If my grandfather didn’t exist, Philip Roth would have had to invent him. Seymour Byock grew up in Newark, between the wars, during the Depression and the golden age of stickball. He left school at 13 to man his father’s soda fountain, and a few years later he married pretty Ruthie Grubstein, literally the girl next door. He was Sy to his intimates, a constituency that comprised half of Northern Jersey. He was garrulous and funny, a humanistic Jewish patriot with an irrepressible passion for food. After he was conscripted into the Second World War, a clerk at the local draft office asked if, by any chance, he had experience as a baker. “As a matter of fact, sir, I do!” Sy said. This was not, strictly speaking, the truth. But he could grill a hamburger and pour a root beer float; how hard could baking be? Uncle Sam had tossed him a life preserver and Sy intended to seize it.

A cheerful autodidact, he hastily read every baking guide he could find. Before long he was the “company baker” for an amphibious Army engineer unit in the Pacific. In 1945, when he’d been overseas for two years, the Newark Evening News announced that Sergeant Byock had been awarded a Bronze Star on account of his actions at the Battle of Cape Gloucester:

He set up a kitchen under fire on the landing beach within 24 hours after he went ashore. Served hot foods not only to his own company but also to “hundreds of other troops in the vicinity in spite of continuous heavy fire and enemy action.” He also prepared and served “baked foods at a time when only the most ordinary rations were expected.” And on many occasions “he left his kitchen and waded out to a landing barge to carry casualties ashore through the high surf.”

Sy returned home intact and with a love of baking, one rivaled only by his love for his family. His daughter was born nine months after he and Ruthie were reunited, and a son — my father — followed a few years later. The Byocks moved to a split-level in the suburbs. Sy launched a small business and ran it almost single-handedly, supplying cigarettes and candy to vending machines up and down the Jersey Shore, but in his rare off hours he donned a white butcher’s apron and rolled out dough. His favorite confection, and the one most beloved by those for whom he prepared it, was babka.

There are as many varieties of babka as there are bakers who bake it, but essentially the term refers to a type of yeasty cake from Eastern Europe. The name, a diminutive for the Yiddish and Polish word baba (grandmother), apparently derives from the cake’s traditional plump, round shape. There are those who would glaze a babka with chocolate. In the spirit of my grandfather, who lived by the creed “It’s nice to be nice,” I won’t mention my feelings about this practice. Some other misguided souls employ an excess of yolk, corrupting their babka into something resembling a brioche. A true specimen is bready and dry, neither dense nor overwhelmingly sweet. Cinnamon streusel clings to the top and runs throughout in a modest center vein. Babka begs to be dunked in coffee or a glass of milk. In its highest form it is roughly Bundt-shaped, though use of a loaf pan is acceptable. Raisins are encouraged.

This, anyway, is Sy’s version, which he learned either from his Russian immigrant mother-in-law or from the back of a Pillsbury box, depending on which elderly relation you consult. During the war he multiplied the recipe many times over to feed his troops, and once he was home he found he couldn’t bake fewer than half-a-dozen at a time. Sy possessed limited religious faith but boundless community spirit, and his babkas became a constant presence at Temple Beth El. (Surely it’s no coincidence that he was elected president of the congregation.) He baked them at high holidays and low ones, for customers, neighbors, and family. Sy’s babka was almost as well-known — and well-loved — as Sy himself.

In the late ’60s, my father and Sy had a falling out. Sy didn’t like my father’s hair (Jewfro) or his draft status (aspiring conscientious objector). For a few years they didn’t speak much. But relations thawed when my father became a doctor, and more so when he married my mother, a freckled Californian from his medical school class.

