I really love staged photographs—where everyone is beautiful and smiling. My daughter is a gentle beauty; my son is a serious, smart boy. I’m such a tender mom with kind eyes. And only I know what happens off camera. How can a gentle beauty become stubborn and not move an inch? How can the son start trying his hand at rhetoric, trying to bring me to white heat with his ironic arguments? And I—an anxious mother with a wild stare—don’t know how to raise children. This book is for moms like me, as well as for dads, grandmothers, and grandfathers who don’t know what to do with children. Masha Traub