Women have to sacrifice ambition to have children."

But I think it's really important that children don't feel their parents' emotional lives depend on their success."

Waldman is deluged with responses to her various books and columns and blog entries. She feels that the Internet has become "a toxic place" and that women are "more prone to ad hominem attacks than men."

I think being a mother in this day and age has got to be the hardest job a woman could ever have. It used to be she only had to fear what would happen if her children left the house, who the would meet and what would happen along with the normal everyday fears of health and welfare. Now there's internet stalkers in the home along with drugs and worse outside. A mother has to try and raise normal healthy children to become normal healthy adults while retaining her own sanity.

Parenting is hard, not just mothering. But no job is more rewarding. Making a person? Seeing your best intentions in action? priceless.

Of course sometimes it turns out differently than one would hope. But when I try so hard to instill some ethics, some sense of place in the world for her....and then I see her reflect that....oh, my joy. I can fly.

I pray that she is the person I always wanted to be (you know, inside, the loving goodness I try to put out there), and not hold my shortcomings against me.