My mother is the sixth of nine children from a bustling Catholic household in La Jolla. Her parents, a pediatrician and a surgeon, were erudite and worldly and utterly indifferent to food. Meals were prepared by Mexican maids, under the supervision of my mother’s stern Costa Rican grandmother, and dinners followed the midcentury fashion of utilitarian blandness: spaghetti with Durkee sauce, pre-packaged Salisbury steak. A dish of canned peas graced the table every evening and every evening it remained undisturbed. (My mother did not taste a fresh vegetable until college.) Certainly there were no baked goods in the house, unless you counted the plastic sleeves of rock-hard biscotti to which the Costa Rican grandmother was devoted. As an adult, my mother taught herself some basic cooking skills and entered an herbivore-curious phase. She once celebrated a visit from her in-laws with a supper of cucumber soup and bread, much to Sy’s nonplus. She was a shiksa hippie with no meat on her bones, but Sy was bonkers about her. Here was this warm, clever Katharine Ross lookalike, and of all the men in the world she loved his son. Their marriage afforded Sy a new, more generous set of eyes through which to view my father, and an ideal proxy on whom to bestow his pent-up affection.

At the time of the cucumber soup my parents were living in Fresno. In a couple of years I would be born in that house and Sy would die there. But first he had something important to do: He had to teach his daughter-in-law the babka. This was the best way he knew to induct her into the Byock fold, and, by extension, to reinforce the tender bond with his son. He’d traveled from New Jersey with a gift for my mother, a special round babka pan with a removable base and a tall central chimney. When he arrived in Fresno he discovered that she owned neither a pastry brush nor a rolling pin, so he bought those for her too. She felt honored and bewildered in equal measure. Sy had never taught anyone the recipe, and she couldn’t imagine why he’d started with her. He must’ve been bewildered as well. What to make of this meshuggeneh girl who, for all her brains, couldn’t even roll out dough? And why was she so stingy with the sugar? If he had second thoughts about anointing her, though, he didn’t let on. As a teacher, Sy was unflappably patient and good-humored, and the babka (whew!) was a success.

But the decades of gustatory indulgence had taken their toll on Sy’s health. As a concession to his increasingly alarmed cardiologist, and more importantly to his wife, he swapped out half the butter in the babka recipe and replaced it with margarine. He cut back on eggs. In the end, though, his pancreas betrayed him. He became jaundiced and fatigued. He was too tired to bake and took no pleasure in eating, the once-burly man deflated, still smiling but with haunted eyes. He took a turn for the worse on a visit to Fresno. I was nine months old. With my parents’ help, Ruthie nursed Sy through his final days. At the funeral, the Temple Beth El rabbi reminded the assembled mourners (as if they needed a reminder) of the babka that was “renowned from Newark to Manila, from Asbury Park to Oakhurst.”

Ruthie was a widow, not yet 60 years old. She was 16 when they met, just out of high school when they married. He waited until they’d boarded the train to Florida for their honeymoon to show her his draft notice. During basic training, when he wasn’t permitted to contact her, he placed some coins in an envelope along with a note: “Whoever finds this money, please call Mrs. Ruth Byock in Newark, NJ and tell her that her husband is O.K.” And then he dropped the weighted envelope from the window of an Army bus as he was being transferred between bases. (Someone called!)

Since Sy’s discharge from the Army, they hardly spent a day apart. The tenderness and indulgence of their courtship never really flagged, though Ruthie’s capacity for carping would surely have tested a less besotted spouse. Baking was the currency of their affection. Her specialties were apple streudel and cinnamon rugelach (“ruggies” in the Byock vernacular). Never babka, though. She must’ve watched him do it hundreds of times but she didn’t ask to learn and he never offered. To bake a babka would have been as unthinkable for her as driving Sy’s step van to the Monmouth Racetrack to service a cigarette machine. He had his jobs and she had hers, and each enjoyed the fruits of the other’s labors.

And now he was gone. And how humbling to have to ask your daughter-in-law to teach you your own husband’s recipe. That’s exactly what she did, though, about a year later, on another visit to my parents. By then she was just beginning to emerge from the chrysalis of her grief. To hear my mother tell it, there wasn’t much to teach; Ruthie had seen it made so many times she practically had a muscle memory of the steps. She didn’t need a lesson, she just needed permission, someone to tag her into the cosmic babka relay. Your husband is O.K.

