Don’t Wait Up: Confessions of a Stay-at-Work Mom

For most of Don’t Wait Up by Liz Astrof, I couldn’t decide if I was enjoying it or not. She is a skillful writer, and her descriptions of her childhood compared to the childhood she wanted to give her own children had me alternately laughing and wanting to cry. I didn’t enjoy the tone of her memoir, though; it felt a little too slapstick for me. However, in the last chapter she has a beautiful section that completely encapsulates the struggle in her memoir: “Until I had children of my own, I didn’t realize how important it was to have a mother… a constant presence in the lives you are bringing into the world. That responsibility has long weighed heavily on me, mostly because I’m no more equipped now than the day my son was born and I told Todd not to take the tags off. I have no role model worth emulating in the people who raised me. No road map. No skills. No mother. And it shows. At the very least, I feel it. Yet as time goes on, I’m starting to think there are a lot of moms like me out there.”

Astrof wants to be a good mother. She is a good mother, and she would rather go to work every morning than be at home with her kids. There is nothing wrong with that statement, but many people find it scary. Hopefully, Astrof’s lighthearted memoir is the beginning of a conversation to talk seriously about the many conflicting feelings in motherhood.