Last weekend, “the five kindest, and swiftest, and wisest bunnies in the whole wide world” delivered baskets of Easter eggs made of chocolate and marshmallow and glitter and gold to every child on Earth. And the bravest of the five, Mother Cottontail, delivered her baskets while wearing a special pair of little gold shoes.
Or so DuBose Heyward tells us in his classic 1939 picture book, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. A book for children, yes, but like all good children’s books, it’s also a book for the parents who read it to them.
It was never my plan to have a child before 30. My mother, my grandmother, and the mothers of pretty much every kid I grew up with in Manhattan were well into their 30s when they gave birth, and my friends and I assumed we would follow suit. Career now, family later.
But then I married a man 25 years my senior and started to rethink the timeline. At 27, I’d submitted my dissertation at Cambridge, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, and had been profiled in The New York Times in an article with the print headline “The Aspirations of Solveig Gold.” Two months later, though, those aspirations moved to the back burner. I was pregnant.
