A single mother living in the Bay Area is attempting to successfully raise three children, but finds trouble optimizing both their freedom and their safety.

A working-class mother has held only one hope for her entire life: that one day, her daughter would marry well and wealthy, and take care of her in her old age. When her daughter reveals that the man she loves is not wealthy, her mother's dreams of rest are dashed and divided.

Around the holiday season, a mother takes her children and leaves her deadbeat husband to move into the mountains, all the while trying to find a good father figure for her kids.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 mother reflects on her failures to improve the troubled upbringing of her first daughter, who she raised as a single parent during the Great Depression.

An unhappy woman lives in the slums of New York only to watch her life transform as her children become wildly successful, catapulting her into an unrecognizable world of extravagance.