My boyfriend and I had just hired a nanny to spend three days a week caring for our baby, to do a kind of work that I’d been shocked to find intimately rewarding but also far harder than anything I’d ever tried to do for eight hours straight. We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a... See more

WHEN I LOOK BACK AND think about my own reaction to impending motherhood, I can’t help but see that my extreme distress was informed by anxiety that I wouldn’t be able to be a mother and be happy at the same time. Though my mother had three children, something about dealing with them consistently had been anathema to her core identity, as if she

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