Ialways wanted to be a mother. This feeling was in my core but unarticulated and largely unexamined until I became a father . I’d always figured it was one of those things better left unexplored — just writing “mother” made me wince, worried I came off a bit too much like Norman Bates in Psycho . But when I finally became a parent, the idea was clear: Like the old adage “Dress British, think Yiddish,” for me, it was “Be Daddy, think Mommy.”

Of course, that’s a flip oversimplification of the insight the last 18 months have brought. The most obvious explanation: Mothering, for me — the cultivation of shared growth and closeness — was actually a way to unlearn the remove I had inherited from my own parents. I think it’s the sort of thing Freud would have had fun trying to diagnose. Perha

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