Latest Update: 45, and at 3 a.m. today, I finally became a father!.. Both my wife and I are orphans, and no one has congratulated us. Maybe no one will say it, but we want to share this joy anyway . May everyone who blesses us be blessed.

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.

If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world.

On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History.

I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework,