Motherhood

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own. 

A job is predicated on agreement. (“I will take X dollars for Y hours of work, as long as the arrangement works for me.”) But there are all sorts of other labors that are predicated on duty . Duty to help others, duty to be true to ourselves. (“I’m doing this because it is necessary for me to do it, regardless of whether it works for me or not.”)... See more

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

The most important rewards of being a parent come from the moment-by-moment physical and psychological joy of being with this particular child, and in that child’s moment-by-moment joy in being with you.