The Girls From Ames Part 11

Her primary care physician, who happened to be pregnant herself, was furious that this doctor had phrased it that way. "Listen, Karen," her doctor said, "you do not have a choice. If you go the full nine-month term, your baby will die within minutes of being born. She will not live. You have a year-old child at home. I don't want you waiting four more months to deliver a baby who will not live. End this pregnancy now and move on with your life."

It was December 1993, and Karen was planning to return to Ames for Christmas, then fly to Hawaii with her family for vacation. She called Jane and Cathy, both of whom took the news calmly and weighed in supportively. But it was Jane who first uttered a word that Karen hadn't heard from her doctors and hadn't even contemplated. "You have to do it," Jane said. "You have to have the abortion." Karen hadn't allowed herself to think that the "procedure" being talked about was an abortion. So Jane's comment was sobering and haunting, especially since Karen was Catholic. It put everything in a new and awful light.

Karen told Jane and Cathy how guilty she felt. "I hadn't wanted to be pregnant again so soon," she said. "Maybe this was punishment for not being happy when I learned I was pregnant." Both girls rea.s.sured her that she had nothing to feel guilty about. "It's a genetic disorder," Jane said. "That's it."

Karen decided to take the vacation in Hawaii as planned and then have "the procedure" when she returned. Her week away would allow her moments to say good-bye. At night in Hawaii, her hands on her belly, she'd talk to the little girl she felt moving inside of her, offering words of love and apology.

When she returned home, she went to the hospital, where labor was induced. "I was in the maternity ward," she told Cathy, "but they didn't want me near the other moms and babies. They had me way down the hall, where I wouldn't be seen or heard."

She was in a room without any clocks, which led her to think: "They don't want me to know what time I deliver my baby."

Her husband, Kevin, stood by her side, devastated but trying to stay strong. When the tiny baby was delivered, Kevin felt it would be best if they didn't look at her. "They had her in a blanket, and they took her out of the room," Karen told Cathy. "I kept saying I wanted to see her, and Kevin said, 'No you don't.' And I said, 'Yes, I do. I do!' and then I fell asleep."

Karen understands and appreciates that her husband was acting out of love, but she still regrets not taking a look at the little girl she would have named Emily. And she wonders where the nurses took her when they carried her away. There was no burial, no funeral.

In memory of Emily, Karen has long worn a "mother and child" charm on a gold chain around her neck. It was given to her by her husband in the days after Emily was delivered. Karen rarely takes it off.

One summer back in Ames, Karen met up with some of the other girls, and Kelly watched her as she held that charm between her fingers. "I can only imagine the pain of that," Kelly thought.

Karen went on to have two more children, a son and a daughter. And after Jenny had two miscarriages of her own, Karen helped her by talking about her experience losing a child she never got to know. Jenny and Karen also found strength in the knowledge that fully half of the Ames girls had had miscarriages, and all of them later gave birth to more children.

After Christie died, however, Karen never tried to tell Karla that she empathized. "It has to be so much worse to really know and love the child you've lost," she thought. "I can't tell Karla, 'I know how you feel.' I'm not sure any of us can know how she feels."

On the back porch of Angela's house, as some of the girls sip their morning coffee, Cathy and Angela happen to be seated on the so-called crying couch. Within fifteen minutes, there are tears.

First, Angela gets to talking about how her brother learned he was HIV-positive and about his 1999 death, offering details she has never shared before. "Growing up, he knew he was different." she says. "He once told me that in Sunday school, when he was eight or nine years old, he'd pray that he wouldn't have the feelings he had." As he got older and more comfortable about being gay, Angela's parents would talk to their minister about him. "The minister said, 'If you pray really hard, it'll go away,' " Angela says. When her brother was near death, this minister came to the hospital to suggest that he seek forgiveness for his sins. As Angela recalls it, the minister's basic message was "You can still change. You can still say you were wrong."