From then on, there was no question but that it was Ruthie’s babka. With her children grown and no career to distract her she became even more prolific than Sy. She toted babka to every social call, no matter how tenuous the acquaintance, and every medical appointment. Babka became the currency with which she repaid people and kept them in her debt. When I was growing up, she never came to visit without at least half a foil-wrapped loaf packed in her carry-on, and she would typically bake another during her stay. Having made it her own, she began to futz with Sy’s version. The result, reproduced here, is a palimpsest of changing tastes and customs, of illnesses and deaths and love. Embracing both modern efficiency and Depression-era frugality, she favors a loaf pan over Sy’s Bundt-like mold, “because it is easier to slice, and there is no waste.” (Google was no help in my quest to visualize a “gugglehaupt pan.”) Golden raisins are specified in deference to a certain picky granddaughter who refused to eat the brown ones. And the margarine represents a kind of magical thinking, a false talisman of longevity.

Ruthie died in 2003, of a heart attack. My mother is the last surviving babka maker. “Sy saw me as the best bet to pass it on to future generations,” she told me recently. “I guess I’ve kind of let him down in that regard.” Neither my sister nor I have ever made a babka. My sister doesn’t relish kitchen work; as for me, I suppose I blame the inertia of family dynamics. For now, at least, babka baking is still my mother’s job. It’s my job to clean my plate and ask for seconds. Sometimes a recipe will skip a generation, like a cleft chin. But maybe my children will inherit it from their grandmother. And maybe you’ll make it for your family. If you do, though, feel free to forgo some of Ruthie’s embellishments. Use real butter and whatever color raisins you prefer, and for God’s sake don’t stint on the streusel. “I learned from the master that a real babka cannot coexist with notions of dietary prudence,” says my mother. She still makes it Sy’s way every Christmas, when our whole eccentric clan — my long-divorced parents, my French-Canadian stepmother, my sister, my father’s sister, my WASP husband, an old family friend from Bogota, and me — convenes around a Douglas fir with a bagel on top.

Lila Byock has written for The New Yorker, and Mother Jones, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Please tweet photos or descriptions of gugglehaupt pans to her @LByock.

I grew up in Bosnia, and fled to America in 1993, at the age of 13, after my family was exiled. A 31-year-old survivor of the war, I am one of the 5,000 Bosnians living in Astoria, Queens. Not long ago, I went back to visit my hometown for the first time since we fled. Vacation for other guys my age means partying, or hanging out with old friends. I spent two weeks visiting graveyards.

On the runway at JFK, I sat between my brother Eldin and my 72-year-old father, Senahid, nervous to return to the land after so many years.

“Which day are we going to the cemetery?” my father wanted to know.

“Which cemetery?” I asked as the plane took off.

The next morning in Brcko, the town of my birth, I climbed into the back seat of our rented car wearing a tank top, jeans and sneakers. My brother Eldin shook his head. “You’re not going like that, exposing your tattoo.” He gestured to the bright blue and yellow coat of arms of the historical Bosnian Flag on my arm. He did not want any trouble.

We were going to see the karate coach, Pero, who betrayed us. Our goal was not to pay respect. It was to see for ourselves that the bastard was dead.

But I’d waited 20 years for this; I would not back down so fast. “Let’s stop so I can get two bottles of water,” I said.

“Why?” my brother asked.  “So you can piss on Pero’s grave?”

Eldin knew me too well. As we parked, I felt his body temperature rise, along with his anxiety.

This was a Serb cemetery. We didn’t belong here. As I walked by the black marble markers and crosses amid the bitter scent of candle wax, I was conscious of sour looks and muttered profanities. How dare I walk over their sons’ graves with that ink on my left shoulder. In 1992, I would have been shot dead.

As I stood over Pero’s grave, I recalled how my brother and I were his favorites in the karate club.  He helped me become the youngest brown belt there.  One happy evening, my mother invited him over for stuffed peppers.

