An Ode to Connection
An Ode to Connection
A Mother’s Journey of Bonding, Re(dis)covery and Belonging
Author: Urska Podvrsic, self-published, 2025
Paperback
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21,00 €
Available on backorder
Available on backorder
Product Details
Author: Urska Podvrsic, self-published
Design: Maja Licul
Length: 136 pages
Paperback
Book blurb
Parenting today can feel like both a miracle and a maze – exhilarating, disorienting, and, at times, quietly isolating.
An Ode to Connection is a heartfelt invitation to slow down, reflect, and find your way back to what matters most. Blending memoir with psychological and anthropological insight, it explores what it means to raise children – while raising ourselves – in a world that often pulls us away from presence, meaning, and one another.
With courage, vulnerability, and just enough humor to survive the emotional rollercoaster of raising tiny humans, a psychologist and mother of two daughters shares her journey through the layered terrain of parenthood – as part of life in all its complexity. What begins as a reckoning with disconnection, loneliness, and a lost sense of belonging becomes a deeply human search for connection: within herself, with her children, and with the world around her.
Grounded in lived experience, informed by years of working with children and teens from challenging backgrounds and later with expectant and new parents, the author weaves together personal stories, scientific insights, and the quiet truths that science can’t always capture – the contradictions that make us human.
The book also offers a sharp, compassionate unpacking of the broader cultural forces that shape how we parent and connect – how disconnection, pressure, and today’s faster pace seep into everyday life and what it takes to find resilience in the midst of it all. In this context, the author reintroduces babywearing not only as a practical tool but also as a profoundly human way to begin our parenting journeys – more connected, both in body and heart.
It doesn’t promise answers. It offers something better: resonance, recognition, and a powerful reminder that we’re not alone.
The author closes the book with a letter to her daughters – yes (!) – but her message resonates with anyone daring to raise the next generation with intention, courage, and heart.
A gentle revolution begins here.
Yanike Sophie –
Ode to Connection brings together everything many parents instinctively feel, and backs it up with research from several scientific fields. Urška Podvršič weaves her knowledge as a psychologist, mother, and baby-wearing consultant into a story that is easy to read, straight-forward, and often touched with humor.
As a mother of two young children searching for community, I found the book deeply recognizable and comforting. It gave me not only validation for the challenges of early parenthood but also a hopeful sense of what motherhood can look like in the years ahead.
Branka –
Being a mother is a woman’s most beautiful calling.
But so much of it is somehow taken for granted – that you will build a good relationship, act the right way, show love in the right manner, and set boundaries firmly. Yet it isn’t that clear or easy, and many insights only come once a certain period has already passed.
Urška has subtly brought forward the theme of the intimate bond between mother and child – and she does so at a time when so much emphasis is placed on spending just a few “quality” hours a day with a child! A child is not a project, but a loving little being who needs us all the time, or at least as much and as fully as possible.
It will be with great joy that I gift this book to my two daughters, once this becomes their story.
With gratitude.
Masae Fujimoto –
This book is love itself.
That the author, Urška, completed this book, and that I am able to read it in Tokyo, Japan—tens of thousands of kilometers away—allowed me to truly feel that love wraps this globe.
I have two children in their early twenties, and today I am able to live a life in which I feel happiness together with my partner.
However, when I speak of my own childhood, I had a younger brother, one year my junior, who was often ill. Many of my early memories are of my mother taking him to the hospital or staying with him during hospitalizations, while I spent entire days sitting in front of a TV at a friend of my mother’s house, watching programs I didn’t particularly want to see. I grew up constantly telling myself that I must not depend on my mother. Gradually, I came to feel that although she was my brother’s mother, she was not truly my mother.
By the age of five, I already sensed that something in my emotional balance was not right.
My mother was extremely responsible and held demanding jobs, yet at the same time she often cried out and struggled with her own mental health. Because of this, for nearly half a century I lived my life turning away from the idea of connection, and simply grew into adulthood that way.
Everything began to change when I gave birth to my own children and held them close to my chest. Through those moments, I came to feel—within myself—the value and meaning of things that cannot be seen: safety, warmth, and the sensation of truly being alive. I began to want to share this warmth between parent and child with others.
What that truly means, this book helped me understand. As I read, my heart softened, loosened, and gently opened, allowing me to know myself more deeply.
Urška also teaches us about the barriers that prevent connection—and she gives us the strength to move forward. A vast love and a deep connection certainly exist.
By reading this book, I realized that I am one of the people in the village where Urška is. This book brings with it the songs, the wind, and the light that flow through that village. I, too, feel that I would like to offer something—no matter how small—to someone in that village.
As a first step, I want to begin by talking more and listening more to my 83-year-old mother.
The author Urška, I am deeply grateful from my heart for the publication of this powerful but calm book.
And I sincerely hope that this book will reach everyone around the world who is waiting for it. And let’s make today and tomorrow by ourselves.