“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 their husbands,...”

“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 its carefully selected...”

“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 so many of t...”

“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-- not ourselves...”

“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 to your ...”

“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 care. It's the sense th...”

“Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more complet...”

“All this wondering was the weather vane on top of the building of unrest and of discontent”

“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

“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 the knowledg...”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“It didn't matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.”

“Stranger inside me, when you are born, I will give youa closed book and ask you never to read it, never rest, never forgive a man who wants to save you.”