Sweet and Sour: Womanly Thoughts

© KJ Hannah Greenberg, 2021

Sweet and Sour: Womanly Thoughts
Seashell Books, USA
Apr. 2021. Buy it Here

In seventy literary bites, Sweet and Sour: Womanly Thoughts invites readers to explore the complex roles of females. This book celebrates moms’ ability to simultaneously: mop carpets, diaper doll bottoms, chop beans, and actualize professional jobs. As well, this book regards, jadedly, some of the conventions surrounding womenfolk’s socially prescribed limits.

This assemblage is meant to be provocative. It is a collection of frankly noisy notions at the same time as it is a rationale for ordering more chips and dips, for triaging one’s inflatable swimming pools, and for weighing the utility of papier-mâché parrots. Sweet and Sour: Womanly Thoughts makes readers scold their supervisors while simultaneously wishing to be elsewhere, hugging their children. It is a peppery itch without the relief of a rub. Above all, this assemblage is an invitation to engage in critical thinking.

Sweet and Sour: Womanly Thoughts intentionally stomps around uncomfortable topics, dares to engage, to enrage, and to otherwise trigger emotions. For instance, this work describes The Middle East’s history of disputed real estate with the same nonchalance with which it refers to the availability of affordable, herbal galactagogues. What’s more, Sweet and Sour: Womanly Thoughts as readily bemoans excessive teen energies as it does adults’ over-reliance on electronic devices. Basically, this book does not shy away from prickly positions and it does not recoil from edifying ones. Sweet and Sour: Womanly Thoughts shovels collective cow dung into double dug rows for the express purpose of agitating, viz., for the express purpose of catalyzing new questions.

Preface
Introduction: Growth, Plain and Fancy

1. Babies and Children’s Assurances
1.1 Verbal Snapshots
1.2 Those Days of Milk and Honey
1.3 All Manner of Sunshine
1.4 Typicalities
1.5 Family Theatre: Shopping with Kids’ Store Gift Cards
1.6 A Bushel of Tomatoes: Produce and Matronly Common Sense
1.7 Homing Instincts
1.8 Welcoming Kids Back Home
1.9 A New School Year
1.10 Every Child as Valid
1.11 To Scar or Not to Scar
1.12 The Volleyball of Claiming to be Unabashedly Sentimental about Other People’s Children
1.13 Social Prestidigitation and Teens
1.14 Crazy Baby Vibes
1.15 Only One Minute, Please
1.16 Schedules and Other Laughable Matters

2 Adolescents’ Assurances
2.1 Suddenly Teens
2.2 Height
2.3 The Goat Yoghurt Story
2.4 The Pleasantness of Teenagers: Two Perspectives
2.5 Relationships as Achievement; Two Views on Turning Eighteen (with Rivka Gross)
2.6 Communication Sensibilities
2.7 Refocusing Adolescent Hostilities
2.8 Further Reflections
2.9 And So On: “Importance” as a Relative Commodity
2.10 A Singular Definition
2.11 No Parental Disgrace in Assigning Teens Household Chores
2.12 Running from Dust Bunnies and Other Sporting Competitions: A Brief Aside
2.13 Honesty
2.14 Trading Places: Two Views (with Rivka Gross)
2.15 Driving Lessons
2.16 Driving Attitudes
2.17 Linoleum and Larceny

3. Internalized Assurances
3.1 Stone Women Groove Park Geese
3.2 The Heuristic Value of Name-Calling
3.3 Mama Wombats
3.4 Overtired Teens and Cranky Moms
3.5 Grief
3.6 The Souls and the Folding Table
3.7 Literally Styling Mama
3.8 Cellphones, Electronic Gate Keys, and Automatic Automobile Keypads
3.9 Running off from Resolutions
3.10 Some Observations on Cultural Chauvinism
3.11 Guard Your Life
3.12 My F-Word
3.13 Today is Not Too Late
3.14 Further Liberation
3.15 Tunnels: A Parable
3.16 Release
3.17 Living between Heaven and Earth

4. Externalized Assurances
4.1 Tree Fruit and Gym Nuts
4.2 Of Kitchens, Conventions, and Other “Cookery”
4.3 Mirror
4.4 Pathologies
4.5 Alternative Health Care
4.6 Home Birthing
4.7 Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll
4.8 Breasts, Ear Lobes and Bellybuttons
4.9 Busted; Rhetorically “Out of Order”
4.10 Assisted Living
4.11 Possibilities, Disappointments and Realities
4.12 Bronchitis, Bacterial Complications and Bigger Perspectives
4.13 Herbal Remedies for Body and Soul
4.14 Homemade First Aid
4.15 One Fewer Chocolate Cordial
4.16 Needled
4.17 Exhaling

Conclusion: Tweaking the Family Vibe
Credits
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
KJ Hannah Greenberg’s Other Books