Angela's mom had pa.s.sed away four years earlier from breast cancer, and her dad had remarried. Angela says she is so grateful for her stepmother, who turned to the minister that day and politely asked him to stop. Deftly but respectfully, in so many words, she gave the message: "This young man feels like he's going to h.e.l.l because people like you have told him this. It's time for you to leave this room." When the minister left, Angela's stepmother went over to Angela's brother, held his hand and comforted him.

"Thank G.o.d she did that," Cathy says.

Angela gets tearful at the memory, and Cathy moves closer to her, wrapping her arm around her. After Angela composes herself, she says, "My stepmother later told me that maybe her purpose in life was to help my brother die."

Angela's story triggers memories in Cathy, who offers details of her mother's last moments before she died in 2005. She was seventy-seven and had leukemia. Cathy and five of her six siblings were there at the end. Her mother was home, on a rented hospital bed with a special air mattress. She was lucid, talking to everyone until 4 A.M. She pa.s.sed away later that day.

"Just after she died, my brother said a lovely prayer. It was helpful. I felt this kind of calm numbness," Cathy tells the other girls. She describes the scene in the room. "My mom had been on oxygen, and the machine was kind of loud. So we turned it off. But there was still this whirring noise in the room. It seemed to be coming from that hospital bed. So my brother-in-law kneeled down next to my dad, who was praying, and he decided to reach over and turn the switch for the air mattress on the bed. Suddenly, the air in the mattress started going out really fast with this big whoosh, and my mom's body started getting lower and lower . . ."

Cathy makes the sound of the bed deflating. ". . . and so my father turned to my brother-in-law and said, 'Why did you do that?' And my brother-in-law, you could see on his face that he was thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I don't know why I did that!' So he turned the bed back on, and my mother started rising up . . ."

Cathy is laughing now, and so are the other Ames girls. "My mom would have thought that was hysterical."

"Your mom had the best sense of humor," Karen says. All the girls remember Cathy's mom as perhaps the friendliest of the mothers. Whenever they came to Cathy's house, she wouldn't head into another room, like most mothers did. As Cathy always said, "She loved to yuck it up with you guys." She'd sit down with the girls to get the scoop on their lives. And she loved being dolled up. She wasn't very tall, so she liked to wear shoes that gave her a few more inches. The girls remember her looking great, vacuuming her house in her high heels.

"For the funeral, my dad wanted to make sure my mother looked good," Cathy tells the girls, "because, of course, she always wanted to look her best." And so her dad asked Cathy, the well-known makeup artist, if she'd apply her mom's makeup.

Cathy tells the girls of going through her mom's things with her siblings, picking out clothing in just the right colors, and then taking her makeup kit to the mortuary. She stood over her mom's body. "I thought I would be really freaked out, but it was just an act of love. It turned out to be a gift, that I had this chance to do that."

Her mother had really full lips, so Cathy made sure to give her the right shade of lipstick. She worked on her mother's face for about fifteen minutes, and the woman in charge of doing makeup at the mortuary was very impressed. "She asked me if I wanted a job there," Cathy says.

Kelly, Sally and Karla had made it to the funeral for Cathy's mom, which was held in Kansas City. It was a year after Christie's death, and it was not an easy journey for Karla to drive down for it.

The talk on the porch turns to the girls' recollections of that funeral.

"There was that procession, when the whole family was walking out of the sanctuary," Kelly recalls. "It was very emotional."

"I felt so weak. Kelly, you were holding me up," Karla says.

"And we were crying," Kelly says. "People thought we were crying for Cathy's mom, and we were. But it was more than that. We were crying for Karla and for Christie. We were crying for ourselves and our friends.h.i.+p."

It was at that funeral that they saw Sheila's mom after all those years, and asked her about Sheila's death. So that particular day was overwhelming, and unforgettable, on several fronts.

