Interesting, though at times repetitious on both a micro and macro level. The author was very committed to making the points she wanted to make in the ways she wanted to make them, and did not hesitate to reuse certain transcript elements again and again to illustrate each point. This said, I don't necessarily find this methodologically troubling, and I found many of those points convincing; it was just slightly annoying to read. This is obviously a motivated text, a charge the author strives to challenge in-text, unsuccessfully. As I'm writing this I'm wondering why I'm being so ambivalent and analytical at the top, and I think it's mainly because what the author wanted me to take away from the text and the things I found most compelling about the text don't necessarily overlap. I also think this is an outcome this author wouldn't mind.

The two things I most took from this text are: (1) it provides an interesting look into how gender roles and politics intersect in the Israeli state, and (2) its meditations on gender roles seemed almost to identify motherhood-regret as a form of dysphoria. First things first: Israel is a militarized state for reasons that date before its founding; many of the women the author interviews discuss military service alongside their discussion of motherhood as an example of another role, obligation, or limitation they have experienced in their lives. The book also explores how and why the narrative of reproduction is particularly reinforced in Israel: It behooves Israeli priorities as a state to be as populous as possible for both political and military reasons. Some of the times when I didn't necessarily find this book reflected my understanding of gender and roles were fundamentally rooted in my being, instead, Canadian. These narratives interested me to a very high degree, though. I'm not informed enough about this to comment more about it beyond that.

Secondly: the book's central thesis is argues that treating motherhood like a relationship instead of a role may help women who do regret motherhood feel less isolated and alienated, and/or coax them partially out of a place of shame. Women are multifaceted; they are human; their emotional ranges are complex and need not be condemned simply because they deviate from norms. This argument several times relied on discussions of the act her interviewees felt to be putting on all the time, how they felt incapable of authenticity, how much they were hiding. These women felt their true selves had been irretrievably buried or killed by the expectations motherhood placed upon them. These arguments often resonated to me as roughly analogous to feelings of dysphoria: how enacting a role imposed from without felt, in the process, destructive to oneself. I think my extrapolation here is broad; any role imposed from without can potentially feel destructive in this way. The book's argument is one of self-determination from a feminist perspective; the road is not long from here to an argument for self-determination from a queer perspective. It is in our interest as gendered subjects to reject normative expectations we do not choose for ourselves when possible—this is what these perspectives have in common.

A main flaw of the book only stood out in its final chapter, when the author reveals the socioeconomic circumstances of her interviewees in more depth. Relegating the observations that the poverty experienced by these women may have substantially affected their ability to enjoy their "roles" as mothers to the final chapter seemed to me to bury the lede. I think it was a methodological choice to leave this discussion to the final chapter; the author was immediately keen to stress that regret sometimes stemmed not at all from conditions of poverty, and too much focus on these women's socioeconomic status might have undermined that message, which was central to the book. Despite that I found the book a bit explicitly motivated, it was a very interesting and thought-provoking read, and worth the time I spent with it.