Manifesting Motherness: Healing from Infertility

Author: Rekha Ramcharan
Publisher: Self
​Reviewer: Nancy Richards
​‘It’s a rare couple trying to conceive who doesn’t at least sometimes look around the world and wonder why they are being singled out for this particular heartbreak.’ Just one of the nails that Rekha hits so accurately on the head in this careful book about infertility – or as she later refers to it more hopefully, as about fertility. If you’ve been there, you will know the distinction.
But primarily, she describes it as ‘a story….simply my experience rendered as 

honestly as anyone can tell their own story.’ So, expect no miracle cures or solutions. She emphasizes that her journey may not be yours. Nor her final attainment of what she calls ‘motherness’, your ultimate experience. Rekha’s daughter Aarya was born on December 17 2016 after four long years of infertility when she herself was 45.  But there are an extraordinary number of lessons to be learned along the way – and not all that pertain exclusively to becoming pregnant.
She starts simply with her own background by way of context. She shares that surprisingly, until her late thirties and her second marriage she had never really wanted children. She also shares a sort of spiritual awakening – and then the long and winding road that she trod with all the dark tunnels and cul de sacs along the way.
She confesses, ‘I’m an intellectual magpie and a reading addict, so now and then there are references to statistics and research, as well as to other books on fertility and healing.’ Personally I am both in awe and appreciative of writers who read a great deal and then synthesize what they’ve learned so that it can be easily grasped for the lay person. To this end she has investigated all manner of contributing factors that lead to infertility – environmental, chemical (beware BPA chemicals found in plastics), and above all emotional. She looks deeply into this and gives a 6 step guide to releasing emotions – ‘an iterative process’ she emphasizes. There are no quick fixes.
To each of the eight parts of the book she gives a guiding introduction as well as a conclusion to tie it all up. Of particular note, with our without fertility being an issue, are the parts on Transforming Limiting Thoughts and Beliefs as well as Understanding Personality. In this last she gives a helpful breakdown of the Enneagram types with special focus on her own, Type 8. I will confess she lost me a bit on the Metaphysical adventures – but nobody could accuse Rekha of being anything other than completely thorough in that no leaf is left unturned, no avenue unexplored.  As a business leader she says, she was interested in the ‘pathfinder phenomenon’, while I don’t know exactly what that is, it sounds as if her book clearly exposes that interest.
Finally, what I found extraordinary is not just her journey, but the depth with which she has examined and shared it – and found the time to do so, as a, presumably, working mother. Although it’s an intensely personal book, in her acknowledgements she closes by thanking you, ‘I never realized’, she says ‘how much The Reader, that imagined person who will choose to share a writer’s world by picking up her book, becomes part of the writer’s life.’  There is a sense of community amongst those who’ve known infertility – and in these pages, dear Reader, you may well feel embraced.