After the war broke out, Pero was put in charge of the city’s special-police unit. I was shocked when he arrived in front of our building in an army van to cleanse the building of non-Serbs like us. We were given an hour to leave, or be killed. My father and brother were thrown in a concentration camp while my mother and I stayed behind.

Pero turned my second home, the sports complex hall where he’d once coached me in karate, into a torture center where corpses of my neighbors were dismembered and stored, my father learned from fellow inmates. Five months later, I passed by Pero standing with a girl holding an AK-47. He pointed his finger at me and laughed. We later heard he was killed by one of his own, a Serb soldier, over a different girl.

“He’s gone, we’re alive and they still have to live next to us,“ my brother Eldin tried to console me at Pero’s grave. His time came before ours.  At least he had a funeral, unlike many of his innocent victims.

The second cemetery, for Bosnian Muslims, was located on the other side of the city. My Grandpa Suljo was buried there. The hatred and bitterness in the city spread to gravesites: Even the dead were split among ethnic groups. When the fighting began, the burial ground became the frontline, and the place was pummeled in order for Serb soldiers to have an unobstructed view. Horses and tractors ripped up and carried away the remaining headstones. Suljo’s tombstone was sliced in half. Reconstructed, it was glued back together at its base, just like we were.

I also found the grave of my great Uncle Sabit. He passed away a few months before our arrival. I had been hoping to go trout fishing, like we used to.

When the Serbs stormed his apartment, he hid behind a bookshelf. His sister, my Great Aunt Fatima, lay in the grave next to him. She sacrificed herself in 2003, jumping in front of a cab to save her granddaughter. Her husband, Smajl, mysteriously died in the hospital during the war. We never found out what really happened. In my final memory he was offering himself to the military police to distract them from finding Sabit and my father, who were hiding.

Last, we visited my Grandmother Emina, who passed away after holding services for the sixth month anniversary of my mother’s death. Heartbroken, it was a no-brainer that she’d go into cardiac arrest.

“Your tattoo looks amazing,” the undertaker said, waving as he walked away.

We belonged here.

We visited two more cemeteries. One contained 556 fighters from our side. Another was a burial ground for both Bosnian soldiers and civilians, a six-hour car ride away.

“Hey, you have to see this guy, he’s not one of us,” I yelled to my brother as I read the Serb name of a soldier buried there: Goran. He was a Serb who fought in the Bosnian Army against his own people; he fought for the good side, despite what he had been born into, and his family put him to rest among his Muslim neighbors. In my book, Goran deserved the most respect.  His ethnicity didn’t matter because he saw the war through the same eyes as everyone else who landed here.  If I’d died in my homeland, this would be the place I’d want to lay.

“You’ll never catch me dead flying over Bosnia,” my mother Adisa used to say after we’d escaped to the United States.

It had been four years since we’d been to see her in Enfield, Connecticut, where we’d promised to spread crushed marble stones on her grave.

“We have to visit mom,” my brother said.

“I know. But it’s too cold. Let’s wait until spring,” I told him.

“That’s what you said last time, “ Eldin said.

I blamed conditions of the war for the disease that killed her. The leading cause of death for Bosnian women who survived was breast cancer, with high malignancy and mortality rates. Ironically, my mom’s cemetery, just a few hours from where we lived in the United States, was the one grave I couldn’t bear to see.

I couldn’t explain all of this to James – the loss and the unbearable grief. Instead, I just remain glued to Ratko Mladic’s trial in a public viewing gallery in the courtroom, hoping that Ratko will be convicted before he dies in a country-style prison and is given a hero’s funeral, like Slobodan Milosevic.

As my family I wait for a semblance of justice to close the 20th century’s bitter chapter called Bosnia, forgiveness is not an option.  It’s hard not to feel that all the wrong people are dead.

As I grew older, I went from “difficult” to “rebellious.” There were accusations, door slams. We are both temperamental and quick toward theatrics, both prone toward shaking our hands at the heavens and screaming, “Why me?!”

