I wasn’t a stay-at-home mother, but I dropped off and picked up my kids from school every day, organized their activities, took them to the doctor, bought their clothes, kept them fed, homework, bath, bed, the whole schmear. (When I showed my husband this essay, he wrote in the margins, “Um, you weren’t totally on your own: I dropped off one or the other kid every day and at least in my memory got them breakfast every morning.” The former note is sort of true, the latter is a complete fantasy. PS: He also suggested the Richard Gere comparison above.)

By the late 1990s, my husband made a very (he inserted that word) good living, but we were a family of four in New York City, so we needed both incomes. There were years when I taught 11 classes and wrote books and screenplays, book reviews, the occasional essay, all while running our household and intermittently hospitalizing my parents. I also didn’t have a classic office job like Bruce’s, which meant my days had flexibility. I could do laundry at 2 in the morning while grading papers — the trifecta being simultaneously food shopping on Fresh Direct.



I know our life sounds rarefied, but at the time, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.