Spooky things happen in houses densely occupied by adolescent boys. When I checked out a four-inch dent in the living room ceilingone afternoon, even the kid still holding the baseball bat looked genuinely baffled about how he possibly could have done it.

Mothers are likely to have more bad days on the job than most other professionals, considering the hours: round-the-clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. . . . You go to work when you're sick, maybe even clinically depressed, because motherhood is perhaps the only unpaid position where failure to show up can result in arrest.

The truth invariably arrives several years after you need it.

It's an old trick now, God knows, but it works every time. At the very moment women start to expand their place in the world, scientific studies deliver compelling reasons for them to stay home.

The naive notion that a mother naturally acquires the complex skills of childrearing simply because she has given birth now seemsas absurd to me as enrolling in a nine-month class in composition and imagining that at the end of the course you are now prepared to begin writing War and Peace.

Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary by pass. After such a monumental assault on the heart, it takes years to amend all the habits and attitudes that led up to it.

Never accept an expert's opinion if it violates your own because the experts can change their minds.

We are expected, somehow, not to offend anyone on our way to liberation. There's an absurd expectation that the women's movement must be the first revolution in history to accomplish its goals without hurting anyone's feelings.

Women aren't trying to do too much. Women have too much to do.

Divorce exposes absolutely ever buried assumption about marriage ... how a husband's sense of entitlement and a wife's sense of duty turned the principle of 'our money, our kids' into the reality of 'his money, her kids.

If a woman is to know herself, then periods of solitude should be courted, planned, and embraced.

Our humor turns our anger into a fine art.

Families don't always realize that mother is exhausted, because mother is always exhausted. Exhausted is what looks normal.

In a culture that gives men irresponsible power and women powerless responsibility, the advancement of civilization cannot be a serious goal.

Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary bypass.

Raising boys has made me a more generous woman than I really am. Undoubtedly, there are other routes to learning the wishes and dreams of the presumably opposite sex, but I know of none more direct, or more highly motivating, than being the mother of sons.

Today, only a fool would offer herself as the singular role model for the Good Mother. Most of us know not to tempt the fates. Themoment I felt sure I had everything under control would invariably be the moment right before the principal called to report that one of my sons had just driven somebody's motorcycle through the high school gymnasium.

Mother is the first word that occurs to politicians and columnists and popes when they raise the question, 'Why isn't life turning out the way we want it?