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
Wow, what a beautiful framing. Some people feel called to build families, others feel called to build ideas. They're not mutually exclusive, of course, but they're both ways to spread parts of ourselves:
"My religious cousin, who is the same age as I am, she has six kids. And I have six books. Maybe there is no great... See more
I used to watch as she read Ms. magazine, sitting upright, at the dining room table. She came of age during second-wave feminism, when women kind of had a choice and kind of didn’t. This made my mom’s ambivalence about motherhood starker and more insistent: It’s within the realm of possibility that my mom’s life could have gone a different, more... See more