Recently, in the hours where I feel the most lost as a mother, the most inadequate, I’ve been thinking about Kristin Lavransdatter. If you haven’t read the book you should, although be warned: there is a 75 percent chance Kristen will strike you as a ridiculous, helpless, ninny for most of the book’s thousand plus pages. Kristin makes terrible decisions all the time and has the worst habit of fainting whenever the going gets rough. But slowly, very slowly, something changes. As she births babies, loses babies, and sacrifices again and again for those babies, Kristin is remade. She becomes a new woman, a woman who you don’t want to dropkick off a cliff.