I'm Every Woman: A Black Woman Remixes Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work.

I'm Every Woman: A Black Woman Remixes Stories of Marriage, Motherhood, and Work by Lonnae O'Neal Parker Amistad/HarperCollins, November 2005, $24.95, ISBN 0-060-59292-3

There's a lot of chatter in mainstream American popular discourse about the challenges women face balancing work and family, but the prototypical experiences of black working mothers have received scant attention in the "mommy war" debates. This gap in the commentary actually makes very little sense, notes veteran Washington Post reporter Lonnae O'Neal Parker, since "Black women and field work and house work and paid-outside-the-house work simply go back too far." So in her first book, Parker begins to shine a little light on the concerns of African American women and "reclaim a space for their experiences" through canny reportage, honest and probing personal and family testimony, and shrewd social observation.

After all, she writes, "I've watched from a safe distance, keeping counsel with other back women with long histories and instructive family narratives to sustain us as we straggle, not with each other, but to nurture our families, agitate for our communities, and keep our eyebrows arched and lovely. It is consuming work with its own sets of challenges and rewards that can keep us too busy to weigh in with observations and lessons learned, especially since no one is asking us."

Parker's urgent insights are charmingly seasoned with the practical humor that arises from old-fashioned "colored folks common sense" you hear too little of in 21st-century popular culture.

At 37, Parker has herself simultaneously built a high-profile journalism career and a marriage with a black man that has lasted more than a decade, enveloping and sustaining the couple's three children. She delivers highly charged dispatches from the frontlines of a tough but joyful fight. However perilous your own work/family balance, Parker lets you know you are not alone and also that you will find a way, like our foremothers and forefathers before us.

Susan McHenry, BIBR founding editor and now editor-at-large, is an adjunct instructor in writing at Medgar Evers College, CUNY