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 exper

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It is hard a lot of the time and easy a lot of the time. Is this making any sense? It doesn’t make any sense to me either. And that’s the total mind-melting, incomprehensible, frustratingly indescribable, and also wonderful thing about infants. Time with them has no goal and operates in a strange nonlinear fashion, and you are doing so much but not... See more

It was a calling, a duty. Service was a contribution to society, heroic even. But in the home, service was care and maintenance. It was nursing the sick. It was tending to the baby. Service involved feces and food and dishwater. It was done out of love and duty and desperation. At its best, it was intensely intimate. “Service could be brutalizing a

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