Our Little Women Problem

Guest Columnist

By STACY SCHIFF
Published: June 18, 2005

As it seems to be the way things are done around here, I asked my spouse's opinion. Could this working mother thing ever be mastered? "On two conditions," he said, but the rest of the sentence was drowned out by a wail from the other room, where the youngest had raced out of bed so fast that she had collided with her door.

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Stacy Schiff, the author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America" and a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a guest columnist. She was also in the mood for poached eggs, which - my husband helpfully pointed out - Robert Novak was presumably not making this morning. If he was, I wonder if he too was under strict instructions to keep the yolks runny, and to position the eggs in the precise center of each slice of toast. The 5-year-old is a gourmand and a tyrant, equally exacting in her menus as she is stern in her conviction that mothers do not go to their offices on weekends.

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