Eventually, though, we learned to get along. We still do. When I had children, I promised our home would be calm and reasonable. We would talk everything out. We would never, ever yell.

At first, I was a different kind of mother than she was. My son was quiet and compliant — and sweet. He hugged me when I put my arms out; he never defied me, at least not until much later. My mother would visit, and I would show her how loving and not screamy I was with him. I sat on the floor with him and played with him during those visits, though I find stacking and shape-sorting excruciating. By my example, I would try to teach her how nice and easy it could have been. On our daily phone calls, I would show how I was the model of patience and how I was understanding and not reflexively impatient. I was showing her how she could have been a better mother; in truth, I was waiting for an apology.

Then my younger son was born. He is beautiful — you should see him — and he is charming. He smiled, I swear, the day he was born. He laughed when he was just 4 weeks old. Then, about two months after we brought him home, he opened up his mouth and began screaming, and he didn’t stop for something like 15 months. He has not yet slept through the night for more than a week in a row. He is old enough now to get very angry at me and throw tantrums, and for those tantrums to upend our household. He’ll grow out of them, or maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll sit at his desk in 34 years and write an essay about what a terrible mother I was.

But that will be his essay. In my essay, I start to scream. I scream so loud that the neighbors want to know if, um, everything’s OK in there? I scream so much that my throat is raw. I give looks that are identical to the ones my mother gave — sharp and pointed — not just to the younger one, but to the older one, who has started testing my limits, too. I send the 2-year-old to his room. I try to speak the way my sister speaks, to tell them that I understand their frustration, but honestly, I don’t, and I don’t think I should have to. I tolerate no amount of disobedience or backtalk. My husband comes home to find me a frazzled mess.

I am, in short, the kind of mother my mother was.

But my mother is a different person than I realized. I first came to understand this after the delivery of my older son. It was traumatic, and I was depressed for months following it. My mother came to stay with me and tried to show me new ways of having perspective on this, but all I kept saying was that she had never had to triumph over anything this difficult. As I sat in a dark trance, rocking my baby, she told me to put him down while he slept. I wouldn’t. I was going to be a calm, peaceful — OK, completely depressed — presence for this kid in a way she never was for me.

Once again, she didn’t understand what I was going for. I wanted to be rock solid. I didn’t want my own emotional limitations to get in the way of being a parent. Not my sadness, not my temper, not anything. I wanted to be better than human. I wanted her to have been better than human.

The day before she returned home from her visit, she had been told that a lifelong heart condition had reached critical condition. I knew nothing about this. She told me about it when she returned home. She called to tell me that she was scheduled for open-heart surgery. I knew she had a heart murmur, but that sounded so — I don’t know — benign.

She told me the whole story: She’d been born with a heart condition. When she was a young child in Israel, the doctors told her she wouldn’t live very long. They didn’t let her play in gym class or ride a bike. They told her she would never have children. When she got to America as a teenager, she decided that she would live on her own terms. She bought a pack of cigarettes and didn’t tell anyone about her heart condition. No one would tell her how to live her life. She married my father, and she spent the next 10 years gestating me and my several sisters and smoking Kents, alternately.

I was stunned. I had never known my mother had such a secret. I’d never know that it was she who was the rebellious one. I started to see my mother as someone about whom I did not have the whole picture. I was starting to find common ground with my mother. We were both rebellious, it turns out, but she was truly brave.

I came to imagine a new side to my mother: The bad-ass side, the take-no-crap-from-anyone side. And here is where I should mention my mother’s looks. She is so, so beautiful. She was devastating to look at. Even with her children in tow, yelling at them in some public mall, men would turn to look and women would comment with envy on some aspect of her body or face. In her jewelry box, I found letters from old boyfriends, begging her to stay.

And you should see the photo albums: The white bikini, the strapless dress, the beehive hairdo with the liquid eyeliner, that trench coat. She did not know how long she would live, but she would live until then. She would live and die according to her own terms. V’ze-hoo, as she’d say in Hebrew: And that’s that.

