Motherhood

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.

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

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.... 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.