It was, like young motherhood itself,
naïve if not purely delusional: Two conversation-starved and over-caffeinated mothers on a zoo outing with their children started to talk about how underserved they felt by the standard motherhood books and magazines. They ranted about the treacly mom testimonials and recycled how-tos. They decided they would create an alternative—a website where mothers could read honest, unsentimental essays by women who were struggling with the same serious issues they were. They would do this working part time, so they wouldn’t miss out on decorating tomato soup with Goldfish crackers or spray-painting Halloween costumes with their four children, two of whom were under three years old. They would call their creation Mothers Who Think, in homage to Jane Smiley’s essay “Can Mothers Think?,” which ponders the question of whether motherhood turns women’s brains to mush.

They would, in short, create a Narnia for mothers, a place where mothers could disappear through their computer screens, day or night, always miraculously on time no matter how late they showed up, always welcome to join the ongoing conversation, free to revive or chat or let off steam, and to come back later after some small elf had, inevitably, demanded their attention.

In one sense, the mothers succeeded. Their website, part of the online magazine
Salon
(and hatched with
Salon
editor Joyce Millman), became very popular, so popular that they decided to put together a book of essays, also called
Mothers Who Think
, which they would write and edit in addition to putting out the daily website while still working part time.

I n t r o d u c t i o n

Boy, were they deluded. Their husbands, both professionally supportive if not totally clear on the concept of shared parenting, failed to come through on their ends of the expected childcare partnerships. The two mothers ended up working fifty-hour weeks at
Salon
. Their professional lives leaked like spilled juice into the cracks of their other, “real” mothering lives, leaving a sticky mess—the mothers could often be seen behind piles of papers in the bleachers at soccer practice, for example, or editing copy while waiting at the pharmacy for amoxicillin prescriptions.

They resorted to holding their daily editorial meetings by phone late at night, after their children and husbands were fast asleep.

They found themselves in the awkward position of writing and editing a book about motherhood while they hardly ever saw their own children. When they did see their kids, it was often to shoo them away like pigeons so they would not leave little crisscross tracks on their mothers’ thoughts. Other times they tried to ignore their children altogether, a skill they found themselves biologically impaired to master. Their shrewd children, who had already taken to slipping nonsensical sentences into conversations with their fathers to see if their dads were actually listening, were not about to put up with such behavior from their mothers.

Still the mothers huffed and puffed, “We think we can! We think we can!” while their children memorized the phone number of the pizza delivery place. From their makeshift desks at home, closed off from whatever domestic goings-on they had no choice but to ignore to meet their deadlines, they heard their toddlers muttering to themselves, “Mommy’s behind the door again.” When the mothers would finally go to bed, images of Lewis Hine waifs and smirking little boys lobbing hand grenades disturbed their sleep.

Spring came. Their book was published. Theoretically more rested, the two mothers got themselves together for a publicity tour.

Never mind that they would be gone only half the time it took them to create their exit memos listing the helpers and scheduling that would keep their children’s lives running smoothly in their absence.

They were the Runaway Mommies who would see their children’s faces in the floral arrangements in hotel lobbies, in cloud formations
vii

I n t r o d u c t i o n

scudding between high-rises in distant cities. But they were headed, eagerly, for intelligent conversation, and they had it all under control. They were Thinking Mothers with a capital TM. They were, they thought, getting good at this.

In cities across the nation, they found the village of real mothers that they had known thus far only virtually—warm, sharp, lively women who were starved for a night out and for someone to read to them. Ironically, you could not hear yourself think at these readings: they were raucous events, a cross between a Baptist testimonial and open-mike night at a stand-up comedy club. For all these mothers, the kindling of real-time, face-to-face, uninterrupted conversation had been dry for a while; it didn’t take long to set it ablaze.

Each day the two mothers headed out for TV and radio appearances from their tidy hotel rooms, confident that the toilet seats would remain dry and down in their absence and that there were no jam fingerprints on the backs of their white silk blouses.

In Manhattan they sipped Cadillac-size martinis under Maxfield Parrish’s mural of jolly King Cole, and revived their own old souls with seaweed facials and eyelids soothed by cucumber slices at a fancy day spa. One morning they opened the
New York Times
to see “A Night Out with . . . the Mothers Who Think.” And the headline wasn’t meant to be some kind of oxymoron, like “military intelligence.” There they were with their contributors, in living color, talking about sex, good cheese, gun control, and “Bill Nye the Science Guy.”

At last the mothers returned home, triumphant. Their husbands kissed them like Adrien Brody at the Oscars, and their children squealed with delight. But the next day, they assessed the damage. Healthy, perishable food they had stocked up on before they left was still in the refrigerator, seeping and glued to the shelves; the goldfish were dead. Their husbands had run out and bought the children new clothes in lieu of learning to use the washing machine. Piles of unsigned field trip slips, homework never turned in, bills for piano lessons and diaper services were shoved into random drawers. At pickup time, a preschool teacher
I n t r o d u c t i o n

viii

said to one of the mothers, “I knew you were home because her hair was brushed.” The mothers were stricken by the realization that they owed weeks of carpooling and sleepovers to other mothers as payback on the huge debt they had incurred for leaving home. Bags reappeared under their once coolly cucumbered eyes.

They took to drinking martinis while watching—perhaps even because they were watching—
SpongeBob SquarePants.

They were exhausted, and so were their children. The mothers decided that the daily website was too much, and they left their jobs for other pursuits: Kate to write a novel, Camille to care for an ailing mother; both to sprinkle Goldfish on tomato soup while their kids were still young enough to care. Without its birth parents to feed and sustain it, Mothers Who Think at
Salon
eventually went the way of a Grimm fairy tale orphan, wandering unwittingly too far into the wood, leaving a diminishing trail of crumbs that was hard to follow on the forest floor.

We too had wandered off,
sort of. In the midst of where our lives had taken us, there were still a few fat crumbs of nostalgia for the camaraderie and stimulation of our website and book. Like the memory of childbirth, we knew the process had been painful, but the pain itself had disappeared, and all that was left was the heady relief of having gotten through it, and the lasting pleasure of the bundle of optimism we took home when we were done.

But it wasn’t just nostalgia that made us long to return to the roots of Mothers Who Think; it was a sense of necessity. We discovered it was not true that the longer we did this, the better we were at it. We did not, actually, have motherhood all figured out.

We often felt like the flailing mother in British novelist Helen Simpson’s short story “Golden Apples,” who flags down strangers on the street to help dislodge a bean that has found its way up her child’s nose. We recalled the wise observation of a seasoned mother and contributor who said that after those early, intensive years of babyhood and toddlerhood, there was a moment of calm when her work as a mother seemed to lessen,
ix

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