COVER REVEAL! My Memoir, The Mother Code

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I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life to share this cover with you. And in some ways I have.

I’ve been writing parts of this book for decades and it’s taken many forms. Scraps of paper in various notebooks. Emails to myself. Files on long-dead computers. Meanderings that will never see the light of day. Some of it flowed out of me as if I wasn’t the one writing it at all. Some of it felt like an unearthing, an excavation, as if I’d need to remove my heart and place it on the table in front of me to make it so.

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This version of this book started in 2020. I remember the night clearly. It was December. I woke up after midnight and went to my computer. In my sleepy haze I knew I was writing a book and I knew the exact scene that would open its pages. I left myself a note on my desk and in the morning I typed out everything that was in my head. Looking back I laugh at that version of myself. That version of me needed to believe that those scribbles were the opening scene of my book. Don’t tell her that there would be dozens of other opening scenes before the book would be finished. It doesn’t matter. That December night was a beginning. And now I’m here with a finished book I’m hoping you all will want to read.

People ask me how long it took me to write this book. Five years, I want to say. But a lifetime would be just as true.

This is not a book about a woman who knew what she wanted and went after it. It’s not a linear story. Or an easy one. Or even one with a happy ending. It’s a story of a life just like so many others. It’s a story that’s about so many things.

I could tell you it’s about not being sure I wanted to be a mother and then realizing I did. And that would be true. I could tell you it’s about not wanting to pass on the generational curse I believed lived in my DNA and that would be true too. I could tell you it’s about love lost and found and lost again. But it’s really a book about how I struggled to understand my deepest desires. About how I heard the voices of what everyone else wanted for me, but could no longer know what I wanted for myself. It’s about how women are rewarded for people-pleasing and pretzeling until they no longer know who they are, only what everyone else wants them to be. It’s about how I wanted to know who I could be and what I could achieve outside of marriage and motherhood, but I had a hard time finding role models for what a “good life” could look like.

I believed this was a failure of my imagination, but now I understand that it’s a failure of our collective imaginations.

I’m so grateful that I get to share this book with you. I’m so grateful to my community of friends and loved ones who cheered me on and talked me through.

I hope you’ll preorder my book. And share it with someone else who needs it right now. Preorders are one of the only ways authors like me who aren’t famous influencers or celebs have a chance of getting on a bestseller list.

Thank you for reading, thank you for buying, thank you for sharing. This is only the beginning and I am deeply excited to begin this journey of collective processing, sharing, and celebrating.

XO,

Ruthie

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