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. 

It is hard a lot of the time and easy a lot of the time. Is this making any sense? It doesn’t make any sense to me either. And that’s the total mind-melting, incomprehensible, frustratingly indescribable, and also wonderful thing about infants. Time with them has no goal and operates in a strange nonlinear fashion, and you are doing so much but... See more

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.

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.

People shying away from having babies because they heard that it’s so hard are making one of those category errors that are inescapable in this rotten decade in this awful century: they think that hard is the opposite of good.