If you have access, this article on motherhood by Rebecca Mead is worth the read. If you don’t have access, I just wanted to share the closing lines, which ripped my heart out Temple-of-Doom style:

“Children are born into vulnerability and mothers into vigilance; and even then our best may not be good enough. [Donald] Winnicott insisted that love, imperfectly given, was enough to get a child started. What he could not promise was that it would suffice to keep disaster at bay, because it can’t. An awareness of this truth, more fundamental than witching-hour misery or child-hostile workplaces, is the very worst of being a mother.”