Look. You can't write anything in public about what you actually do as a mother. Poor Annie Lamott, kind human of the decade, confessed in Salon that she totally lost it one afternoon and slapped her teenage son across the face. She was horrified (although anyone who has raised a teenager knows that look, the cold, insolent, hateful "I dare you" look that comes after weeks of misery, and can easily understand Annie's moment...) .. but you should have seen the letters. Had she decribed the same incident and how she had NOT slapped him, she would have gotten the same degree of vicious excoriation. As it was, the readers worked up into a frenzy that ended up accusing her of near-psychotic abuse of her son, pathological and possibly criminal exloitation for having written about it, and so on. Had she not slapped him they would blame her for an entire generation of damaged children, spoiled, castrated, etc etc etc. You have by now perhaps understood something. The Mother is, was and always will be the target of a hatred and bitterness that reaches way beyond culture and times. You will be called a bad mother no matter what you do, and if your children taje their life difficulties to a psychotherapist of any persuasion, male or female, the chances are very good that you will be blamed . (I'm, a therapist, so I know. I am also a mother.) Your very human, touching and honest article made me wince, mostly because I knew what was coming. Look, everyone has had a mother, and the mother holds for the child a projected numinous power that is just way out there. This is most powerfully felt when it gets a collective going, as in a letters forum, or say, a tribe, like the Taliban. (The Taliban have taken care of mothers very neatly.) In any culture, whether she "overprotects" or "underprotects", she is invested with so much fear and hope that she becomes a symbol for the source of all possible good and all possible evil. then there are the Mommy wars, where the ghastly ambivalence about the whole situation pits mother against mother. It is ugly and stupid and universal. Read a neat book called "The Mermaid and the Minotaur" if it's still in print. And meanwhile, know that you are a perfectly fine, human, flawed, excellent, loving Mom, and that this gang of letter writers is simply expressing the compulsive and collective mob rage that always follows any honest confession of real mothering episodes (as opposed to the canned ones approved by The Myth, Inc.). You can't win with this bunch.