For women, the ques­tion of whether or not to have a child can feel less like a per­son­al choice than a lit­mus test. Hav­ing (or not hav­ing) chil­dren serves, even in 2012, as a mea­sure of one’s wom­an­ly val­ue, a more or less final state­ment as to whether one has suc­ceed­ed at being prop­er­ly alive and female. In Why Have Kids?, Fem​i​nist​ing​.com founder Jes­si­ca Valen­ti demon­strates this pres­sure with a remark­able num­ber of cul­tur­al exam­ples — from the CDC’s rec­om­men­da­tion that all uterus-bear­ing women regard them­selves as ​“pre-preg­nant” and tai­lor their per­son­al health plans accord­ing­ly, to the ​“par­ent­ing” blog at the New York Times whose title, Moth­er­lode, address­es only one parent.

The truth is that parenting is really hard, it isn’t always rewarding and it doesn’t always bring you joy—that’s OK! Who said it was kids’ job to make you happy?

Valenti’s book is inspired in part by the pre­ma­ture and life-threat­en­ing deliv­ery of her own daugh­ter, Lay­la, in 2010. She admits to drink­ing the per­fect mom Kool-Aid: Two days before she was hos­pi­tal­ized for an emer­gency C‑section due to preeclamp­sia and HELLP syn­drome, she was tour­ing the birth sec­tion of the hos­pi­tal, ​“torn between the birth cen­ter – relax­ation tubs and brag­ging rights on giv­ing birth ​‘nat­u­ral­ly’ — or a hos­pi­tal room where there were sweet, sweet epidu­rals.” The less-than-sweet real­i­ty of the birth left Valen­ti, as she puts it, ​“mourn­ing the preg­nan­cy and child­birth I thought I was going to have.” Worse: Due in part to her child­birth-relat­ed PTSD, she couldn’t feel the effort­less, all-ful­fill­ing ​“emo­tion­al orgasm” of love for her daugh­ter that she’d been told would come naturally.

This leaves Valen­ti in an ide­al posi­tion to inter­ro­gate the myths that sur­round ​“per­fect” moth­er­hood. She writes that the oh-so-mock­able ide­al of smug­ly over-involved hip­ster-mom­dom (teach lit­tle Tim­my to knit his own clothes! And play the bass! And write a per­sua­sive school paper on the neces­si­ty of food co-ops!) may be ​“just the under­stand­able out­come of expect­ing smart, dri­ven women to find sat­is­fac­tion in spit-up.” Like­wise, moth­ers refus­ing to vac­ci­nate their chil­dren may sim­ply have an under­stand­able dis­trust of the med­ical estab­lish­ment based on its his­to­ry of mis­un­der­stand­ing or pathol­o­giz­ing women’s expe­ri­ences, com­bined with a faulty edu­ca­tion from the ​“Uni­ver­si­ty of Google.” And she points out that these pres­sures are dou­ble-edged. While wealthy white women whose priv­i­lege affords them ful­fill­ing careers are encour­aged to drop those jobs for a life of water-birthing and dia­per-chang­ing, women of col­or and poor women are called ​“lazy” for stay-at-home par­ent­ing, and often harsh­ly pun­ished or even jailed for their par­ent­ing choic­es. Valen­ti cites the case of Raquel Nel­son, a woman of col­or, whose 4‑year-old son A.J. ran out into traf­fic; Nel­son fol­lowed to save his life, and she, her daugh­ter and A.J. were hit by a van. When A.J. died, an all-white jury con­vict­ed Nel­son of sec­ond-degree vehic­u­lar homi­cide, reck­less con­duct and — here’s the kick­er — fail­ing to cross at a crosswalk.

Valenti’s empa­thy for moth­ers is matched by her impa­tience for plat­i­tudes about moth­er­hood. Half of the book is head­ed ​“Lies” and ques­tions such sacred cows as ​“chil­dren make you hap­py” (stud­ies show that par­ent­ing decreas­es sat­is­fac­tion with life) and the idea that being a full-time par­ent is ​“the hard­est job in the world.” (If it’s so dif­fi­cult and so all-impor­tant, Valen­ti won­ders, why aren’t more men vol­un­teer­ing to prove them­selves by under­tak­ing it? And why isn’t it paid?)

