When my son Henry was four, the neighbor he called "the Pointy Man," an older man who spent his days waving a greeting to every car that passed him by, failed to appear one day as we drove by his house on the way to Henry's preschool. Since Ed's friendly pointing finger had been a highlight of every trip we made out of the neighborhood, Henry noticed Ed's absence, and I reluctantly told him the truth: Ed had become very ill, and he had died.

I know I could have lied to Henry and told him Ed moved away, or just decided to start watching the soaps all day, rather than stand out in the sun, wind, and rain making people smile. Other neighborhood parents did, and I don't think they were wrong to do so. Henry has an older brother, though, and any lie I told him was likely to be revealed by his sibling. I also recoiled, for many reasons, from lying to him. As has been the case with many decisions I've made as a parent, none of the options available were much to my liking, but I went with the one which felt right at the time.

So I told him the truth, and when he cried, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I told him a story. I told him about how sad I felt when my Great-Grandma Hazel died when I was a little girl. I told him how much I loved her, and how she would invite me to spend the night, take me to the market to pick out each meal we'd eat during my visit, let me read for hours, and make me feel welcomed and beloved each time. When she died, I thought I'd cry forever, I told him, but something unexpected happened: after a while, I found I could think about her without crying.

"Maybe," I told Henry, "after a little while you'll think about Ed and remember how much you loved waving to him each time we passed, and you'll feel a good warmth in your belly. And eventually, that feeling will get stronger than the sadness."

For the next month or so, Henry asked me to retell my story about my great-grandmother many times. He also asked over and over about Ed. "Where is the Pointy Man?" "How did he died?" "Why do people died?" And most heartwrenching of all: "Mama, are you ever gonna died?"

"Yes," I told him. "Someday I will. I hope it won't be for a long, long time," I said, "and that I'll be very old and so will you."

Every time, Henry's response was the same: "I don't want you to died, Mama!"

I answered those same questions every day for months, in agony at first, and then gradually, as the weeks wore on and his anxiety about this awful new discovery of his lessened, with an almost callous indifference. "Yes, Henry, I'm going to die someday, but not for a long, long time. PUT YOUR SHOES ON right now, or you'll be late to preschool!"

Our exchanges had become ritualized; he asked the same questions, I gave the same answers. Our daily conversations about death became what I, raised agnostic, sometimes wistfully imagine repeating the Lord's Prayer or saying ten Hail Marys can be to some: a comforting, predictable format for dealing with what scares us.

One evening a few months after Ed's death, my husband reported that Henry had said to him, "Daddy, I'm really gonna miss Mommy when she dies."

"Oh, god. Was he upset?" I asked, picturing Henry's distraught little face, tears welling up in his long-lashed blue eyes and some tender moments as a father comforted his little son in his grief.

"No, not really," came Chip's answer. Henry had seemed wistful and a little mournful, but mostly, he had just seemed resigned to my eventual death.

From that point on, our death talks decreased in number, and while now, at age six, Henry occasionally mentions his very logical feelings of fear and wonder about death, he doesn't seem to need to talk about it nearly as much as he did during those first months after Ed's death. In the past two years, he's faced the deaths of his great-grandfather, Inky the fish, and Tuck the hermit crab with grief that was followed fairly quickly by acceptance. By asking the same questions and hearing those same answers over and over, he seems to have made sense of this part of his world, or at least as much sense as most of us are able to make of death, whether we're four or fifty.

In much the same way, since becoming a mother, I find myself asking the same questions over and over and needing to hear the same answers. Should I worry about three-year-old Josie when she refuses to eat anything but string cheese sticks and cold hot dogs for two straight weeks? If I don't make Henry share his bike with his friend at the park, will he grow up unable to function in society? Am I the only mom who, after eight years of Thomas and Friends, finds myself bored to tears ten minutes into building yet another train track? And then the bigger questions underneath those little ones, like how do I balance three very different children's needs, plus those of my partner, with my own?

Despite having seen my ten-year-old stepson Vincent go through all the stages Henry and Josie are moving into, I still need reminders that most of the worries I have about raising kids are pretty normal, and that most of the time, we'll make it through each stage, from newborn night wakings to preteen sarcasm, with only minor casualties: a few nights' sleep, Henry's ignorance of death, my parental hubris. Just as Henry struggles to accept death as a part of life, I'm still trying to make sense of this task of raising children, with its attendant potential for enormous joy and pain. I'm still struggling to accept the death of my ideal of myself as an endlessly patient and wise parent, still learning to accept the reality of my own limits as a very flawed and truly human mama.

Those limits terrify me at times. Henry was born just a few days after the Columbine killings and Josie a few months after 9/11; both events have been an integral part of my parenting experiences. The teenage boys in Colorado and the men misguiding those airplanes had each begun life as small, scrunchy-faced bundles like the ones I held in my arms in those early postpartum days. Wondering how to keep from fucking up what is simultaneously the most demanding and rewarding job I've ever had is a daily ritual for me, as it is for most of the mamas I know and love.

Most frustrating of all is that there are no definite answers. Just as I have no answers for Henry about death beyond that it happens, no one else has the answers for me about the one right way to raise my kids. Sure, you can find an expert to support almost any decision you make as a parent—and you can also find multiple voices telling you what's wrong with that decision. Most of us muddle through, loving our kids with all our hearts and hoping for the best.

"Hope is not a feeling," writes Czech playwright Vaclav Havel. "It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but the conviction that what we are doing makes sense, no matter how things turn out." When making a decision about raising my children starts making me anxious, I go back to Havel's words and ask myself if what I'm doing makes sense. I remind myself that in parenting, things turning out well might mean Josie becomes the first female president of the United States, but it also might mean, on a more primitive level, that we survive to see another day, to ask more questions, and to hear more stories.

It's far too easy for me to think that everyone else has it together, especially in the morning rush to get three kids out the door to their three different schools, when I often end up yelling at the boys to get their shoes on by the time I count to ten and more than once have resorted to physically holding a rebellious Josie down so that I can buckle her into her car seat and get on the road. Those are the days when Bitchmother, as writer Ayun Halliday calls her, comes out more often than I thought she would, back in those early baby days. Then I pick my daughter up at preschool and see another mama doing the same thing and try to comfort her as she begins to make guilty and sometimes tearful explanations to me. That's when I realize anew that I'm not alone in my frustrated impatience, in the sometimes ridiculously high expectations I have for myself, or in my fear of failing my children. That reassurance and sense of community get me through some of the more challenging days.

Our hope is that mamazine.com can be like that fellow mama to you—a place to go to hear some honest, real mama voices, some telling stories you've lived yourself, and others telling stories so far from your own experiences you never even imagined they could happen. Since March, when Sheri and I started work on mamazine.com, we've had the privilege of hearing many stories from real mamas' lives. We've interviewed mamas whose work we're nourished by, including Faulkner Fox, Miriam Peskowitz, Ayun Halliday, Judith Stadtman Tucker, and Jennifer James. We've met new-to-us writers, too, whose work you'll see in upcoming updates of the site, and we've met couples who were incredibly kind in allowing us to come into their houses and ask them nosy questions about who cleans the bathroom and what they feel about sharing parenting tasks and all kinds of messy, important issues.

The people we've met through this project aren't afraid to proclaim their love for their kids while also being real about the difficulties of mothering. They're brave enough to move beyond the sentimentalized, over-simplified images of mothers we often see in mainstream media. They share a belief in telling the truth about their experiences, whether that truth is joyous or terrifying. I've been enriched by every one of their stories, and I hope you will be, too.