The Four Trimesters Reading List: My Favorite Books through Pregnancy into Early Motherhood

Welcome to a brand new TBR Tales, my friend! Reading is my go-to hobby and most of my leisure time is spent in books. I had an inkling that getting pregnant and becoming a parent would be even more reasons to explore the book world, and when that came to pass, I picked up books I had never imagined I would read. Instead of a traditional pregnancy reading list that focuses on pregnancy, birth, and newborn care, I thought of mine in four trimesters — reflecting not just on preparing for the baby, but also the emotional journey from early pregnancy into the first weeks of motherhood.

Pregnancy is divided into three trimesters. Once the baby is born, what follows is another trimester, called the fourth trimester, when both baby and mom continue to go through rapid body and mind changes. My reading rhythms changed with energy, mood and transitions. This is how my reading life unfolded during that time. Let’s dive in.

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First Trimester: A Gentle Start

By the time it was confirmed that I was pregnant, a month of this trimester was already past. I remember I had been in the middle of reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Having read about all that can go wrong in the first trimester, these weeks brought mental stress along with the expected physical discomforts. Regardless, I started to scour book lists online and at my library. I read Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began to tell me all about the marvellous organ, the uterus. Womb is a great book to ponder where we all begin. It gives a holistic view of the uterus of a little girl all the way to menopause years, including the transitions into getting periods, ovulation, conception and childbirth. I learned so many things from this book! I loved learning about the roles of midwives and doulas—two figures I hadn’t fully understood before. Too often, discussions focus solely on the baby, and this book helped recentre my own experience, keeping the mother at the centre of pregnancy and childbirth. It gave me an opportunity to ask my mom and learn about her experiences. 

To calm my mental stress, I read (and periodically perused over the whole pregnancy) The Mindful Mom-To-Be: A Modern Doula’s Guide to Building a Healthy Foundation from Pregnancy Through Birth. Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting is a shorter version of the famous Bringing up Bébé and it offered some interesting and condensed ideas about motherhood in France.

An article I found online about probability and possibility helped me when I needed a boost.

This trimester went fast!

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Second Trimester: Settling In

Heading into the second trimester was exciting. We knew our baby was a healthy girl. In my readings and discussions with my care team, postpartum depression had come up many times. So it seemed like fate when I received a review copy of Your Brain on Pregnancy: A Guide to Understanding and Protecting Your Mental Health During Pregnancy and Beyond. I found tools to assess myself and return to after birth. I gushed about this book on the blog and you can find the review here. 

I can’t recall how and when I came across What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood but once I started reading this book, I could not stop. This book helped me understand how societally pregnant women are seen and treated and the common thoughts and concerns that one has as they go through pregnancy. Through the chapters about birth, I evaluated my fears around delivery. I wanted to learn more about navigating parenthood with a partner and did some light reading in Smooth Transition to Parenthood for First Time Mothers and Fathers: How to Adapt and Embrace your New Life as a Parent without Stress and Worries. 

I returned to John M. Gottman in And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan for Preserving Marital Intimacy and Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives but didn’t get around to finishing it. Other topics drew me away at that time. I had previously read What Makes Love Last?: How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal.

I explored some fiction this trimester too. The Truth about Ben and June, an old review copy, complemented my reading of Your Brain on Pregnancy as it offered a fictional lens on some of the mental and emotional changes.

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Third Trimester: Nesting and Deep Dives

I entered this trimester feeling great and was starting to look forward to meeting my baby. Feeling her kicks were my favourite moments throughout the day. Many of the books I had discovered in the second trimester started to become available in this one. Through each I worked on different aspects of mindset into pregnancy, labour, delivery, postpartum, relationships and more.

The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama: Redefining the Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Journey is one of the most beautiful books I now have in my library. Its affirmations gave me strength. It also covered breastfeeding and early days with the baby which I appreciated. I started to wonder what my time would look like with her, feeding, sleeping and diaper changes aside. I didn’t observe my dad and step mom in the first years with my brother and had no idea.

The Montessori philosophy had come up a number of times when I was designing the baby room. I read The Montessori Baby: A Parent’s Guide to Nurturing Your Baby with Love, Respect, and Understanding and loved its approach of respect and observation. It is a comprehensive guide for the first year, how babies grow, the skills they work on, how to set up the environment for play and interaction, as well as common questions new parents have. From this, I jumped into How to Raise a Reader. You know I am going to try, considering how ingrained reading is in my everyday life. 😉 This book has given me tons of recommendations that I will read with her and it confirmed how the way I live and breathe books will nudge her in the direction of loving them.

As November was turning to December and the due date was fast approaching, my anxieties around delivery resurfaced. I had to learn to trust my body and Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond will always remain my favorite book that I read in pregnancy. It gave me tools to think about and prepare for this major event. I thought about how I wanted it to unfold as well as how to mindfully adapt when reality does not match up. This book went with me to the hospital. Though I didn’t open it there, just having Mindful Birthing with me was peaceful. 

I also read Return to You: A Postpartum Plan for New Moms (the first of my postpartum specific books), Three Steps to Courage: Working Compassionately with Difficult Emotions (another one transitions), and Your Baby, Your Birth: Hypnobirthing Skills For Every Birth (my one dive into hypnobirthing which my baby interrupted).

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Fourth Trimester: Reading in the Quiet Moments

In the first week of Serai’s life, books were my lifeline. I consulted them like a woman clinging to the last piece of driftwood in an overwhelming ocean. I had a number of volumes cluttering our dining table and there came a point when I was doing more reading and second guessing than listening to my instincts. 

