The Pond Beyond the Forest
eBook - ePub

The Pond Beyond the Forest

Reflections on Childhood Trauma and Motherhood

  1. 239 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Pond Beyond the Forest

Reflections on Childhood Trauma and Motherhood

About this book

For fans of Stephanie Foo’s What My Bones Know, a memoir of a middle-aged Japanese immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her teenage son and save her marriage when she finds herself triggered by memories of her own childhood trauma as he enters adolescence.

At age twenty-two, Shigeko Ito immigrated to America to escape Japan’s rigid society and a neglectful childhood home that landed her in a mental hospital at seventeen. She thrived in her new, healthier environment and thought her traumatic past was all behind her. 

Until it wasn’t.

Motherhood, she realized, was far more challenging than she could have ever imagined. But it was her son’s high school years that proved to be particularly daunting, and that was when her past reemerged—in the form of intense flashbacks to her childhood trauma and tumultuous teenage years. With the stream of daily stresses compounded by menopausal irritability, Shigeko often found herself regressing into a bunker-like mentality with childish coping mechanisms, a pattern that threatened to undo her most prized achievement: her happy family.

In The Pond Beyond the Forest, Shigeko faces her past head-on, taking the reader along on her quest to uncover the root causes of her lifelong struggles—a journey that leads to deeper self-awareness, understanding, and acceptance, and ultimately saves her family and marriage.

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Information

Year
2025
eBook ISBN
9781647429812

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Prologue: Fish Dream
  8. 1. Morning Hell
  9. 2. Barabara Family
  10. 3. Music Camp
  11. 4. The Japanese Garden
  12. 5. At Monkey Bridge
  13. 6. Bon Voyage
  14. 7. My Sixteenth Birthday
  15. 8. Familial Culture Shock
  16. 9. Locked Up
  17. 10. The No-Nonsense Family Counselor
  18. 11. Triumphant Return
  19. 12. Family Secrets
  20. 13. Demystifying My “Illness”
  21. 14. Morning Heaven
  22. 15. The Closing Family Counseling Session
  23. 16. Wallaby to the Rescue
  24. 17. My Father’s Funeral
  25. 18. Family of Victims
  26. 19. Cold Turkey
  27. 20. Minamino Heart Clinic
  28. 21. Biscuit
  29. 22. Holland America
  30. 23. Second Honeymoon
  31. Acknowledgments
  32. About the Author
  33. Looking for your next great read?

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