For too many women in America are becoming sick with exhaustion and stress as they try to do things that can’t be — shouldn’t be — done. Too many are eaten up by resentment toward...

Too many of us now allow ourselves to be defined by motherhood and direct every ounce of our energy into our children. This sounds noble on the surface but in fact it’s doing no one–...

The media not only fans our fears, it comforts us in our hubris. Nearly every scare story comes with a Message: You can take control. You can do something to keep bad things from happening...

I tried to do it all myself: be mommy and camp counselor and art teacher and prereading specialist (and somehow, in my off-hours, to do my own work). I tried my absolute best. And like...

-what’s really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it’s a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to...

We seem to feel as though the life our children have — that we have built for them — is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all...

Something is missing, and it’s something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child...

All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path...

The Mommy Mystique tells us that we are the luckiest women in the world — the freest, with the most choices, the broadest horizons, the best luck, and the most wealth. It says we have...

I found that when women were able to act in line with their natural inclinations and ambitions — whether to work or stay at home — they were generally happy, and generally felt that their...

I realized, listening to the silences that fell sometimes in my interview groups, that there are things that are sayable and unsayable about motherhood today. It is permissable, for example, to talk a lot about...

What kind of choice is it, really, when motherhood forces you into a delicate balancing act — not just between work and family, as the equation is typically phrased, but between your premotherhood and postmotherhood...