Author:  Christine Louise Hohlbaum

Publisher: Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, Inc.

                 As part of the Mom-Writers Publishing Cooperative 

ISBN:  1-932279-14-8

 The following review was contributed by: Jennifer Brown & Click Here To View Jennifer Brown's Reviews 

“There are days when I feel like quite the superhero.  Those are usually the times when everything happens at once and I still manage to maintain a sense of humor.  It quite often involves pulling my children out of their sporadic beastly moods, completing a craft project with them, reading five books aloud, cleaning the entire house, and going food shopping with both children in tow.  That is when I look down at my chest and wonder where the golden brassiere and the white stars against the blue background are.  Wondering Woman is close enough, I suppose.” (p. 17)

Christine Louise Hohlbaum is a S.A.H.M.  A Stay At Home Mom, that is.  With two young children, Hohlbaum manages to…well, manage.  As with most S.A.H.M.’s out there, it seems sometimes as if everything in the world falls under the her job description, which, aside from making for deliriously busy days and the occasional so-tired-you-can’t-sleep woman wondering when her life and her slim waist joined hands and ran away together, makes for some heartwarming and even hilarious storytelling potential. 

Hohlbaum is an American S.A.H.M. living in Germany, proving to the world over that there exists an inexorable tie between mothers of all nationalities, that of the experience of mothering.  Hohlbaum uses her essays to hold the hand of her readers and assure them that all moms struggle from time to time, life gets out of hand for all moms occasionally, and yes, everyone’s house falls into intermittent chaos.  What’s most clear throughout, however, is her sense that at the end of the day, it was all worth it.

In S.A.H.M. I AM, Hohlbaum’s second book of essays, she finds the humorous, the tender, and the flat out fun in subjects such as:

*The many hats worn by Mom. 

*The lure and occasional addiction of the Internet.

*The phenomenon that occurs when children are left alone, causing even the most angelic, well-behaved of them to turn into ornery beasts. 

*The fine line between encouraging your child’s artistic talents and saving your walls.

*The insatiable appetite of a young NBA player- to- be. 

In a style made most popular by Erma Bombeck, Hohlbaum is able to take ordinary, everyday nuisances and turn them into funnybone tickling chuckles, made all the funnier by the fact that most readers will have “been there/done that.”  Hohlbaum’s essays are short and easy to read and seem to improve as the book goes on (possibly because the reader feels she “knows” Hohlbaum’s children and has grown a fondness for them of her own).

A reader looking for vast differences in experience due to Hohlbaum’s living in Europe will be disappointed.  Other than some interesting details about shopping and culture mentioned in the essays, Hohlbaum’s experiences with S.A.H.Mming are as American as apple pie and baseball.   

Easy and enjoyable to read, S.A.H.M. would be a great gift for any Mom-to-be or perhaps a mom who’s preparing to hang up the work uniform and take the plunge into S.A.H.Mming herself.  It’s a comforting reminder that you’re “not alone out there,” a message that newbies and veteran mom’s alike desperately need to hear.