The audacity of a child's
demands for love
are only matched
by the ridiculous depths
of the love their parents
have for them.

Dear Mother wasn't exactly what I was expecting, in good ways and bad. Having followed the author on Facebook for the last couple of years, I'm used to her hilarious, crude, weird status updates, so I honestly expected this to be a funny collection of anecdotes about her kids and her reactions to their zaniness. Instead, I got a collection that was 10% humor, 90% utter seriousness.

to make a two-year-old,
combine one puppy
one incontinent octopus
and a single juice box-loving gangster
mix until it starts slapping

The humorous parts, short as they were, were pretty good, though not on par with her everyday updates — to be fair, I guess it's not easy to write side-splitting poetry! That said, there were a few gems that made me smile (or laugh out loud, like the quote above).

dear mother,

no
they would not
be better off
without
you

While I was mostly disappointed to see how serious it was, there were a few poems (like this one) that really hit me in the gut and made me sit still and soak it in for a minute, and I appreciated those moments tremendously. I always heard people say parenthood was the hardest job you could have, and I thought it was an exaggeration until I started living it. The guilt and feelings of self-inadequacy I live with every single day? Those are hard to breathe through. Bunmi gets it, though, and she offers some incredible reassurances that ended up being exactly what I needed to hear today.

All in all, it's not my favorite book I've read on life as a parent, and it's nothing ground-breaking, but it's got a lot of enjoyable poems and I think most mothers, or parents in general, will find it easy to relate to.

All quotes come from an advance copy and may not match the final release. Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!