Kelly tries to describe for the other girls what happened after the service. "We ran to the bathroom, Sally, Karla and I, just like we used to do in high school. That's the refuge. And we cried. Horrible, awful crying. And I looked at Sally and said, 'You know, we've done so many important things in ladies' rooms, haven't we?' We smiled at each other. I think Karla smiled, too. And then we hugged Karla, and she cried and I cried and Sally cried. And being together like that, together in that ladies' room, it was just a nice moment for us. A nice moment at a very hard time."

14.Cooperation and Appreciation

Seven of the girls are power walking around Angela's North Carolina neighborhood, and the conversation has turned to parenting.

"Cooperation and appreciation," says Jane. "That's my mantra." Jane says that she keeps repeating the same words to her children. "I tell them all the time: I want them to cooperate and I want them to appreciate. Cooperation and appreciation."

All the girls are now raising their children with a higher standard of living than they knew growing up in Ames. Part of this is because American culture in general is more acquisitive and self-indulgent. And part of it is due to the fact that almost all of the girls have risen into the upper middle cla.s.s. They've taken a step up from what their parents had-in family incomes, in the size of their homes, in the toys and accoutrements that clutter their kids' lives.

Karen says her fourteen-year-old son thinks nothing of asking for a $160 hockey stick, and he'll want it within minutes of eyeing it in a store. "When I was his age, I was deta.s.seling corn, saving up money, and using the money to buy my own clothes," she says. "I'm not sure kids today understand what that was like. There were things I wanted as a kid but would never ask for. I knew there was no reason to ask, because it wasn't in the realm of possibility. My parents wouldn't get it for me anyway."above: The girls' hands on a pregnant Kelly left: Karla and Diana, both pregnant A recollection comes into Karen's head, and she turns to Jenny. "Remember in junior high? What was the coolest magazine?"

"Teen Beat," says Jenny. "I had a subscription."

"Yes, and I'd always go to your house to read it. Every issue. I never asked my parents for my own subscription. I knew it wasn't necessary. Because, hey, I could just go to your house and read it there."

The girls talk about the definition of "spoiled."

"When I think of spoiled, I think of obnoxious and unappreciative," says Karen. "I wouldn't describe my kids like that. But they're spoiled in the sense that they have no trouble just asking for whatever they want. My son wanted a Razr phone. It's three hundred dollars. He just asked."

Karla says that in the wake of Christie's death, she has a heightened sense of the needs, moods and desires of her two surviving kids, Ben and Jackie. She knows how they feel inside-like a part of them is missing without Christie-and she knows it's naive to think she could fill that emptiness by buying them material things. Still, she admits that she has relented at times when they wanted her to buy them something. She knows life is fleeting and she wants them to be happy and feel whole.

All the girls want their children to be happy, of course. But when they think back to their own childhoods, they realize that their parents weren't especially focused on keeping them happy and satiated. Their parents didn't just give them things. Their parents were more apt to say: "You want something? Find a way to get it and leave me out of it." As Karen sees it, there's less of that philosophy in the culture of parenting today.

She reminds the girls of the time she and Karla were in a department store fas.h.i.+on show. As a reward, they got a discount on clothing. "I was so excited," she says. "I had saved up my babysitting money, and I used it to buy a pair of Calvin Klein jeans, which was a real extravagance."

The girls lament that the idea of wanting, saving, buying, savoring is foreign to a lot of kids today, even kids in Ames. These days, the students at Ames High and elsewhere in Iowa might not be as hip as kids in, say, Beverly Hills, but they're still full-fledged consumers, like their peers all over America. At least that's what the girls are hearing from loved ones back home. "My niece in Iowa went to get a bra and underwear for the prom and spent seventy dollars," says Karen.

Jane circles back to her original point. The fact that kids have more today isn't necessarily terrible, she says. But she urges the other girls, in their roles as mothers, to adopt her mantra.

