This book by Daphne de Marneffe, a clinical psychologist, and mother of three, is a distillation out of her own professional and life experience, covering an important topic overlooked in the psychoanalytic thinking and writing of the past. In a remarkably thorough manner, she has not only researched the existing literature on mother -child bonding, but has also added some new, twenty first century perspectives on women's desire for having and relating to children.

Beginning with a preface, she defines women's desire to spend time mothering as a natural need and one “from which other priorities flowed.”(preface pg. viii). She then posits the following questions: “Where should caring for one's children fit into one's life? What should one do with the desire to care for one's children How should one understand it, think about it, or talk about it?”(preface pg. ix)