After finding out that her toddler has cancer, a fiction writer and her husband living in the American Midwest do everything they can to save their baby, including giving up her artistic integrity in order to pay for the medical bills.

A young mother mourns the death of her firstborn child, a son, three days after his birth and falls into a bout of depression.

After a man's wife dies in childbirth, he hires a nanny to take care of his children. The children develop a loving relationship with the nanny, while the father brings in numerous stepmothers.

A woman leaves her island home to serve at a créche on the mainland in a poor area of the city. There, she falls in love with one of the children she cares for and wants him as her own, but his mother commits a crime that puts the boy out of reach.

After a tumultuous and difficult upbringing, a woman contemplates whether or not she should give up her newborn child for adoption.

After their only child dies during his gap year abroad, a woman reflects on her relationship with her husband and comes to understand that they deal with fear and grief in different ways.

Though numerous social workers try to step in, a co-dependent mother and son bounce from city to city, in search of a place where they can be together at all times.

After a dying mother instructs her children to find their distant aunt and new guardian, they must step outside the home they have always known and embark on a journey toward their new life.

In the 1980s, when one of the women in a New York female friend group is on the brink of death, her friends reflect on their children, particularly the ones who are gone, and their attachments to each other.

A teacher in Washington tries to comfort one of his students—an orphan who is dying from a chronic disease—opting to be her guardian for the summer even in the face of her looming, imminent death.