Motherhood

But I love being a mom. I’m not always great at it—let’s be very clear about that. Sometimes I yell. I don’t enjoy playing make-believe, and I mostly leave the work of crawling on the floor and pushing Hot Wheels around the rug to Ken and the grandparents. Sometimes, I can get very caught up in my work and have a hard time focusing on what my son... 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

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.

I have heard tales of creative rushes during the postpartum period, of women who ride the energy of human creation to power other creative acts. It is a beautiful idea, and one I would of course hope to experience. Make a human AND have a personal creative renaissance!? Yes, please. But alas, this is very, very far from my current state of affairs,... 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.