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In Between Interruptions, an anthology of essays on motherhood edited by Cori Howard, Denise Ryan describes the queries and unsolicited manuscripts she receives as editor of a newspaper:

The columns they submit sound frighteningly similar, as if they've all come from the same mommy factory. There are the standbys: spit-up on unwashed clothes, lack of sleep, unwashed hair, mommy brain, unwashed floors. There is plenty of cheery ruminating on the tug between feelings of frustration and the absurd pleasure of it all, and there's always some variation on the theme of "my milk-duds are a-flapping and I'm too tired for sex."

There are variations on these standbys in Howard's anthology, too, provoking one to wonder what more there is to say about contemporary motherhood that, however worthwhile, hasn't been said already in forums like Salon magazine's 1999 anthology Mothers Who Think, edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, or the online magazine, Literary Mama, which spawned a number of collections edited by Andrea J. Buchanan. We've come a long way from Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, as an unprecedented wave of publishing by and about mothers in books, magazines and blogs has removed any remaining mystique that surrounds motherhood.

Howard arranges Between Interruptions around five themes -- Ambition, Anxiety, Guilt, Devotion, and Redemption -- a choice that seems so arbitrary that she could just as easily have gone with the "Seven Deadly Sins." (Sloth: Unwashed hair and floors. Envy: Bugaboo strollers. Pride: My child in a Bugaboo stroller.) These categorizations, however, hinting vaguely of Burke's guilt-redemption cycle at the basis of all rhetoric and human drama, or even of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress -- the allegorical Everywoman or every mother's experience -- impose a limitation and universalizing tendency at odds with the anthology's subtitle: "30 Women Tell the Truth about Motherhood."

The truth, as Howard's contributors demonstrate, is that there are many truths. Some of them are just more interesting than others.

Among the more interesting are essays by Globe and Mail staff writers Marina Jimenez, Katrina Onstad, Elizabeth Renzetti and Leanne Delap. Onstad's take on the cultishness of motherhood and its mass-marketed trappings is humorous and incisive. "Baby yoga ($15) is retarded," she notes; "Doing yoga with a baby between your legs is uncomfortable. It's like trying to do yoga with a baby between your legs." Fashion and style journalist Delap describes in "Falling from Grace" how she let vanity and the desire to have-it-all interfere with her marriage and parenting, and though she still leads a life more glamorous than most, hers is a cautionary tale that suggests that we can't always get what we want (but you get what you need).

There's also a discussion between novelist Joy Kogawa and her daughter, Deidre Kogawa-Canute, that offers a glimpse of private tenderness, and reflects on the shaping forces of family history and values and how relationships are formed on the shifting, tenuous ground of memory and childhood perceptions. Other selections, like those by celebrities Chantal Kreviazuk and Carrie-Ann Moss, and those in the handwringing territory of the chapter titled, "Guilt," are less polished though earnest. Many other stories are engaging and thoughtful, but also familiar and sentimental, in ways that perhaps only another mother could love. When a visiting friend of my husband flipped through my review copy of this book, the pages fell open upon the words, "I take my wine upstairs in search of Zen," which, alas, confirmed every cliché he'd ever believed about women and mothers.

It is Ryan's essay, "The Other Side of Brightness," which dips into memories of her own mother's depression, that takes the conversation beyond the chitchat. Ryan, while noting the sameness of the mothers who submit queries to her, mentions their references to short-story writer Alice Munro ("Did I know that [she] wrote at the kitchen table while she baked bread and her children played around her feet?") as they defined their desire to balance work and motherhood.

Interestingly, Munro draws her material from the rhythm of everyday life, its "dailiness," and not just the succor of domesticity but the vagaries that lurk on the other side of it. This is where Ryan draws her truth -- that "motherhood is an uneven passage through all that is precarious and terrifying in life." Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker has described "the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything." Here is the idea that in our role as mothers, as creators, we are living a life we had not lived before, and had not imagined completely until the moment we became mothers. As Becker said, "to live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything."

Motherhood is one ticket to this awareness. Joanna Streetly's essay, which reflects on raising her toddler while living surrounded by water on Vancouver Island, similarly treads in and around the flip side of happiness, how quickly a child can slip into water, and disappear from us.

Howard seems to have missed an opportunity to expand on this compelling idea; or at least, it is lost in the crowd.

To give a less than glowing review to Howard's anthology seems as heartless as not helping a mother with a stroller down the steps of a streetcar. Mothers deserve our support. We want to be their cheerleaders. It would be wrong, if not solipsistic, though, to celebrate the clubby exclusiveness of motherhood, or to suggest that becoming a mother vaults women into a special status, an identity that is entirely separate from the one she had before she entered motherhood. It would not serve our understanding of motherhood to fetishize it.

Perhaps this is where Howard was trying to go with her "many truths." In her introduction, "The Whole Motherhood Thing," she comments on the way that mothers have struggled with the transformation that motherhood can bring on. "Here in Canada, unlike Guatemala or any number of Third World countries, we like to keep babies and children separate from the adult world. We don't integrate them into the fabric of our lives," she notes.

Between Interruptions is named for "a conversation constantly interrupted by kids, husbands and work" and attempts to "bring women together in this book to continue this long, constantly interrupted conversation." Here, Howard reveals a contradiction in the book that undermines the cohesiveness of its vision. What is needed in our understanding of motherhood is to go beyond interruptions, because it's not kids, husbands, or work that are interruptions but the very fabric of our lives. What that discourse would include, that might be new, and I'd really like to read about it.