This is some REAL TALK about whether women can legitimately be expected to excel at demanding careers and private life these days. Some of her coping mechanisms were pretty ingenious, but I get the sense that the demands on the "good mom" side are way bigger than they were in my day -- or maybe it's a class difference, I don't know. WEEKLY coffee meetings for all the moms in her kids' schools?!?!? When I was a kid, if your parents managed to attend PTA night twice a year they were already in the top 10%. If they worked extra hard to make enough money to send you to summer school, they were in the top 5%. If they also took you camping and gave you piano lessons, they were in the top 1%.

That's brilliant. It's (those issues are) not exclusive to mothers, just that they have to overcome 10x the counter-issues to succeed, so it's 1/10th as many that do.

This is such a contrast to Sheryl Sandberg saying women CAN do it all:

I don't think women can have it all. I just don't think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all. My husband and I have been married for 34 years. And we have two daughters. And every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions. And you have to co-opt a lot of people to help you. We co-opted our families to help us. We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent parents. But if you ask our daughters, I'm not sure they will say that I've been a good mom. I'm not sure. And I try all kinds of coping mechanisms.

I'll tell you a story that happened when my daughter went to Catholic school. Every Wednesday morning they had class coffee with the mothers. Class coffee for a working woman -- how is it going to work? How am I going to take off 9 o'clock on Wednesday mornings? So I missed most class coffees. My daughter would come home and she would list off all the mothers that were there and say, "You were not there, mom."