Author: Christine Louise Hohlbaum

Publisher: Mom-Writers Publishing Cooperative, 2005

ISBN: 1932279148

Adult/Essays/Parenting

                Humor is the Answer

Stay at Home Mom Popularizes Acronym,

Supports Her S.A.H.M. Sisters Everywhere 

Every parent with young children, every prospective parent, and every parent long past the Dy-dee stage will find Christine Louise Hohlbaum's S.A.H.M. I Am instructive and fun reading. 

A foreword by Cynthia Brian of Chicken Soup fame lauds this book of essays by a woman who she says, "exalts the roles of housewife and mother to the level of CEO--Chief Excitement Officer."  

During a visit to New York I was amazed at the number of moms wheeling strollers in Central Park on a sunny May Monday morning.  Now I notice more and more young women staying home but I didn't realize it had become a trend of such proportions to deserve its own acronym right along with WASPS, WHAM, and as Hohlbaum points out, AWOL and MASH.

My days of rinsing out real cloth diapers in the toilet to ready them for their Clorox bath in the smelly canister kept nearby are long gone but it seems to me that that Chapter 36 where you'll find several pages of "You know you are a parent when…" statements would be an ideal tutorial for women considering motherhood. The canisters and Clorox may be things of the past but there is still much in the life of a mom with young children that requires a healthy dose of humor to survive. 

Author Hohlbaum has a perfect sense of the absurd, enough not only to survive, but to do it in style.  Her stories are inspirational, funny, and short enough for a mother to read in the span of time her children will spend taking their naps.  It is exciting that Hohlbaum is enjoying life with two pre-schoolers but I can't help but wonder if she would be doing so well if it weren't for that computer that connects her to the outside world and that her writing may be working as therapy in printer's ink. For all young parents who don't have those advantages, there is S.A.H.M.  It is a book designed for maintaining sanity with a chortle or two.