Margo, it's pretty clear most mothers have a hard time with the idea of anything like hate,

and you can use different terms for this, in the context of motherhood.

What do we tend to do with those feelings when they inevitably surface?

What we usually do is we either neglect them or try not to think about them.

We don't give them a space.

And that's really what my work is about.

It's about giving these difficult feelings that we would rather ignore or neglect a space to think about.

Because these feelings actually transform us and transform our mothering.

I often refer to these moments of ambivalence as melting moments.

And I'll just give you an example.

A mother is in the mall with two with three of her children. It's very busy and she's got to go to a store and she says to the kids,

just stay there. I've got to check in my diary what I'm going to be doing here. So she's looking in her diary.

She looks up and one of her children has gone missing.

Now we've all had this experience that moment when we can't find our child.

So she's panicked.

She absolutely does not know what to do.

She doesn't know whether to scream, whether to cry.

She holds her other two children close to her and she's paralyzed.

She doesn't know what to do.

The three minutes feels like three hours.

And she's about to, she doesn't know whether to run or whether, she doesn't know what

to do.

...