and worse, alone. This is why the voices of women matter. The voices of mothers matter. Here’s one to keep you company, and to remind you to do your Kegels. (They’re really important.)