UnboundCONTENT. USA. 
July 2017. Buy it here.

Parenting is both a natural and an acquired trait. On the one hand, adults seek to be, if not "perfect," then "ideal" nurturers of children. On the other hand, the complexities of raising children often cause care providers to adjust role expectations and to neglect other duties.

From overflowing diapers to adolescent dilemmas, from inter-sibling sauciness to the surrender of careers for reasons of focusing days and nights on wee darlings, and from the joy of discovering that progeny are emerging as lawyers, environmentalists, bankers, and clerics, all before naptime, to the alarming revelation that some of those same sons and daughters are aspiring (gasp!) to become writers, parenting enriches. It's of no small consequence that after years of being peed on, spit up upon, and drooled over, moms and dads graduate to emotional meltdowns, dramatic accusations, and plain ‘ol funk. Parenting is an uneven process.

In validation, Mothers Ought to Utter Only Niceties illuminates the throes of raising infants, children, teens, and young adults. This poetry collection documents parents as they wibble, wobble, fall down, and start all over again, while concurrently urging their boys and girls to grow up. Accordingly, this book reveals "How the Next Generation Succumbed to the End of Morality," why kids are often found with "Frozen Green Beans on Their Faces," and how difficult, familial moments can wrap well if only care providers hold to "Simple Miracles" or make a point of disregarding "Jukebox Juries."

Sure, at times, broods leave parents "Empty of Meaningful Intelligence," "Social Evolutions" makes parents unwilling censors of children's information byways, and all of that fuss over the next generation causes parents to forget their "Brandy and Cheer," and "Pillow Talk's Expediency." Fortunately, most moms and dads eventually stay awake long enough to return to that which brought about parenthood and eventually are again well served by their partners' "Hushed, Stealthy Looks." Even with boom boxes blearing, lamps crashing, and children elsewise acting childish, most adults learn to stop worrying about "Keeping Hedgehogs Trim via Liberal Politics," "Plastic Surgery," and "Reckoning with Trauma."

Parents are fortunate of folks. In seventy earnest bites, Mothers Ought to Utter Only Niceties rightly celebrates their amazingly vacillating universe.

Mothers Ought to Utter Only Niceties

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: The Warrior's Mother
1. Charif Mamas
1.1 There's a Seam
1.2 The Zebra Hoof Beats of Buttercup Boys
1.3 Nutritional Inconveniences
1.4 Alphabetical Trails
1.5 Baby Spits Peas
1.6 For Ezra: Familial Wishes for a New Nighttime Traveler
1.7 My Daughter Bangs Pot lids
1.8 Simple Miracles
1.9 Baby's Friends
1.10 But Loving You
1.11 Milk Moments
1.12 Three Haikus for Childhood
1.13 Parenting's Saxophone Smiles
1.14 Watching Raindrops Dance
1.15 Natural Balance
1.16 The Effect of Cumin on Mankind Can't Replace Pop-Pop
1.17 Daddy's Ankle Biters' Extravagance
1.18 Then the Wind Brings
1.19 Bird Wonder
1.20 Among Seaweed
1.21 Heart-Felt Festival

2. Formative Growth
2.1 Education before Marriage
2.2 Vitreous Recollections: That Summer's Glaze
2.3 Holidays' Fallibility
2.4 Song of Oenomelian
2.5 Older Girls Ought Not, as Spinsters
2.6 Social Evolution
2.7 Four Haikus for Adolescence
2.8 A Sixty Year-Old Woman Peels Potatoes
2.9 How the Next Generation Succumbed to the End of Morality
2.10 Germane Adolescents
2.11 Changes in Field Experiments
2.12 Permutations which Transform
2.13 Empty of Meaningful Intelligence
2.14 Frozen Green Beans on Your Face
2. Formative Growth Cont.
2.15 "Like" is Because
2.16 Natural Progressions
2.17 Day-old Cakes
2.18 Not of Small Value
2.19 Twined, We Two, Tenderly
2.20 Hearts' Preamble
2.21 Halfway to Naked

3. Older Significances
3.1 Subduing Dilettantes of Human Behavior
3.2 Beginning with a Medley of Root Vegetables
3.3 Windfall Fruit
3.4 Brandy and Cheer
3.5 Amidst Texts
3.6 Pillow Talk's Expediency
3.7 Gentle Spray
3.8 Your Hushed, Stealthy Looks
3.9 Your Warm Stomach
3.10 Even Linda Ronstadt Grew a Chin
3.11 All those Nooks and Crannies
3.12 Not Entirely becoming Grandma
3.13 Plastic Surgery
3.14 Exposition's Heart-Felt Blushes
3.15 Harmony's Third Chord
3.16 All of the Wisdom that is a Grey Cat's
3.17 Peaches Merit
3.18 Love Canard
3.19 Jukebox Jury
3.20 Keeping Imaginary Hedgehogs Trim via Liberal Politics
3.21 Accounts Due: Reckoning with Trauma
Conclusion: The Three Dimensions of Decision-making
Credits
About the Author