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.

A son tells a series of stories, most of them about his father and stepfather. As the son describes a robbery that took place at his house in high school and his experiences with his father, a former Jehovah's Witness and current alcoholic, he begins to recall details from his childhood.

After being left behind by her husband and two sons due to her alleged "boringness," a woman must learn how to cope with her new life.

A middle-aged woman is forced to grapple with her son’s mental illness and her partner’s disinterest. While she tries to accommodate everyone else, the woman begins to lose herself.

In a small town in Minnesota, a man's ex-wife returns to him, homeless and in request for help, after abandoning him and their son more than a decade ago.

In an attempt to impress his emotionally distant father, a boy ridicules his mother, who has loved him unconditionally even in his father's absence. Wracked with guilt, he yearns for her forgiveness - only to find that she does not hold it against him.

A woman with a troubled, cruel son pays careful attention when a mother across the street murders her children, feeling eerily connected to the mother and her motives.

A writer reflects on his mother’s incredible strength, which he depicts in a short story. However, his mother does not approve of the piece as he had hoped, and he soon makes an important discovery.

After having an affair with a married man, a woman divorces her old husband and remarries, but she struggles to keep up with the compounded responsibilities of mother- and step-motherhood.

A bitter divorcee and distant father having an affair with a younger, married woman gets a call that his son has gotten into trouble at boarding school. He travels to the school, where the headmaster says his son, who beat up another student, must transfer. In a series of events that makes him increasingly bitter, he ends up making his son's girlfriend cry in a restaurant.