Writer Meg Wolitzer. (Deborah Copaken Kogan/Penguin Books Canada)

When future historians riffle through the opinion pages and blogosphere detritus of the early 21^st century, I wonder what they will make of the current Mommy Wars. Will they picture breast-pump-wielding Amazons charging into battle on Bugaboo chariots? Or maybe something sleazier – illegal fight clubs pitting stretch-marked, sleep-deprived mothers against each other.

For those of us living through it, the reality isn’t nearly as fun. Blame New York Times writer Lisa Belkin, who first drew the battle lines in 2003 with a dispatch from the affluent suburbs. There, Belkin found former attorneys and one-time executives contentedly playing pat-a-cake in Mommy and Me classes. Ever since, the made-in-the-media rift between working women and stay-at-home moms has been a career booster for pundits like Linda Hirshman and Caitlin Flanagan.

"What happens in the home is just as telling about a culture as what happens at work.The 10-Year Nap is just as much about ambition and coming to terms with mid-life as it is a book about motherhood.”'—Meg Wolitzer

For the average woman, the debate has done little more than up the guilt ante: To work or not? Daycare or nanny? Full-time or flexible hours? In the (un)friendly fire of the Mommy Wars, these decisions aren’t just a reflection of what works for a particular family but can determine one’s worth as a woman, a feminist, a mother and a member of society.

Anyone eager to wave a white flag and holler “Truce!” will find a sympathetic voice in Meg Wolitzer. The author of the acclaimed novel The Wife (2003) has waded into the fray with a level head and a bracing sense of humour. Her latest novel, The Ten-Year Nap, follows a group of middle-class women in New York’s Upper East Side struggling with their decade-old decision to leave their careers to raise their kids. Bored, rudderless and in some cases nearly broke, they’re hitting middle age just as their children require less of their time and focus. These women face 40 with a flagging sense of purpose and are stuck wondering — as their mothers did a generation before: Is this all there is?

A youthful-looking 48 with tousled curly hair and a quick smile, the New York-based Wolitzer says she’s a few years too old to consider herself part of the current wave of hyper-self-conscious parents, with their breast-feeding blogs and designer nurseries. Her two sons are both teenagers; Wolitzer was already a semi-successful author when the first one was born. Her debut novel, Sleepwalking (1982), was published while she was still in college, and a later novel, This Is Your Life, was made into a film by Nora Ephron in 1992. Being writers allowed Wolitzer and her husband to be “half-distracted,” stay-at-home parents.

Still, sitting in the lobby at a hotel in Toronto, where she was recently for a reading, Wolitzer says she can relate to the pressures facing her characters. Just that morning, she got a phone call from her younger son, who was having a tearful meltdown over an impending math exam.

“I said all the soothing things, of course, but part of me was thinking, 'Don’t you know that Mommy is a successful novelist who has to go do interviews right now?'” Wolitzer says, laughing. “If you’ve raised them right, all children are narcissists; their needs always trump yours in their mind. Which I think is as it should be.”

Wolitzer, whose writing centres on family and domestic life, didn’t set out to take a stand on the Mommy Wars. She did feel, though, that the lives of women and children in this particular moment in history are underrepresented in fiction —“outside of the kind of book that has a pink cover with a stork carrying a briefcase on it and with one-dimensional characters inside who are easy to mock,” she clarifies.

The Ten-Year Nap. (Penguin Books Canada)

Literary fiction is full of stories of men’s midlife crises and career malaise, but stories about women don’t tend to get taken as serious literature, Wolitzer says.

“Both men and women will read about the lives of men, but only women read about the lives of women. But what happens in the home is just as telling about a culture as what happens at work. [The 10-Year Nap] is just as much about ambition and coming to terms with mid-life as it is a book about motherhood.”

It’s also a light but laser-sharp satire of the manners of a particular class and demographic. A gifted social commentator, Wolitzer fills the novel with too-true observations. They include an anorexic mother seeking investors for a chain of gyms targeted at people with “eating differences” and a husband so bored when his wife recounts her day at home that he has to take Ritalin in order to listen.

While the novel’s title suggests a less-than-subtle judgment on the choice to drop out of the workforce, Wolitzer’s characters are more than interchangeable desperate housewives. Former lawyer Amy was raised by a Gloria Steinem-era novelist mother whose passion for her career is something Amy can’t fathom; Roberta is a failed artist who channels her creative drive into kids’ crafts and political activism; Jill, voted the most promising student at her prep school, is a stalled academic, exiled to the suburbs and unable to bond with the daughter she and her husband adopted from Russia. The only seemingly happy one is Karen, an M.I.T.-educated mathematician and child of poor Chinese immigrants who revels in her expensively minimalist apartment, bright twin sons and attractive husband. “Does everyone always have to ‘do’ something?” Karen asks. “Can’t they just enjoy their lives?”

The inability to do just that is the crux of their dilemma. As the novel puts it, without “the excuse of having a young child at home to use as a human shield” against all career inquiries, these women have to face the hard truth that life — even a financially comfortable one filled with supportive friends and menschy spouses — can often be a dull slog. And at no time is this more heart-crushingly true than at mid-life, when one’s potential and promise no longer spreads out like a long stretch of beach.

For Wolitzer, there is still plenty of solace to be found in the everyday: the funny-wise observations of one’s child, a dose of tough-love from a friend, the sense of fulfillment from work well done. When Amy and her husband finally make love after a long, silent dry spell, they share a post-coital drink in a domestic scene that Wolitzer imbues with a sweet romanticism: “The plastic cup was warm from the dishwasher, but the water they drank was cold and delicious.”

When I mention the scene, Wolitzer says, “I think those moments are real life. Those are the moments where you find happiness. I suspect that the happiest people in the world are those with a sense of purpose: people who save lives or work at not-for-profits helping poor children. But for most of us, the idea that everyone has a calling, that everyone is special, that everyone has an extraordinary talent, just isn’t true. Most of us are average. Most of us aren’t passionate about our work. So where do we find that passion and purpose in our life? It’s in the day-to-day.”

The Ten-Year Nap is published by Penguin and is in stores now.

Rachel Giese is a Toronto writer and editor.