I agree with Melinda, who points out that a whole lot of people out in the big bad world have tough lives, yet few have concluded that the norms of civilization should be rewritten to the tune of their personal suffering. There is plenty wrong with American marriage and family life, to be sure, and much that can and should be thoughtfully critiqued. But "bad mommy" writer Sandra Tsing Loh goes way too quickly to extremes to exonerate herself: Sure, maybe she's done with marriage, maybe marriage won't ever work for her, maybe she lives daily with the guilt of being a bad mom. But is it even an honest question, asking whether marriage or motherhood should be nullified as a result of this? After all, surely some people manage to have satisfying marriages. And most ordinary people like having a mom, or at least wish they had a mom to like.

Twenty years ago, living in England during my husband's sabbatical year, I felt so stressed by the job of raising two small boys that I wished I could conjure up a solicitous wife or mother adjunct who would soothe me on a daily basis. Why oh why did it fall to mothers not just to wipe noses and bottoms, coax toddlers into napping, and enforce time-outs, but to care so much about these little people that we put our own lives on hold to mother them? My fantasy adjunct wife/mother, I believed, would not just change diapers or shop for healthy snacks, she would provide something much more complex and profound -- emotional and psychological backup. So stretched and strained and wearied was I during that year abroad raising my toddler and 3-year-old that I shuddered when told by a breast-feeding friend that "beyond nursing at the breast for milk, nursing infants imbibe their mother's very consciousness." Yikes! Compared with the intensity of this level of psychological and emotional connection, daily privacy issues like being able to sit on the toilet alone were a day at the beach.

All this is a way of saying: Sandra Tsing Loh, I feel your pain.

OK, so now it's 20 years later: I've been married for 25 years and have two young adult sons whose company I enjoy and of whom I am very proud. In other words, I survived and so did my kids, despite the horrifying possibility that they imbibed my maternal consciousness.

Now I spend my days as a therapist trying to undo the damage (or at least stop the damage from getting worse) of truly bad mothers (and fathers). I try to tell the 11-year-old who is facing criminal charges that he's really not a bad kid -- he just thinks he is because his parents have told him so. I ask the 14-year-old who has been bumming cigarettes from her mother since she was a third-grader what it will take for her to trust this mom who has abandoned her repeatedly. I encourage the 14 year-old girl in foster care to stop taking responsibility for her mother's drugging and dealing, but nothing I say stops her flow of tears as she expresses the gap between her love for her mother and her acceptance of the months that pass without even a phone call. Call these women what you will --bad or neglectful or toxic mothers -- or even call them victims, but just don't tell me that because of their incompetence or pathology, all mothers are unnecessary. Any one of these children will tell you that the sun rises and falls on their mother's image. That's the honest-to-god truth about moms.

And so, as a therapist, I am amazed by Tsing Loh's ego strength: because her marriage failed, maybe marriage as an institution is untenable; because she lives out of a car and is a "bad" mother, maybe mothers are unnecessary. There is a personality disorder to describe this type of self-regard (found in the DSM-IV); it's called narcissism.