But we have no idea who our mothers really are. They are mysteries to us, and we don’t ever have all the information. Even my kids, who will one day use their Google brain chips to read my essays — me, the oversharingest woman in the world — still won’t know my entire story.

Yet, lately — maybe because of the behavior that I’ve tried and failed to control — I’ve started to wonder if the kind of mother I had wasn’t exactly the kind of mother I needed. Because I turned out fine. I am a loving daughter, a loyal and warm wife, a doting (if screaming) mother. I am what my mother wished for. So are my three sisters. And we are sure of nothing if not that we are loved by our mother.

Could it be that every bit of tension was aimed particularly at a part of me that required it? Could it be that the screaming and the anger worked like water and sunlight and helped me grow? Could it be that her disapproval was what I needed to learn to parse what I found approvable?

Or could it be that motherhood is far more forgiving than we ever could imagine? Could it be that, later, our children will forgive us our faults because there is nothing like a mother who screams at you and suspects you and checks on you at midnight and is afraid for your future to show you how loved you are?

My older son was just a few months old when my mother’s heart surgery was scheduled. We flew back to New York on a redeye and went straight to the hospital just in time to see my sisters head into the waiting room: It was almost time to begin. I sneaked into the pre-op room, where babies were not allowed, and where she’d been given a drug to relax her as they arranged the IVs and monitors so they could be wheeled into the operating room.

“I’m sorry I made your life hard,” I told her, just in case, as two nurses carefully guided her bed out of the pre-op room and into the hall.

“You made my life a joy,” she told me. I held my son close on my hip as they wheeled her down the long hall, all the way down, until she became so tiny that I couldn’t see her at all.

My parents had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends, but the night they were supposed to go out, my mother stood my father up. She’d gone to Long Island that day with a friend to pick strawberries, and by the time she came home, the last thing she felt like doing was going on a blind date with some older businessman from Atlanta.

My mother was funny and quick-witted, and she was almost always up for an adventure. She was also uncommonly pretty, with green eyes, blond hair, a symmetrical face and an easy smile. When she went to sleep that night in June of 1975 in her little one-bedroom apartment on 28th Street, she had no idea that her life was about to change.

My father, at 55 years old, was just entering his prime. In spite of (or perhaps because of) two divorces and three grown children, he was happier than he’d ever been.

He flew first-class wherever he went. He stayed at the Watergate Hotel when he was in D.C. and the Plaza when he was in New York. He winked at stewardesses and drank tumblers of scotch on the rocks. He wore hats and suits and left big tips at fancy restaurants.

He wasn’t used to being stood up, so the next morning he rang my mother’s buzzer at 9 a.m. “Who dares call on anyone before noon on a Sunday in New York?” my mother later wrote about that first encounter in a letter to my father, detailing their courtship. “It had to be you, as they say, and I opened the door with wet hair asking if you wanted a Bloody Mary, which you did, thank God.”

I always try to imagine this moment between them. My mother in the doorway with her wet hair, my father on the threshold in his blue leisure suit, the moment of them not knowing each other and then knowing each other eclipsed in one short breath.

They went to dinner and later flew to my father’s place in Atlanta, making daiquiris with the strawberries my mother had picked on Long Island the day before. They swam in the pool and smoked Camels and talked into the night, their legs dangling into the water, lit from below by the pool light.

They were married three months later on Cape Cod. My father whisked my mother away from New York and set her up in a big house in a nice neighborhood in Atlanta. He paid off all her debts, bought her a cream-colored convertible and opened a credit card in her name in every department store. I was born two years after that.

For the next decade — before my father unexpectedly went bankrupt following the stock market crash of 1987, and before my parents were both diagnosed with cancer within months of each other — we lived a blissful and privileged existence. My mother had quickly charmed her way into Atlanta’s upper social echelon, and it wasn’t uncommon for our dining room table to be inhabited by local political figures and foreign dignitaries.