This only added to my stress and it couldn’t go on. I am eternally grateful to my husband for telling me that I had read enough. It was time to put away the stack and start trusting myself and my observations of our baby’s needs and moods. One of the books in that put-away pile was Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers which helped me get comfortable with this natural and not simple act of nourishing my newborn.

I spent some time in books like The Happiest Baby on the Block which taught me necessary skills to sooth my baby. It changed how I perceived the fourth trimester. I started to see it as an extension of my pregnancy. If our bodies had allowed it, we would have kept the baby another 3 months. I loved being pregnant and my grief of no longer being pregnant felt seen.

I also started to look more seriously into changing relationships, particularly partners becoming parents. I returned to Brene Brown in The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting as it let me step out of the hour to hour cycles of newborn care and imagine life with an older Serai. In To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma, Molly Millwood exposed the truth behind matrescence and the enormous shift it creates in a partnership or marriage. After I finished it, I finally felt I had read enough. I had been seen and my original ideas of how big a change having a child is had been adjusted. These lines are my favorite: 

“To become mothers is to become more fully aware of who we are. To become coparents is to come into greater contact with our partners, and to become more fully aware of who they are. In order to find well-being in the terrain of motherhood, we must accept the loss of so many illusions, not least of which are illusions about the bliss children will bring and the extent to which our spouses will share the burden and support us. The greatest loss of all may be our illusions about who we are and what kind of mothers we will be. When these illusions are acknowledged and grieved, we find some measure of peace in the acceptance of how things actually are and who we actually are.”

Chapter 10 Lost and Found, To Have and To Hold

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Final Reflections and Invitations

Reading is no substitute for life experience. Though I knew about the challenges of breastfeeding and had been warned about the sleepless nights and exhaustion, I didn’t know what they would feel like to me in my body and mind. Having never given birth before, its implications were beyond my comprehension till I underwent that change. For some weeks, I lamented that no one told me it would be this hard and looking back, I had read it all, I just hadn’t felt it.

Books are no substitute for the heart to heart conversations with real people in our lives. There are many women who have supported me by sharing their early motherhood days, being a shoulder to cry on, a patient ear to share with. a watcher for my health. They offer deep personal connections that words written by people I do not know cannot. Conversation is a key part of accepting and digesting all that has happened and how I have changed.

It was in 2016 that I first embarked on structured reading. I found my passion for education and read so many books about it. In each new transition in life, I have looked to books – whether it was celebrating marriage, navigating social situations or embracing grief. Pregnancy, matrescence, and parenthood are the new topics I studied in the four trimesters and I hope that this article serves as a guide for anyone wanting to explore the first two stages of this journey. Each book I read supported me and prepared me. My journey in parenthood has just begun and already the TBR is stacked high—I’ll keep chipping away, one naptime at a time.

• If you are reading this article TTC/pregnant/ newly postpartum, would you pick any of the books from my reading list? 
• If you’ve experienced pregnancy or parenthood, what books supported you most?

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To recap, here are all the titles I mentioned:

First Trimester

• Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler | Goodreads
• Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard | Goodreads
• The Mindful Mom-To-Be: A Modern Doula’s Guide to Building a Healthy Foundation from Pregnancy Through Birth by Lori Bregman | Goodreads
• Bébé Day by Day: 100 Keys to French Parenting by Pamela Druckerman​ | Goodreads

Second Trimester

• Your Brain on Pregnancy: A Guide to Understanding and Protecting Your Mental Health During Pregnancy and Beyond by Dawn Kingston | Goodreads
• What No One Tells You: A Guide to Your Emotions from Pregnancy to Motherhood by Alexandra Sacks and Catherine Birndorf | Goodreads
• Smooth Transition to Parenthood for First Time Mothers and Fathers: How to Adapt and Embrace your New Life as a Parent without Stress and Worries by Harley Carr | Goodreads
• And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan for Preserving Marital Intimacy and Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives by John M. Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman | Goodreads
• The Truth About Ben and June by Alex Kiester​ | Goodreads

Third Trimester

• The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama: Redefining the Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Journey by Jill Koziol and Liz Tenety | Goodreads
• The Montessori Baby: A Parent’s Guide to Nurturing Your Baby with Love, Respect, and Understanding by Simone Davies and Junnifa Uzodike | Goodreads
• How to Raise a Reader by Pamela Paul and Maria Russo | Goodreads
• Mindful Birthing: Training the Mind, Body, and Heart for Childbirth and Beyond by Nancy Bardacke | Goodreads
• Return to You: A Postpartum Plan for New Moms by Tricia Huffman | Goodreads
• Three Steps to Courage: Working Compassionately with Difficult Emotions by Pema Chödrön | Goodreads
• Your Baby, Your Birth: Hypnobirthing Skills For Every Birth by Hollie de Cruz​ | Goodreads

Fourth Trimester

• Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers by Nancy Mohrbacher and Kathleen Kendall-Tackett | Goodreads
• Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood by Lucy Jones | Goodreads
• Mothershift: Reclaiming Motherhood as a Rite of Passage by Jessie Harrold | Goodreads
• The Happiest Baby on the Block by Harvey Karp | Goodreads
• The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting by Brené Brown | Goodreads
• To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage, and the Modern Dilemma by Molly Millwood​ | Goodreads

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post! 🙂

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