Supermom: A Guide to Kids, Family, Career, and Having It All

by Wendell Ricketts

Today more than ever, having children means coming to grips with constantly rising expenses and with the fact that Mom almost always needs to work outside the home. That, in turn, means that Mom has to deploy her forces along a hundred different fronts. This book is a guide – based on Tiziana Rocca’s experiences as a wife, mother, and director of a highly successful public-relations firm. “Like all mothers,” Rocca writes, “my days are spent performing somersaults as I divide my time and energy between family and work. I’ve always got a million things to do, and each day is an obstacle course.” Notwithstanding these difficulties, Rocca believes that Mom (with a capital M!) is the cornerstone of the entire family structure, essential to children’s emotional and cognitive development. She writes with compassion, humor, and conviction about the unique strength of women and the power to “never give up and never give in.”

188 pages

Published October 1, 2011

About the author

Wendell Ricketts was born on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,and raised in various small towns on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. He holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and has worked professionally as a translator from Italian since 1998. In addition to The Wrong Door: The Complete Plays of Natalia Ginzburg (U. Toronto Press, 2008), an early version of which received the PEN American Center Renato Poggioli Prize for translation, he is the translator of Communicating Success: Public Relations with an Italian Flair; Olive Oil and the Mediterranean; Trilobites: The Back To The Past Museum Guide; Ferrara and its Bread: The History of a Culinary Masterpiece across Seven Centuries, and Twenty Cigarettes in Nasiriyah: A Memoir, among other publications. He has also translated four books as yet unpublished in English, including the novels Generations of Love (Matteo B. Bianchi) and Around Three O’Clock (Andrej Longo); his translations of excerpts from two recent Italian working-class novels appeared in World Literature Today in November 2013. From 1986 to 1996 he was theater and dance critic for the Bay Area Reporter in San Francisco, California, and his writing about literature, travel, politics, the media, and contemporary social issues have appeared in such publications as Contact Quarterly, The Advocate, Dance Ink, Marriage and Family Review, Spin, Silent No More: Voices of Courage in American Schools, and 30 Days in Italy: True Stories of Escape to the Good Life. His fiction and poetry have been published in such journals and anthologies as Mississippi Review, Salt Hill, Blue Mesa Review, modern words, and The Long Story. He is the author of What We Lost in the Fire & Other Stories (FourCats Press, 2022), Cards from the Basket: 307 Imaginative Writing Prompts to Spark the Creativity of Writers, Writing Teachers, Students — and Everyone! and editor of Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men about More-or-Less Gay Life (2005) and of Blue, Too: More Writing by (for or about) Working Class Queers (2014).