On this Mother's Day weekend, here's a shout out to Jessica Grose's mother who as Jess writes, "didn't want to get in the way" of her college age son's and daughter's independence so she would never call them, though they could call her whenever they wanted. It takes a lot of self-discipline to not call an adult daughter. A lot. As I confessed in Slate last year, being available to our grown children without inserting ourselves into their lives is a very tough balance beam to walk. One of the hardest tasks a mother has is recognizing when the job is done. Congratulations to all the moms who have graduated to being the person who can still listen, cheer, and celebrate but somehow refrain from meddling.

Tags: adult children, grown children, jessica grose, Mother's Day, motherherhood

It is not easy to stop being somebody's mommy, but there comes a time when your kids are done. The five-year-old gets on that damn carousel and only two or three horses go up and down before she has a tattoo and a boyfriend. Mimi Swartz in her Double X Empty Nest column wonders how she will restart her life as her son Sam transitions away to his own adult life. Over the next few months she writes that she will explore the burning question, What the hell is she going to do with herself now?

In her first essay, Mimi mentions a family therapist and includes psychotherapy in her hobbies, but I suggest she also consider lowering the volume and increasing her medication during this family shift. When my son graduated high school three years ago, I started writing again. Nevertheless, I was so conflicted to see my baby leave the nest, I metaphorically alternated between shoving him out the door and locking him in the basement. When my daughter left our Washington home, I missed her like crazy, but she called all the time, and that's how I got through it. That and having a toddler. When the former toddler finally started assembling his own tiny twigs in San Francisco, he ignored my e-mails, text messages, and cell phone calls. This is pretty normal behavior, I understand, but it drove me crazy. His silence was the only thing I talked about for months. A friend with three grown sons once assured me, "you can only raise a boy so far," until "some girl comes along and finishes the job." As I wait impatiently for someone to step up to complete Nate, I notice he has started to morph into a man on his own.

Meantime, you keep providing support. We get hooked on their need for us at their first hungry cry. My daughter was already an adult, with some respectable achievement under her belt, before I stopped looking for ways to be useful to her professionally and personally. When I complained how hard I'd worked to lend a hand on one project, she reminded me she hadn't asked for my help. Rachel was glad for my aid, but she didn't need it. "I'm pretty competent," she said "you taught me." She appreciated that I often got good results though, so, she cautioned, "I won't say no to you. ... If you offer to do something for me, I'll let you."

I had just had my first writing piece accepted by the Washington Post when she and her co-director were screening their first documentary at the Maryland Film Festival. I arrived at the theater as the local Baltimore news crew was interviewing the two excited directors. My daughter was so happy to see me she gave me a big hug before asking, "Mom, could you watch our purses?"

However Mimi Swartz and other newly childless mothers cope with having baby adults in their lives, the real challenge will be to the new selves they fashion from what remains. We are middle-aged women with aging parents, tired legs, and husbands who wonder if we'll ever cook again, but there are perks. We keep learning and have new victories. Our experience as managers, policymakers, and problem solvers will provide years of satisfying new adventures. A woman friend I met when our sons were in ninth grade together ran for office the year our boys graduated. She was the mom who wore a school cap and organized team snacks. She now wears one of the best accessories in D.C.: a gold lapel pin with the seal of the U.S. Congress. Capitol Hill police at House entrances wave her past the metal detector. No one asks her about her empty nest.

Tags: adult children, aging, grown children, parenting

Speaking of being bummed out, I felt oddly blue after reading Mimi Swartz’s excellent piece in The Daily Beast about empty-nesters in the Obama administration. Swartz, who also writes for Double X about being an empty nester herself, talks about (and to) White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and also offers up WH Social Secretary Desiree Rogers and First Lady Chief of Staff Susan Sher, among others, as collective proof that professional life isn't over for women—in some ways it's just beginning—when their kids leave for college. This may well be true, and it's striking to see so many redoubtable women in positions of power. I admit to a keen fascination with Jarrett and Rogers, who live in the same apartment building on the Georgetown canalfront and who I like to think of as popping into each other's apartments, like the cast of Seinfeld, or Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, borrowing clothes and gossiping. I hope their glam fortysomething-and-beyond lives are indeed representative of what women can achieve in late midlife. And I do know women in their 40s and 50s who, successful all along, are now enjoying that long-awaited shift into professional overdrive.