These myths not only sad­dle women with unfair guilt, Valen­ti argues, but also pre­vent pro­gres­sive mobi­liza­tion around the work of par­ent­hood itself.

​“It seems to me that a lot of the polit­i­cal ambiva­lence around par­ent­ing issues come from this idea that the par­ent­ing is a reward in and of itself,” she writes to me in an email. ​“That we don’t need things like sub­si­dized child care or paid leave because our kids are ​‘our prob­lem’ and besides, they’re such a joy any­way, what do we have to com­plain about!? It’s a way to main­tain the sta­tus quo.

​“But the truth is,” she con­tin­ues, ​“that par­ent­ing is real­ly hard. It isn’t always reward­ing. And it doesn’t always bring you joy. That’s OK! Who said it was kids’ job to make you hap­py? I think if we’re more hon­est about the strug­gles of par­ent­ing and what par­ent­ing real­ly looks like, we can be more upfront about what we need to make every­day par­ent­ing easier.”

Valen­ti sug­gests a few com­mon­sense solu­tions, many of which have been pro­mot­ed by fem­i­nists and pro­gres­sives for some time: paid par­ent­ing, extend­ed mater­nal leave, a com­mu­ni­ty-based approach to rais­ing chil­dren rather than a strict­ly indi­vid­u­al­is­tic, Mom-or-noth­ing focus. But, she admit­ted in our con­ver­sa­tion, ​“We just haven’t had much luck mobi­liz­ing women around the issue. I see great fem­i­nists and fem­i­nist orga­ni­za­tions doing work on moth­er­hood, but it doesn’t get the same atten­tion that some­thing like abor­tion rights or vio­lence against women does.”

Valen­ti also address­es the oth­er half of the equa­tion: fathers. In one of the book’s dis­turb­ing (yet unsur­pris­ing) anec­dotes, Valen­ti writes of her hus­band attend­ing a read­ing group of men, who were all fired up over a Nation arti­cle on struc­tur­al inequities in par­ent­ing. When her hus­band asked how many of the men present would be will­ing to share equal par­ent­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty, the room fell silent. Most of the men present admit­ted to want­i­ng a female part­ner who would shoul­der the work her­self, and sim­ply ​“fig­ured that the women in their lives would be more than hap­py to take on the pri­ma­ry role of care­giv­er … nev­er mind that these men were dat­ing writ­ers, edi­tors, and activists at the time.” Valen­ti stress­es that these were ​“pro­gres­sive, pro-same-sex mar­riage, anti-racism dudes who are all about chang­ing pol­i­cy — just not their lives.”

Mean­while, polit­i­cal talk of par­ent­hood has been monop­o­lized by the Right, which invokes the moral sanc­ti­ty of moth­er­hood and ​“tra­di­tion­al fam­i­ly” to legit­imize an all-out assault on repro­duc­tive care and choice, not to men­tion on queer and trans­gen­der peo­ple. As long as those emp­ty plat­i­tudes con­tin­ue to per­me­ate the dis­course, we’ll be left with the dynam­ic Valen­ti describes: women bear­ing a uni­lat­er­al bur­den of par­ent­ing-relat­ed guilt (even if they don’t have chil­dren at all) and men who have fuzzy feel­ings about par­ent­hood in the­o­ry but star­tling­ly con­ser­v­a­tive expec­ta­tions of it in practice.

One book may not be enough to start a pro­gres­sive mobi­liza­tion to reclaim par­ent­hood. But thanks to Valenti’s brav­ery in writ­ing about her own ambiva­lence (nev­er some­thing peo­ple want to hear from moth­ers) and her will­ing­ness to claim a fem­i­nist rhetoric of moth­er­hood — in the vein of sec­ond-wave clas­sics such as Adri­enne Rich’s Of Woman Born— serves as an admirable chance to restart the conversation.