It was all of these I suppose. I will start with “the world” as I remember it during the years just before and after I wrote the essay “Maternal Thinking” which was published in Feminist Studies in 1980. I was forty-five; my children were fifteen and seventeen. I had been married to their father for twenty-one years and had lived for the previous thirteen years in the same apartment building, subsidized by NYU, which we still live in now. Although I had gone through a period in which I was entirely unable to write, and indeed could hardly read, by 1980 I was writing and have been ever since. In short, when I wrote the essay “Maternal Thinking,” I was living a fortunate, stable life.