Kim Brooks

I've written out itineraries for baby sitters with years of experience. I've gotten up in the middle of the night and stood over my children's sleeping bodies just to make sure they're breathing, and breathing well. In short, I'm the worst Jewish mother in the world. I make Alexander Portnoy's mother look like a laid-back Earth mama.

I've harassed pediatricians and nurses, demanded extra conferences with preschool teachers, contacted speech therapists and occupational therapists over delays other mothers probably wouldn't have noticed, stressed over magnet school applications three years before they're due.

I always knew my mother was different, different from the other mothers in the way she dressed, the way she spoke, but most obviously, the way she mothered. I remember a slumber party where, instead of a sleeping bag, she urged me to bring a small, inflatable mattress because the dust on the floor was liable to aggravate my allergies.

I got an MFA in fiction.

I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa.

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors, and mentors reinforced this complacency.

Sometimes we do things not because they're fun but because they're important.

I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

I struggled with math and had no interest in sports.

I don't know that I want to live in a world without cheese.

I adore cooking and baking and holiday feasts and dining with friends and spending too much money on mind-blowing meals in wonderful restaurants, but mostly, and quite simply, I love food.

We need to challenge this assumption that any child who's alone, who isn't being directly supervised and observed, is a child in in peril.

It shouldn't be normal to be anxious all the time about your children, so women should seek mental health help if they're having excessive levels of anxiety.

If you've driven your kids to the store, and you leave them for five minutes, by far the most dangerous thing you've done is just put your kid in the car and driven them to the store.

Having a kid who begged for 'just a few more minutes' of television was the antithesis of what I had hoped parenthood would be. It was resigning ourselves to a universe of want and consumption.

I love my husband. I love my family.

All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.

I love food, but I can't bear to read about it, to talk about it, to discuss the consequences and context of how we consume it. And this is more or less how I feel about raising children, too.

Motherhood was the first instance in my life where I was asked to sacrifice anything for anyone.

This is what shame does to women: It isolates us and makes us feel our stories aren't really stories at all but idiosyncratic flaws.