Sasha Iurkin Iurkin من عند Hatidoba, West Bengal, الهند من عند Hatidoba, West Bengal, الهند

I didn't have to give up a high-profile career to have a family, but I want my children to know that just the same it was something that I very conciously chose. Ironically, in some ways it's almost harder to be a woman today--because we have so many choices, it always feels like you're making the wrong one. If you chose to get married and have a family, you're giving up all these wonderful opportunities to be fulfilled and have experiences and be out in the world doing tremendous things--and if you go to work and be out doing all these things, you're neglecting your family and not being the mother you should be. This book was a good reminder about how important being a mother really is, and how we ought to help each other and show each other kindness. Having a large family, I feel tremendous pressure to show everyone that I CAN handle it--if we go out of our house, they have to be as clean and neatly dressed and well behaved as I can possibly manage, just so people don't raise an eyebrow and comment to their neighbor about how I clearly should have stopped at one or two. It is really unnerving to take them out in public and watch people summing you up-- see them counting how many there are, estimating how old they are and how far apart they must be (my six-year-old refuses to grow, so she is not dramatically larger than her 4-year-old sister, and this throws people) and therefore whether you had these children on purpose, and therefore whether you are a good/clever/capable/clean/decent person. I have had people refuse to sit near us at restaurants, which severely hurts my feelings, because it is a matter of life and death for my children to behave themselves when we go out to eat--if they were misbehaving they would have serious trouble when we got home; but these people don't even wait to see if they are decent children--they just see a large family and assume that they will be awful. I liked that message in this book-- that even though the world judges you and trys to tell you that you are "just" a mother, and says that like it's a bad thing, what you really are is so much more important.