Maternal Desire by Daphne de Marneffe New York:  Little, Brown and Company; 2004,  401 pp.

Considering the fact that I spend, by choice, a fair amount of my time engaged in the task of mothering my own children, the strong negative reaction I had while reading de Marneffe's Maternal Desire was more than puzzling to me. I struggled throughout the book to understand my unexpected response to what another part of me recognized as a valuable contribution to the literature. The irony did not escape me when I found myself booking a long weekend flight to the east coast to visit a friend. It was one way to carve out at least six hours of uninterrupted time to finish the book. It seemed as though every time I sat down to read the book, one of my children would scream, “Mom … I need you!” After awhile, the book itself began to feel like another demanding child! Often, while reading the book, I found myself thinking of Winnicott's “Hate in the Countertransference” (/1958) and his long list of all the reasons — 18, to be exact — why a mother hates her baby (p. 201). I think this paper kept coming to mind because Winnicott knew very well that mothering and a woman's desire to mother have very little to do, if anything, with an intellectual endeavor. De Marneffe's book is very much an intellectual endeavor, and for that she is to be commended. But, mothering is everything about feeling wildly disparate feelings — strong and dangerous feelings — and finding a way to contain and embrace them all. Although de Marneffe acknowledges this, I felt her book leaned too far in the direction of a love story, risking the romanticization of motherhood. In my first draft of this review I began by detailing a horror story about the day-to-day chaos, unpredictability, and exhaustion of being a mother, and I ended the review with a love story about being a mother. My horror story was much more detailed and wretched than my love story. Upon reflection, I think that was my reaction to her attempt to counter the early feminist writers who emphasized the constraints that motherhood