Review - Tales from the Pantry: Random Rants & Musings of a Stay-At-Home-Mum by Shari Owen Brown

Tales from the Pantry: Random Rants & Musings of a Stay-At-Home Mom by Shari Owen Brown
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

ebook, 188 pages

Published September 19th 2011 by Estep & Fitzgerald (first published September 12th 2011)

Synopsis:
'"Tales From the Pantry: Random Rants & Musings of a Stay-at-home Mom" is a collection of witty, funny, and sometimes gut-wrenching stories told by a 40-something mother of two small children. Based upon the popular blog 'Don't Make Me Count to Three!', Shari Owen Brown uses humor to navigate the daily slings and arrows of motherhood. Many parents can relate to the often unspoken challenges of child rearing. And for those who have yet to have children...consider yourself warned! Shari found herself the last of her friends to have children and was then SHOCKED to discover all of the lies she had been told! Why hadn't anybody mentioned these things before?!! It was like a secret club of parents who dared not tell the truth or else none of their friends would have children, leaving them all alone in their own private nightmare! Shari blows the lid off of these unspoken challenges & discusses daily life in a funny and entertaining way that still manages to speak the truth. It is a great outlet for parents to laugh at themselves through Shari, and realize that they are not alone or crazy (well, maybe just a little!) for feeling the way that they do.'

My Thoughts:
I started off really wanting to like this book because I'd heard so many positive things about it and read a lot of reviews where women said they literally laughed out loud while reading it. Unfortunately, I just didn't feel the same connection to this book when I was reading it.
Don't get me wrong, it certainly had some funny bits and some 'yep, been there!' bits, but I just wasn't that enthralled with reading about some other woman's trials and tribulations while she brought up her two young children.
Firstly, I should have known I wouldn't connect with this book because I'm not a Stay At Home Mum. I went back to work part time when my little man was 10 weeks old because the monotony of being at home day in and day out with a small baby was doing my head in after working in a demanding professional role for years and years and I needed that stimulation back in my life. Shari is a full-time Stay At Home Mum, and although I don't have anything against women who do this as it's a personal choice, it's not something I can relate to or ever have seen myself doing. For some reason the stresses and insanely hard moments I encountered at home with my baby never really seemed so bad because I had my little escape at work to counter-balance it all.
Also, I'm very lucky to have a very 'hands-on' husband who helped out with pretty much everything when our boy was first born. He still does now so I never felt that lonely, helpless or utterly frustrated as Shari obviously did because the responsibility was and still is always shared between us as much as possible. I guess this essentially makes our life in general that much easier and makes us more of a team so the unpleasant bits are shared instead of just falling completely on my shoulders.
I'm certainly not saying that my life has been perfect since having our boy, but I've never felt that I'm purely defined as just a 'mother' because I've managed to keep most of my previous outside interests as well as my career. I have a happy medium going on and this probably makes me not concentrate so much on all the downsides of having a baby like the author of this book does.
To me this book was a bit like 'Mother's Group' in written form. Considering I only lasted two sessions with my Mother's Group before I'd had enough of listening to the constant whingeing and complaining, this book definitely was not for me.
If you are a mum who enjoys listening to another woman complain about everything there is to do with motherhood, you will thoroughly enjoy this book. If you think motherhood is just another life experience that is to be enjoyed and tackled like any other, you will probably be as disappointed with it as I was.

Links:
Amazon: Tales From the Pantry: Random Rants & Musings of a Stay-at-Home Mom