It was crazy: marriage. You gave your whole life, your whole happiness, over to one other human being, even the best of them inept at times, prone to reach for some other fulfillment, some other pleasure.

Let's just call what happened in the eighties the reclamation of motherhood . . . by women I knew and loved, hard-driving women with major careers who were after not just babies per se or motherhood per se, but after a reconciliation with their memories of their own mothers. So having a baby wasn't just having a baby. It became a major healing.

It was palpable, all that wanting: Mother wanting something more, Dad wanting something more, everyone wanting something more. This wasn't going to do for us fifties girls we were going to have to change the equation even if it meant . . . abstaining from motherhood, because clearly that was where Mother got caught.

We were the daughters of the post-World War II American dream, the daughters of those idealized fifties sitcom families in which father knew best and mother knew her place and a kind of disappointment, and tense, unspoken sexuality rattled around like ice cubes in their nightly cocktails.