I remember picking up the book I Don’t Know How She Does It a couple of months into my first pregnancy. The title sounded like a present-tense version of my desired epitaph, and the plot made it feel a timely read, featuring as it did a busy working mom struggling to be everything to everyone, often to “hilarious” consequence (witness Sarah Jessica Parker, in the film adaptation, endure lice in the conference room! HAHAHA!). I had set myself on the path to working motherhood over a decade before, when I chose in college to pursue a career that would combine prestige, profit, and flexibility in what I figured would be a perfect Cosmo cocktail of Having It All. In the film, Kate Reddy as played by SJP contends that that awful phrase, Having It All, means juggling well–the key being not in how you catch but how you throw. I would have nodded mightily, since at that point in my life (and up until…oh, yesterday?) I equated Having It All with Doing It All.

Hello from the other side.

Read the rest over at Mockingbird!