I never thought I’d find myself saying something this banal here on Girl w/Pen, but a certain double stroller has changed my life. A stylish red and black jogging stroller came into my life three weeks ago as a gift from my parents. It was a mercy gift, intended to replace the clunky Double Snap N Go babytrain I had lugged through snow and ice. Now, I can venture into stores without knocking clothing racks down! Now, I can exercise in the park! I feel giddy, the way one might when one unexpectedly finds herself the owner of a shiny red Ferrari. After all that time spent immobile, Mama’s got wheels.

But I think I’m moving too fast. Like many new mothers my generation who’ve found themselves quickly back at work, both because the work is compelling and because Daddy’s been downsized, I’m always in a rush.

The other day, while pushing the jog stroller with one hand I dropped (and shattered) my iPhone. I’ve been nagging my husband and fighting with my mother. I’ve choked more than a few times on food. Starting a company at the same time that I’ve started motherhood, I’ve been racing, a bit, through my life.

The new stroller liberated me from a prolonged state of physical frozenness. But now I want to liberate me from myself. This perpetual feeling of precarious haste–like I’m sure to get smacked by a bus if I don’t look both ways when rushing across the street–is exhausting. I thought motherhood might be a vacation from my own professional intensity or rather, my intensity as a professional. Instead, it’s only intensified the race.

So here I am, turning to this column, and to my She Writes on Fridays column over at She Writes, as a way to slow it all down. I want to savor motherhood. I want to savor the process of starting a wonderful company with a fellow mother of two little ones who is genuinely sympathetic but who is also my sister in ambition and drive. We want to do our company differently. The question is, given our own intensity, given the needs of the marketplace, will we be able to live that different dream?

Obviously, I’m not alone. As Judith Warner wrote recently in a forum about motherhood at the New York Times, my generation doesn’t revel in the new possibilities of motherhood today, largely because the promises of feminism have time and again come up against a wall of political impossibility.  In an absence of family-friendly social policies, she rightly insists, “[o]ur much-vaunted ‘choices’…have largely proven hollow.” This past month, a hard-charging woman I hold dear, someone who needs to work, quit a job she loved rather than keep her baby in daycare. It broke my heart to hear it. But truly, what choice did she have?

We have a remarkable choice and opportunity, with She Writes, a woman-owned company, to live a more manageable work/life equation. Eventually, we will get there. But in the meantime, I will bet you my new stroller that my partner and I will continue to rev it up even as we work toward slowing it all down.