Monster Mama by Liz Rosenberg

**Warning- This post is kinda’ long.**

Monster Mama (1997), written by Liz Rosenberg and illustrated by Stephen Gammell (one of my favorite illustrators), is a masterpiece. This book review is kinda’ of piggybacking off my older post about depression from a couple of weeks ago. It’s so funny (not a haha funny, but ironic kind of funny) that when I first read the book, I didn’t put two and two together that it was about depression.

Look hard, here is a picture of the mom and the boy↓.

I bought the book because the title reminded me of myself when I used to have mood swings. Just look at the picture. That’s how I would feel when I was really depressed. Nothing made me happy. That’s pretty much how everything looked to me. I really connected with this book.

In the book, the author writes,”Her bad moods terrified the neighborhood. Still she had the sweetest touch in the world when Patrick Edward ran a fever.“

When my older children were little and I went through my depressive states, they would seem to be scared of me. I screamed a lot, but I never hurt them. I would always tell them that. They believed me when they were sick and I would sleep at the foot of their bed, get up and get them water in the middle of the night and cook them the best tomato soup, chicken soup and grilled cheese ever. Just like the mom in the story, I had the sweetest touch in the world when Sam & Dakota were sick.

Some parts speak to me, some don’t. Although I never did this, this is the part that brought tears to my eyes: “On rainy days when she drove him to school, she hid herself in a big cloak and hood.”

Because the mother in the story didn’t want to meet people, little Patrick Edward learned how to handle situations on his own. As in the case of the bullies harassing him. Little Patrick Edward had to go to the market by himself because his mother didn’t want to scare people. Along the way, he is harassed by some bullies. They would have probably gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids…(Okay, okay, I digress, but I couldn’t resist. The joke was there. It handed itself to me.) Anyway, back to the subject at hand. They probably would have gotten away with throwing his hat over the mountain, tying him to a tree and eating up the delicious strawberries that he got for his mother, if they wouldn’t have said something about his mother. After they say something bad about his mother, he lets them have the old whatfor…

If you want to find out what happens after that, you’re just going to have to get the book.

Liz Rosenberg has a customer for life me if she ever writes another book about this. I truly empathized with this book. Some parts of it tell my own story. I would recommend that someone dealing with depression or if you know someone who is dealing with depression who has a young child(ren) purchase this book. The story is told in a simple child-like way that will communicate the message to the child without frightening them. Overall, the message is about a mother’s love. The underlying theme- depression.

I give this book *****/***** stars for dealing with such a sensitive subject with grace and finesse. Go out and get this book before I read it and cry again.