Part of me, though, isn't so convinced that they are representative. Age doesn't feel exactly like an advantage, now, at least not in the media industry, which has gone through such swift and wrenching changes—not only economically but technologically. Older workers tend to be expensive, and they can't necessarily aggregate and Twitter. My worry is that when many women pass the 50 or 60 mark, or men for that matter, at least some workplaces will regard them as doddering.

Swartz's piece also served as a weary reminder of how, for women, “sequencing” is such a relentless challenge. The fact that it’s so easy for these women to work 24/7 just underlines how much energy is expended, by women, mostly, adjusting to the stages of working and parenting that come before that. When your kids are little, you struggle with whether to work part-time or full-time and what sort of child care is right; this segues into the teen years, when many mothers uncomfortably suspect that what their kids really need is them, not a babysitter, to be home and available to talk through the zillions of treacherous moral choices teenagers are called upon to make every day. This is why lots of women I know ask their bosses if they can get to work really, really, really early so as to be home early as well. (At a certain point you can't work part-time because your other reponsibility is to make enough to send them to college.) Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it's a puzzled comment: "Your kids are teenagers—they don't need you anymore."

Just recently a friend talked to me about how, if her employers would just give her a few more years of flexibility to get her last child into college, she'd gladly move into the city and come into the office 80 hours a week, work all the time, dedicate herself, monastically, to work. I overhead another mother talking about how much she loved her son but how in a way she was looking forward to when he went to college and she didn't have to rush to get him from after care any more. If we're not careful we'll end up wishing our lives away.

And here's the thing: This wasn't supposed to be an administration dominated by female empty nesters. It was supposed to be a family-friendly administration where it was possible to be a working parent and actually parent. Back in January, Jackie Norris, a mother of three young children, said upon taking a job as Michelle Obama's chief of staff that she expected to "work my heart out during the day and work my heart out as a mother at night." Now Norris has been replaced by the empty-nester Sher, and Ellen Moran, who has two young children and who started out this year as White House communications director, has left that post for family reasons. It’s great that older women are coming into their own, but does this mean that the younger ones are washing out? Or burning out, rather? And without them, how can an administration that has set out to improve the nation's work-family policy show the way?

Photograph of Desiree Rogers (left) and Valerie Jarrett by Paul Morigi/Getty Images.

Tags: Desiree Rogers, Mimi Swartz, Valerie Jarrett

Paris Review editor-in-chief Lorin Stein entered the Franzenfreude fracas early on, with a piece on the Atlantic’s Web site arguing that Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult’s call for critics to “spend more time celebrating mass-market novels” was a kind of “fake populism” that “pretends to speak for women (as if women weren't the overwhelming consumers of serious fiction, whether written by women or men).” Weiner responded by guffawing at Stein’s taste for “made-to-measure Lord Willys shirts,” charcuterie, and Calvados.

That’s the backdrop against which I read Stein’s recent post on the Paris Review’s (gorgeous) new Web site, in which he responds to a reader who asks: “Which books would you recommend to a smart, bored, somewhat alienated teenage girl trapped in the suburbs?” Stein’s put together an appealing list—though, as a former smart (or so I thought!) suburban teenager, Against Interpretation seems like an eyebrow-raising choice for a 16-year-old, even one cast in the Daria mold. (For those who are counting along at home, Stein name-checks five male authors and three females—and he’s sort of sheepish about recommending Donna Tart’s The Secret History.)

What do you think of Stein’s choices—or his picks, in response to another reader’s question, for “philosophical fiction by women”? (OK, I'm finally ordering my copy of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, now that I'm convinced it's not a novelization of that Tom Cruise movie.)

What would be on your list?

Tags: books, Daria, franzenfreude, Jennifer Weiner, jodi picoult, literature, lorin stein, teenagers