She tells them a story: "A couple of summers ago, my family was out all day doing fun stuff. We went to the water park. We went out to eat. It was almost the whole day. And we got home at four o'clock and the girls were asking Justin and me, 'What do we do now?' Like they were already bored. And I'm thinking, 'Jeez! We've been having a good time all day long! What am I, a camp director?' And that's when I started saying, 'Things won't be going well in this house, and fun times won't be happening, unless we have cooperation and appreciation.' I think everything can be distilled down to those two words."

The girls stop walking to stand under a tree and take a drink from their water bottles. That's when Kelly says that maybe they should cut back on their pining for the good old days and their complaining about young whippersnappers. They're starting to sound like grouchy old ladies.

"Anyway, on some level, I think our kids do understand the issues," Jane says, and then offers up another story. At Hebrew school, her daughter Hanna was recently given an a.s.signment. The kids were studying the Ten Commandments, and each was asked to create an appropriate eleventh commandment. Hanna came up with "Thou shalt be appreciative."

"She explained to me that people don't appreciate all the things they have, and they should," says Jane. "And I was so thrilled. I said to Justin, 'Wow, the kids heard us! We're getting through!'

"You know, it's funny, because half the time, as your kids get older, you feel like you're talking to a wall. You feel like an inanimate object that they're ignoring. But sometimes, when you're just living your life, they surprise you, and when they do, wow, it's so great."

From the moment Karla delivered Christie in 1990, and through all the children who've followed, the girls have been trading an unending procession of motherhood tales.

Often, their reports from the home front are meant merely to entertain.

In a 1999 letter to all the girls, Marilyn described her daughter, Emily, as a three-year-old optimist with "a zest for skipping" rather than walking. "On warm summer days, she likes to exclaim with delight, 'It's our lucky day!' "

That same year, Jane's younger daughter was two years old. "Sara shows a strong independent streak," Jane wrote. "She seems to have no fear except for clowns and ice-cream trucks. Our only fear is the day Sara sees a clown driving an ice-cream truck!" Meanwhile, Hanna was four years old that year, and when she got her tonsils out, she took a liking to the Vicodin she was taking for her pain. "We then had another problem," Jane wrote, "a kid who kept pleading with us, in shorter and shorter intervals, for more Vicodin-even after the doctor said she was completely healed and in no need of pain medication. Fortunately, we were able to stop just short of a twelve-step program."

Sally's daughter Lindsay won her school's spelling bee at age ten in 2001, "so now we are spelling more than we talk in our house, in preparation for the next level of compet.i.tion," Sally wrote.

The girls identified their kids to each other in part by their quirks. At age three, Karla's son Ben was a loud talker. At age six, Kelly's daughter Liesl wanted hair like Jan Brady of The Brady Bunch The Brady Bunch. At age eight, Marilyn's son David decided to wash his Game Boy in the sink, and Marilyn had to use a hair dryer to dry it out and get it working again. Those were among the million anecdotes the girls shared with each other.

On some fronts, the girls first got involved with each other's kids prenatally. In 1998, for instance, Kelly, Karla and Diana visited Cathy's house in California. On the plane ride west, Kelly watched Diana devour a McDonald's Big Mac. "I've never seen you eat like that before!" Kelly said. "Maybe you're pregnant." Diana and her husband had two daughters at the time, and hadn't yet settled on the idea of having another child. But in L.A., the other girls convinced Diana to go to a drugstore and buy a pregnancy test. Sure enough, and to her surprise, she tested positive. So the Ames girls knew the good news-she was pregnant with her third child-before her husband did.

From the time they each got email accounts, the Ames girls have been asking each other for instant advice regarding their kids. One of them recently had questions about attention deficit disorder and teens-what are the signs?-and threw it out to the other girls. Sally and Kelly weighed in as teachers. Cathy offered nutritional advice. Everyone had thoughts.

A few days later, Jenny wrote an email to everyone about her three-year-old son, Jack, having trouble sleeping through the night. Marilyn wrote back about her own son's sleep issues, but no one else responded to Jenny's email. Finally, Jenny wrote again, "Hey, did you guys forget about me and my question?"

