Sublime

Children, in particular, have suffered a grievous decline in just the goods that are most important to them: adult time, energy, and company. The child-rearing work that men and women and an extended family did a hundred years ago, and that women did thirty years ago, has to be done somehow by someone. The scientific moral is not that we need

In trying to process it, I wonder why I’ve felt such inner resistance to accepting that anything I do as a mother might actually be a page in a book. And really, it doesn’t take long to connect that feeling to the fact that in popular culture, at least in America for the past forever

There is an excess of mom-wine-drinking jokes and poop-on-the-clothes-at-work jokes and a lot of judging jokes about bad mothering. But none of these things afford mothers, who are literally carrying humanity forward around their necks, the simple grace of a change of hands.

Her life is filled with novelty and adventure, but it all takes place in relation to her kids,