“Reading this book felt like sitting at the knee of an elder, listening to her describe the tapestry of her life, touching each 
piece of the fabric as she told its story.” – HW

“Reading this book withing a small community invited me to heed my inner summons to discover, write, speak, embody, and boldly offer my truth, the medicine in my Story.” – MS

A Captivating Read, by Janell Walden Agyeman, Next Steps Literary Services
WOMANING is a captivating read, especially for one who shares the same birth year and Midwestern roots as author Meta Commerse, and who shared several key developmental experiences such as: receiving solid encouragement from elders to learn when they recognized her sharp mind; enjoying a strong upbringing within a church community; navigating broad stretches of life without critical emotional and financial support from her father; being responsible for her younger brother while her mother worked outside the home; and learning to deny feelings and actions that could lead to disfavor from her elders–especially those that dealt with her body and sex. Who and what experiences teach us how to be Women? Are the lessons we receive entirely helpful and truthful? Do we develop soul-deep, knowing confidence or submit to simply following the “rules?” Meta grapples with these questions and shares insights that resonate deeply.

Meticulously crafted with language by turns poetic and prosaic, accompanied by the vibrant soundtrack from the years in which her story unfolds, WOMANING succeeds in sharing Meta’s personal excavation and inspired me to possibly undertake my own. Often recounted in granular detail, her memories amazed and challenged me to attempt the same. Can I remember so clearly and specifically? Do I even want to?

Rarely have I encountered a book that excites in me the desire to see what I might do, on my own, and to suggest why I would be wise to invest in the journey. What demons can I exorcise? What triumphs can I celebrate? How can I live in a way so that I bless the “seven generations behind and seven generations preceding me” that indigenous wisdom tells us is necessary to heal and strengthen our world?

It turns out that Meta is a skilled doula to writers, and that she founded a business devoted to encouraging women to heal their emotional traumas through writing the stories of their lives. Critical, essential topics such as the effects of secrets kept in families, and the abuse and devaluation of women and women’s bodies, are central to her personal exploration in WOMANING. It is no wonder that her life journey developed her abilities to write and publish narrative works and poetry; to make sound nutrition and healthy lifestyle practices priorities for herself and the sturdy family she would nurture; to hone her literary and administrative skills; and to eventually be certified as a health care practitioner and found a wellness clinic.

Highly recommended for its description of an eloquent and conscious black female’s journey to better understand the circumstances and practices that are invested in our development–for better and for worse, WOMANING is also a valuable resource for women who aspire to make the interior journey, dig deep, analyze their emotional artifacts (minus damning judgment) and to affirm and likely heal themselves in the process.

Womaning, A Review by Laura Lengnick, Author, 2022
How does one learn to be woman? What does it mean to be a good girl? How do we recognize when someone is behaving like a lady? When does a maiden become a woman, a woman become a crone?

Meta Commerse explores the answers to these questions in her extraordinary new memoir, Womaning. With clarity and compassion, Commerse shares the lessons learned over six generations of her family about what it means to be woman – girl, mother, lover, wife, worker and elder – and the powerful healing that she has found by looking back on her life and sharing what she has learned.

This fascinating collection of stories examines the joys and sorrows of a family living on the front lines of the American Dream in the last century. Best friends, loving grand-mothers, bullying bosses, shattered dreams, inspiring lovers, broken hearts, and the complexities of raising children and caring for elders – these are one woman’s stories, told to the music of the times, at once both deeply personal and political. Womaning takes the reader through a life shaped by wave upon wave of social unrest challenging America’s dark side, the side that offers opportunity according to race, gender, religion, and class.

A “black woman of a certain age, time and place,” Commerse grew up in the heart of the Civil Rights and Black Arts movements in Chicago. She found herself “in the center of a cultural unfolding, with change exploding everywhere around me.” She tells how she “watched in awe” as her mother started talking about blackness, changing the way she dressed, stopped wearing makeup and straightening her hair, quit her job, went back to school and started writing poetry. She remembers the fear and uncertainty of these times and how the music of John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and many others seemed “tailor-made to the feeling that was growing in and among us.”

At the age of 14, church elders selected her escort for the Young People’s Cotillion. Forrest was “tall, slender, dark, with the brightest smile and the world’s biggest, most expressive eyes.” At the afterparty, when Forrest asked her to dance to the song “Ooo Baby Baby” by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, she refused. She was afraid “that if Forrest held me close in his arms, I would have melted all over him and we would have learned one another’s secrets that night.” Commerse didn’t dare let this happen because she was a good girl.

By the age of 30, Commerse was “a hard-working, home-owning woman whose existence orbited my children’s lives.” Looking back to those days, she recalls “that promising decade of the 1980’s, the skies were clearer as new doors opened to us and we walked in, the very first generation to do so. In that time, love was fresh and redefined for our emergence, our music, now lavish, orchestrated, our songs longer, liquid-like, set to a melody and tempo to usher us into the shiny new world of our middle -class dreams.” Caught up in this feeling, Commerse married for a second time to a successful professional who was “incredibly handsome, very well-spoken, an educated man with an arresting presence.” Although the marriage was over by the time Bill Clinton left office, Commerse felt grateful for the lessons learned. “From start to finish, this marriage was an education. Among its deepest lessons, I did learn something about sexual healing. I learned what being on the receiving end of infidelity felt like. I learned that while dreams do come true, they’re hardly free.”

As a white woman of a certain age, time and place, Commerse’s stories about living in a world made by and for men inspired me to revisit the joys and sorrows of my own life. I saw both my mother and myself in her stories of falling in love, working full-time while raising children and caring for family, and struggling to achieve a sense of self in unstable and ultimately unsatisfying marriages. Her stories got me thinking about all the ways that womaning has influenced my own life and the lives of the women and men in my family. Like Commerse, I believed that professional success and the middle-class income that comes along with it was essential to achieving the American Dream, which to Commerse, meant “to have a home, to be worthy, to have enough.”

Ultimately, Womaning is a book about the healing power of story. Commerse gifts us with a new way to understand our lives by looking back over our past to unearth our most important lessons learned and sharing them with others. She invites us to view ourselves as the next in a collection of nested dolls, each doll representing a generation of ancestors and elders whose stories have shaped ours, reaching through time from the distant past to present day. As Commerse’s remarkable memoir teaches us, examining women’s stories, told and retold within and across generations, can be a powerful path to finding answers to some of the most perplexing questions of our times, no matter where one stands in the crossroads of race, gender, religion, and class in America.