Jenny didn't have Jack until she was forty-one, so he is by far the youngest of the twenty-one children. Because the other Ames girls are now focused on their own preteens and teens, they've moved on from toddler issues. Jenny's follow-up email, written with mock indignation, left the girls slightly guilt-ridden, and most felt obliged to recollect how they'd dealt with nap time and sleepless nights. "You know what? I don't really remember how we got through it," Karla said.

The girls enjoy observing the ways, big and small, in which each of them chooses to make her commitment to motherhood. Karla makes sure she provides nutritious after-school snacks and meals. Marilyn keeps in mind her dad's final wishes to remember the things he did for her that made her happy, and to do those things for her own kids. Karen, who rarely misses her sons' hockey games, realizes that she is very comfortable with her decision to be a stay-at-home mother. "I know there are lots of wonderful working mothers," she says, "but for me personally, I love being at home to get my kids to school in the morning, and to be there when they get home. When we are in the car together going to hockey practice, that's a great time to talk and hear what's going on in their lives."

In Jenny's case, when Jack was an infant, she felt strongly about the benefits of nursing him. And so, at an Ames girls gathering at Diana's house in Arizona, with Jack back home in Maryland, she brought along a breast pump. The need to pump didn't stop her from joining any activities. She sat with everyone, talking and pumping away. Jane came up with her own pet name for the machine, Big Betty, which the other girls quickly adopted. They had some good laughs impersonating what they called "the milking machine," which sounded like a piece of heavy machinery.

No one told Jenny they had dubbed her device "Big Betty," and then Jane casually mentioned it in an email after the reunion. Jenny asked for an explanation.

"I kept talking about Big Betty because I think it's so cool that you are nursing, and so dedicated to pumping, which I never got the hang of," Jane replied to Jenny, cc-ing everyone else. "I also think it's cool that you were so freely pumping in the mix of things. That's just as it should be. No need for a nursing mother to miss out on the conversation."

Jenny responded: "Well, I'll be packing up Big Betty to take down to Mexico with me on vacation this Friday. I'll be pumping and dumping, as FedEx will not allow me to s.h.i.+p my milk from country to country. It'll break my heart pouring that liquid gold down the drain. But I'm leaving my parents with about thirty-five bags of frozen breast milk, so that ought to be a good start. The things we do for our kids!

"When Jack is older and he is screaming that I don't love him-or is that something that only girls do to their mothers???-I'll be sure to remind him of my time spent pumping every day, three times a day, at the office, on vacation, in the middle of the night, in the wee hours. . . ."

As a girl, Jane had always a.s.sumed she'd be a working mother, and figured she'd end up as a professor. Given that she was the daughter of an anthropology professor and a social worker, it's not surprising that she got to college and narrowed her interests down to anthropology, sociology and psychology. After taking some sociology courses, however, she decided that the topics of sociology, such as solving the problems of poverty, were just too broad and unmanageable. "I was drawn to psychology, where I perceived the issues to be more specified and empirically testable," she says, sounding very much like the academic she has become. She spent several summers at Grinnell College working with live pigeons doing operant conditioning research; that's the use of consequences to modify behavior. She considered pursuing graduate work in animal learning, but instead got her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology.

When her students post comments on "Rate Your Professor" Web sites, almost all of them give Jane high marks: "Professor Nash is a very clear teacher. She uses lots of everyday examples. Very specific grader, though, so study specifics." "Best professor ever! She's super-motherly. She expects a lot from you and sets the bar high. If you like to learn, to be treated like an adult, and don't mind high expectations-take Nas.h.!.+"

Jane is proud of her career, but like all of the other working mothers among the Ames girls, she calls her children her greatest accomplishment. "Time will tell, however, if we've really done our work well," she says.

Her wishes for her two daughters are specific. "I want them to become happy, fulfilled women who feel a sense of pride in themselves," she says, "and most importantly, I want them to really love each other. I always say to them, 'Friends come and go, but you always have your sister.'" Of course, that's not true for her, since she has all the other Ames girls. But she thinks her experience is something of an exception to the rule. "Friends often fade into the background," she says, "and your siblings are always in the foreground-at least in a semi-functional family."

