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Isn't That Enough?!: Musings of Motherhood and the Meaning of Life
"THIS IS A STORY OF MY FAMILY, AND, REALLY, THE STORY OF MANY FAMILIES. IT'S EVERYONE'S STORY, BECAUSE WE ARE ALL HUMAN. WE ALL EXPERIENCE THE DEPTHS OF TRUE EMOTION AS WE ARE LED ALONG THE PATH OF OUR DAYS. AND MAYBE, WE ALL END UP BACK WHERE WE FIRST BEGAN." --PATTY IHM, MOTHER TO MANY
220 pages, Paperback
Published December 10, 2017
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July 1, 2023
Sanity is overrated…
Before I realized that Patty Ihm was a consummate storyteller and a compassionate and complicated human being, I knew her as my “egg lady.” She charmed me immediately when I mentioned that I’d like to meet the chickens who laid such glorious eggs with yolks like golden orbs and a flavor that helps to tease me out of bed in the morning. She shared that her chickens each had names and unique personalities. This increased my wish to meet them as they scrabbled and foraged around the yard outside of their coop as all well-loved chickens should be free to do.
I learned some time later that my egg lady was also a blogger and that she was in the process of publishing a series of vignettes, fables of sorts, in a collection enticingly titled, Isn’t that Enough?
By then, I had discovered that she possessed a huge heart and status as a foster mother to multitudes and adoptive mother to others with whom she fell madly in love, tough love at times, often the subject of her stories. Despite having raised boys of her own who had grown and fledged, she and her husband found room in their hearts and farmhouse for sometimes unexpected challenges, her children’s lives offering both joy and pathos.
One of the features of Ihm’s writing which I found compelling was her stark honesty. She doesn’t sugar coat the truth but reflects on the lessons provided by both struggles and celebrations, some of them surprising. All of them gave me pause. The length of each portion was another characteristic of her chapters that endeared me to this book. The pieces are generally short, and their brevity allowed me to stop and digest her thoughtful ruminations, often involving parallels between human interactions and nature’s revelations. For example, Ihm finds instances in her beekeeping, another of her many talents, which she intertwines with tales of her (mostly) boys. Each provides fresh insight into human nature and the challenges she faces with with what I find to be considerable aplomb.
I don’t want to spoil this treasure for its next reader by being any more specific, so I will stop here. For now.
Before I realized that Patty Ihm was a consummate storyteller and a compassionate and complicated human being, I knew her as my “egg lady.” She charmed me immediately when I mentioned that I’d like to meet the chickens who laid such glorious eggs with yolks like golden orbs and a flavor that helps to tease me out of bed in the morning. She shared that her chickens each had names and unique personalities. This increased my wish to meet them as they scrabbled and foraged around the yard outside of their coop as all well-loved chickens should be free to do.
I learned some time later that my egg lady was also a blogger and that she was in the process of publishing a series of vignettes, fables of sorts, in a collection enticingly titled, Isn’t that Enough?
By then, I had discovered that she possessed a huge heart and status as a foster mother to multitudes and adoptive mother to others with whom she fell madly in love, tough love at times, often the subject of her stories. Despite having raised boys of her own who had grown and fledged, she and her husband found room in their hearts and farmhouse for sometimes unexpected challenges, her children’s lives offering both joy and pathos.
One of the features of Ihm’s writing which I found compelling was her stark honesty. She doesn’t sugar coat the truth but reflects on the lessons provided by both struggles and celebrations, some of them surprising. All of them gave me pause. The length of each portion was another characteristic of her chapters that endeared me to this book. The pieces are generally short, and their brevity allowed me to stop and digest her thoughtful ruminations, often involving parallels between human interactions and nature’s revelations. For example, Ihm finds instances in her beekeeping, another of her many talents, which she intertwines with tales of her (mostly) boys. Each provides fresh insight into human nature and the challenges she faces with with what I find to be considerable aplomb.
I don’t want to spoil this treasure for its next reader by being any more specific, so I will stop here. For now.
Displaying 1 of 1 review