In Defense of Motherhood

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 bu... See more

But the issue of children and who looks after them has become, in my view, profoundly political, and so it would be a contradiction to write a book about motherhood without explaining to some degree how I found the time to write it. For the first six months of Albertine’s life I looked after her at home while my partner continued to work. This exp

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This is followed by a leisurely twenty-minute shower, a late breakfast, a long nap, and then a meandering perusal through a variety of periodicals. Meanwhile, I am ferrying our daughter to birthday parties and playdates. On weekend evenings, Tom doesn’t check with me before he meets friends for drinks; he just breezes out the door with the assumpti

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Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must

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