Opinion | The Lies Mothers Tell Themselves and Their Children

In this anxious inheritance from my mother and my grandmother, I’ve both under- and overcorrected. Most of what I provide to my kids is nurturance, care and a soft lap before bed. I have excellent paid help to address many of their practical needs. I indulge them a lot. They participate in zero extracurriculars and do not have great table manners.

You can love your kids deeply and hate being a mom. You can hold your children to the bone and still proclaim how sucky it is to be a female parent, in America at least, with our lack of paid family leave or high-quality day care and the cultural insistence that “good women” should stake their entire lives on the opportunity.

Unlike her mother, my mom didn’t shirk the practicalities of the job. She read all the parenting theories, pursued all the extracurriculars for both of us and picked the right schools for us to attend. She ran our existence like air traffic control, and she made all that labor invisible. She was good at it, but it was just not who she wanted to be