Returning To My Mother's House: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine

A pioneer and world-renowned authority on empowerment, Gail Straub had built a career devoted to helping people overcome self-doubt and live with purpose. She had enjoyed a long, loving marriage. Yet, in the midst of her life as an accomplished middle-aged woman, she felt a deep sense of loss. After much soul searching, Gail realized that in her quest for success, she had lost her intuitive, emotional, imaginative self. She realized that she was following the path paved by her mother a woman whose spiritual abandonment, even more than the tragic fact of her premature death, had haunted and driven her since the age of twenty-three.

In RETURNING TO MY MOTHER S HOUSE: Taking Back the Wisdom of the Feminine, Gail shares her journey to reconnect with the true spirit of her mother, Jacqueline Walsh Straub, who died at age fifty-five of a rare heart condition, and reclaim what both mother and daughter, like countless women, had sacrificed for the sake of society, logic, and achievement. With vivid immediacy, Gail revisits her idyllic childhood home on Brecks Lane, near the banks of the Brandywine River just outside Wilmington, Delaware, and reveals how her mother began to change, subtly yet profoundly, when she was a teenager. From there, she retraces how she grew up and moved on to inhabit her mother s unlived life. So much of my life has been shaped by what my mother betrayed, lost, or had stolen from her, Gail reflects.

An intimate, candid, and powerfully affecting memoir, RETURNING TO MY MOTHER S HOUSE is also an inspiring guide for all women who have lost touch with their innate female wisdom. Through tales of her travels around the globe to Africa, Bali, Russia, China, and Ireland, her mother s ancestral home Gail shares her search to balance her fulfilling and demanding empowerment work and social activism with a rich, rewarding inner life. Along the way, she recounts:

Her years of addiction to busyness, speed, and workaholism to numb her grief and shut the door against overwhelming emotions.

Her rigid reliance on rationalism, in misguided efforts to be more like her intelligent father and her strategically brilliant husband and business partner.

Her choice not to have children and the unsettling discovery of what a life-saving tubal ligation cost her devoutly Catholic mother.

The long healing process of transforming her emptiness into openness, nurturing the irrational, and making peace with and learning from death.

Her commitment to honoring her mother and the universal force of the feminine by becoming a spiritual mother to others.

RETURNING TO MY MOTHER S HOUS E is Gail Straub s poetic, heartfelt, and very personal journey, but it is also my story, your story, and the story of a culture in desperate need of taking back the wisdom of the feminine, states Elizabeth Lesser, cofounder of the Omega Institute and author of Broken Open and The Seekers Guide. With her words of wondrous wisdom and comfort for all mothers and daughters, Gail Straub offers hope to everyone struggling to cultivate and sustain an interior life in our fast-paced, hard-driving world.