Jane says finding a work/life balance is the greatest challenge in her life. Her job is somewhat flexible. She can take some of her work home, such as grading papers or a.s.sessing labs. Then again, when she's in the house, her girls always need her to drive or talk or whatever. "When I'm at home," Jane says, "I often feel conflicted about which hat I'm wearing, my professor hat or my mom hat."

Her husband, Justin, is very involved with the girls, and that helps. "He's patient," she says, "when I'm at the end of my rope and want to renegotiate our roles or responsibilities. But the fact remains that I'm home earlier from work than he is, so there are many tasks that fall on my shoulders in the afternoon and early evening."

The one area in Jane's life where she feels most compromised-and she has discussed this with the other Ames girls-is the time she gets to spend on herself. "I'm talking about the things that aren't about work and aren't about family."

Looking at her life, she realizes she's pretty much down to two "me time" things-running and her book group. "Both come with plenty of guilt a.s.sociated with them," she says.

Jane started running in 1997, after her second daughter, Sara, was born. "I was on maternity leave, and home with a baby and a three-year-old," she says. "Before I became a runner, the day would start with a baby crying or my older daughter wanting breakfast. This seemed like a tough beginning to what was going to be a long day. So one day I decided that I would get up before everyone else and go for a walk. Then at least I would have some fresh air and would have accomplished one thing before the day began in full.

"Well, walking was taking too long, so I started running. And when I returned home, I found two kids who were dressed and fed." Her husband had stepped into the void, so to speak. And her older daughter was able to dress and feed herself.

"Now what would you have done?" Jane says. "Well, if you were like me, you would try that again the next day and then the next and then the next. All of a sudden, I had become a runner to escape what I called 'the morning mommy onslaught.' "

In her general psychology cla.s.s, Jane has actually used this story as an example of "negative reinforcement."

As her daughters got older, Jane would continue to try to sneak out of the house early. "I didn't want the girls to see me leaving and giving myself what I perceived as this very selfish alone time," she says. "Yes, I can't shake the guilt. But then Justin convinced me to let Hanna and Sara actually see me going for a run, so they could witness a woman trying to stay fit-and taking time to do something for herself."

Jane hadn't exactly considered that she could be a role model for her daughters by taking time for herself away from them. It took her husband to give her that insight.

The Ames girls appreciate sharing these sorts of "aha" moments with each other.

Sally was sick a lot early in her pregnancies. One day when she was pregnant with her second daughter, she was kneeling on the floor of the bathroom, throwing up. Her older daughter, then two years old, was casually swinging the toilet lid up and down, banging it on Sally's head as she was vomiting, asking, "Whatcha doing, Mommy?"

Sally told the other Ames girls: "As she was banging away on my head, I was thinking, 'How in the world did this become my life? Throwing up while being a.s.saulted by a toddler with a toilet lid?' "

Perhaps because she's a teacher, Sally has found lessons in the stresses of motherhood, and she has shared these with the other girls.

Her younger daughter, Katie, was a very fussy baby. "She cried for about three months straight," Sally says. One day, Sally was driving back to Ames to see her parents, her husband wasn't with her, and she was feeling overwhelmed. Katie was a baby. Lindsay was two years old.

"Katie had been crying continuously," Sally later wrote in an email to the other Ames girls. "Lindsay kept trying to keep a pacifier in Katie's mouth, to give her a bottle-just something to stop the noise. I felt so exhausted and tense. Finally, Katie fell asleep and there was blissful silence for about two minutes. Then Lindsay said, 'Mom . . . Hey, Mom . . .' I really just wanted quiet, so I gave her an exasperated, annoyed and impatient 'What is it?'

