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.

Amongst problems with her ungrateful children and ex-husband, a middle-aged mother deals with a burgeoning mid-life crisis — until she realizes that she has become miraculously pregnant.

One Mother's Day, two old women reflect on their relationships with their children--present and absent--and with the same adulterous man. When their paths cross at a crucial moment, one woman's refusal to accept the help of her husband's secret lover leads to her death.

On Mother's Day, a group of mother-less women go to a pub to enjoy each other's company. One of them is pregnant, and another is planning to adopt. A woman contemplates her pregnancy at a dinner with her friends on Mother's Day. All the women's mothers have passed away.

A woman harbors a secret desire to have a baby in a future world where childbirth is extremely rare and discouraged.

A woman grapples with how quickly time slips by with a new baby, and how to protect her, as her partner stresses over the doom and gloom of the news.

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 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.

After kicking her husband out and changing the locks, a mother imagines he is still living with her, distant and uninterested in sex. Lying in bed, she conjures up old memories and imagines new ones, grappling with questions of selfhood, identity, womanhood, and motherhood. One night, her real husband returns, and she lets him back in.

A daughter wakes up her mother to ask how much money she made from the dog races — but instead the mother distractedly dwells on her troubling encounters with men.