Raising Raul : adventures raising myself and my son / Maria Hinojosa

On the face of it, this successful wife and mother enjoys the best of all possible worlds. A former staff reporter for National Public Radio and currently the urban affairs correspondent for CNN, Hinojosa, a Mexican-American, is married to German, a "gorgeous Afro-Taino from the Dominican Republic," who is a talented artist as well as a supportive husband. The two are proud parents of Raul and his baby sister, Maria. Motherhood, however, did not come easily to Hinojosa. After joyfully announcing her first pregnancy to family and friends, she suffered first one miscarriage and, later, a second. On assignment in Cuba, Hinojosa consulted a Yoruba priest who assured her she would have a child; Raul was born by cesarean section a year later. Hinojosa describes both the highs and lows of reconciling American motherhood with her traditional Mexican upbringing, though there hasn't been much to dampen her spirits. Her love of life suffuses this warmhearted memoir, filled with anecdotes about Mexico, the Dominican Republic, her childhood and the fast-paced life of a journalist. Through trial and error, she solves the conflicts that arise when the Mexican way of raising a child conflicts with American ideas. Because she was still nursing Raul during a visit to Mexico, her mother informed Hinojosa that nursing longer than four months indicates to middle-class Mexicans that one is too poor to afford formula. Although raised to sacrifice career aspirations to the needs of her child, Hinojosa now accepts herself as a Latina mother who shares parenting and homemaking equally with her husband.