The doom-saying didn't end with the last century. It remains a private and surprisingly frequent public refrain today. "Anyone who tells you that having a child doesn't completely and irrevocably ruin your life is lying," muses the character Julie Applebaum, who, in "Nursery Crimes," the 2001 novel written by the retired public defender Ayelet Waldman, gives up a career as a public defender to stay home with her new daughter. "Everything changes. Your relationship is destroyed. Your looks are shot. Your productivity is devastated. And you get stupid. Dense. Thick. Pregnancy and lactation make you dumb. That's a proven scientific fact."

It's far from "scientific fact," as we shall see. But this sort of stuff is discouraging to read if you happen to be a mother. So is the following self-deprecating comment made by Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen as she reflects in 2004 on her own reproductive transition: "It was as though my ovaries had taken possession of my brain. Less than a year later an infant had taken possession of everything else. My brain no longer worked terribly well, especially when I added to that baby another less than two years later, and a third fairly soon after that."

During those same years, it's worth noting, Quindlen won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in the New York Times and wrote several successful novels and advice books. No small accomplishments for this mother of three. Yet for some reason, Quindlen feels obliged to assure readers that motherhood has dulled her intellect.

Maybe she's just bowing to peer pressure. Polls in recent decades have tracked a marked decline in many parents' satisfaction with the job of rearing children, a trend owing greatly to the perceived price we pay. Complaining about what our children have done to our finances, moods, hips, and brains has become a fashionable pastime at parties as well as the theme of several recent books. Senility is something you inherit from your kids, we joke. But the new parental angst is serious, and no doubt part of the reason so many women have delayed childbearing right up to the brink of menopause.

I got in just under the wire. By the time I gave birth, at what my obstetrician politely called my "advanced maternal age," I'd waited so long that it was already hard to say whether "Mommy Brain" or early onset of senility was more to blame for my occasional mental lapses. Joey was born when I was thirty-eight years old, Joshua three years later. I knew I was taking the risk of never having children by waiting so long. But I feared that brain damage might cost me the job I'd wanted ever since I was a child.

I was raised in the suburbs, the youngest of four children; my parents were a physician and his stay-at-home wife, a college beauty queen who had dropped out of school to marry. We called my mother "the geisha" when we weren't calling her "the martyr." The family legend was that her fate, and ours, depended upon my father's brilliance. Yet, as I realized only much later, the very perpetration of this legend proved my mother's smarts. She worked under the radar to accomplish her goals, networking at a furious pace to establish her family in the community and further her children's prospects. She waited until I had left for college before earning her own degree; and for ten years thereafter, she taught elementary school children afflicted with learning disabilities.

Although my mother's personal example implied that women's chief priority is to serve their families, she not only took pride in her two daughters' achievements but also encouraged our career plans. We took this for granted, assuming that, unlike her, we were too smart to waste our time cooking and cleaning. All my siblings became medical doctors, but I left the fold early on. At sixteen, I traveled to Nicaragua, then ruled by Anastasio Somoza, as an Amigos de las Americas medical volunteer. I was shocked to learn of my government's support for a dictator who was stealing humanitarian aid and stifling dissent. If more Americans knew, I thought, the support would have to end.

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