"I turned to look in the backseat and saw Lindsay looking at Katie. Then she said, 'I just think Katie is so beautiful.' I of course told her that I agreed that they were both beautiful. But honestly, I felt ashamed that my two-year-old showed so much more patience with the whole situation than I had."

As mothers, the girls also help each other by straightforwardly sharing the ways they've found to cope and then thrive.

After she quit work to stay home with Alexa, her first daughter, Diana found herself emotional for long stretches. Alexa did a lot of crying. Diana seemed to cry even more. Her husband would come home at dinnertime and he'd find her sitting on the floor of the closet, crying. "Alexa just keeps crying and I don't know how to get her to stop," she'd say. She had more experience, of course, by the time she had her other two daughters. But she has admitted to the Ames girls that until her youngest reached kindergarten, "I felt like we were completely out of control, like we were literally drowning." She told the Ames girls about a mother in her daughters' elementary school who left the kids and moved to a beach in Mexico.

When she was overwrought or was struggling to discipline the kids, Diana would tell her husband, half seriously, half kidding: "That's it! I'm moving to Mexico!" And he'd respond: "No. You can stay here. I'm moving to Mexico!" They both made it through without moving to Mexico.

The age difference between Kelly's sons, Quin and Cooper, is just fourteen months, and when they were boys, sibling rivalry led to a lot of arguing and physical fights. "I can't deal with it," Kelly told Diana one day. "None of my teaching skills are working. We'll go to McDonald's and they'll both demand the same Happy Meal toy. Then they'll get in the minivan and they'll both want the same seat." Kelly feared her older son, Quin, might actually hurt Cooper. "Cooper lets his older brother pummel him," Kelly said. "I'm freaking out. I have no strategies." Diana had joined a parenting group, and she asked other parents there for input. When they suggested a certain book on sibling rivalry, Diana immediately sent it to Kelly as a present. "That book saved me," Kelly recalls. "It helped me realize that I wasn't a failure-that even good kids and good parents go through this." (As a teen, Cooper is six-foot-four, and his older brother, who's five-foot-ten, knows not to mess with him. "Both boys are in wrestling and play football, and now they're best friends," says Kelly.) Marilyn felt a bit of postpartum depression after her first child was born in 1994. She was on maternity leave from her job as a career consultant. "You feel like having a baby should be great," she said, "especially when you're a first-time mother. And then, well, some of it is not so great." Her son Christopher was born in the fall, and by the time she was comfortable taking him out and about, it was winter in Minnesota-cold, icy, dark. She'd find herself driving around with Christopher, feeling sleep-deprived, nervous and grouchy.

After her other two kids were born, she sometimes felt resentful, even doing things she enjoyed. She had always loved going to the family lake house, where she had so many childhood memories. But now the idea of packing up the kids and all their belongings felt like an unpleasant ch.o.r.e, not an adventure. Her mother noticed that she just didn't seem like herself, and told her so.

Marilyn had worked until her third child was born, but by 2000, she had stopped working and was home caring for the kids while her husband, Chris, a business consultant, was on the road four days a week. She felt very lonely, with three kids under age six to look after, mostly by herself.

At one point, she took her kids to the pediatrician and he asked her how she was making out as a mother. She told him: "I feel like I'm raising my voice a lot more than I ever have in my life. I'm concerned about that." The doctor's response: "Well you have three little kids and a husband who's out of town a lot. It's normal to feel this way."

Still, something didn't feel right to Marilyn. She eventually went to her own doctor and was diagnosed with depression. Since then, she has taken mild antidepressants, which she says "take the edge off" and make her a more patient, more loving, happier mother. A large part of her feels very fulfilled, focusing her life, at least for now, on helping her three kids learn how to appreciate and embrace education, to find a path to more independence-and to be better people.

She has told the other girls that she calls one of her medications "the be-a-nice-mommy-instead-of-a-screaming-b.i.t.c.h pill." "I can definitely tell when I'm not on it," she says. "I become a 'screaming meemie. ' Even the dog has the sense to run for cover."