With Mother’s Day fast approaching this weekend, it is a time for both mothers and children alike to reflect on the role of parenting in kids’ lives and on all the important things mothers do.
St. Louis-based author Terry Baker Mulligan, who wrote the award-winning memoir “Sugar Hill: Where the Sun Rose Over Harlem,” has been thinking about those issues a lot recently. Her next book, which will appropriately be released on Mother’s Day, is called “These Boys are Killing Me: Travels and Travails With Boys Who Take Risks” and details her experiences raising a pair of very adventurous sons and how their adventures changed her perspective on motherhood.
The book tells her story keeping up with her sons as they backpacked, hitchhiked and made their way across the globe, from Estonia to South Africa to the Middle East. Mulligan said that despite the nerves that she had about her sons’ journeys, she supported them because of how her own mother had encouraged her to travel as a young woman.
“When I was in college, the college had a year-abroad program, which I was kind of on the fence about,” she said. “[My mother] pushed and pushed for me to take that trip and it just opened my life.”
“I encouraged them because I thought it was important to your self development to know the world, to know how you fit into the world,” she added.
Listen to the full conversation:
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