I remained her only child, but motherhood only seemed to enhance my mother’s glamour and sophistication. It added a dimension to her personality and worldview that had, perhaps, been the only thing missing all along. But I wonder what the other carpool moms thought of my mother when she zoomed into the after-school pickup line in her Alfa Romeo, with her blond hair pulled back in a Chanel scarf.

I was 18 when she died of cancer, and I had become the very opposite of my graceful, glowing mother. My teenage years had been rocked by a roller coaster of parental illness, hospitals and private despair. In response, I had become an angst-ridden poet. I wore combat boots, dyed my hair crimson and sported a nose ring. My mother had always embraced these tiny, public displays of rebellion, but the moment she was gone I felt foolish.

I’ll never forget walking down the aisle of a church on the day of her funeral with a shaved head and my first, barely dry tattoo concealed under my shoulder, feeling as though I had utterly failed my beautiful mother in every way possible.

Since she died, I have struggled to forge my own identity in her absence. At times, I have wanted nothing more than to emulate everything about who she was — something I know I could never really achieve. While I may be outgoing and capable of hosting a memorable dinner party, I have inherited my father’s looks and practicalities, not to mention having retained a deep-seated and dark sense of self-reflection following so much loss.

For many years, I was unsure if I wanted children at all. When I finally decided that I did (within days of meeting my husband), I knew that I wanted to be a younger mother than mine was. My daughter was born a few weeks after my 31st birthday — almost a decade before my mother herself bore me — and now, as I approach my 34th birthday, I am due with my second.

Every inch of motherhood, for me, has been stitched with the essence of her. Throughout my 20s, I made valiant and sometimes senseless attempts to bring my mother into my life again. I lived in the places where she once lived. I learned how to cook and throw dinner parties. And more often, I simply took myself to the very brink of life in hopes that if I tottered just enough, she might appear to pull me back from the edge.

But it was truly in motherhood that I found her again, even though our experiences couldn’t be more different. My husband and I live in a tiny rental house in Los Angeles and both work as writers, struggling to pay our child’s preschool dues. I can often be found at the playground, even if I am one of the few mothers actually wearing mascara and earrings. As I write this, my body is swollen with another child, something she never ventured to do.

Despite those differences, motherhood has brought her back into my life, and it has given me an opportunity to embrace my own path as a woman and mother. I hear her in my voice when I comfort my daughter by crawling into bed with her at 3 a.m. when she has woken from a nightmare, when I stop to marvel at a snail traveling through the grass, and especially during dinner parties when I catch myself offering my 3-year-old bits of brie or Marcona almonds.

In adulthood, it has occurred to me that all of us are living reactions to our parents. Whether they loved us or not, whether they were present or absent, whether they kept us safe or recklessly abandoned us to harm’s way, we move forward into life walking paths they etched out decades earlier. It also often occurs to me how grateful I am to the woman who loved me fiercely enough to remain true to who she was, even in the complicated throes of motherhood.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking: You’ve been a mommy for three years. Get over it.

But it wasn’t the prospect of becoming a parent that freaked me out. I loved my little boy and wanted to add another goofball to the family. What threw me into a tizzy was the prospect of being a mommy and all the cultural baggage that came along with it. With one child, you could be that interesting woman with the cute kid who still retained a modicum of cool. But the second child would define you. This is faulty logic, I know, but I believed it nonetheless: A mommy is invisible. A mommy has bad jeans and a minivan. Twenty-five-year-old boys would never check me out. I would never take off to London on a whim.

Our culture certainly didn’t help these insecurities. “Mommy” is used to denigrate female parents. Professional women planning to have children are on the “Mommy track.” When we write about our experiences, we are “Mommy bloggers.” When we differ about parenting, we engage in “Mommy wars.” When we get into a little erotica, it becomes “Mommy porn.” Once identified as a “mommy,” we’re identified as little else.

No matter that I was never that cool or adventurous in the first place. I was the high school valedictorian, the Goody Two-Shoes. I’d had two boyfriends and married one of them. I always win “I’ve Never” because, really, I’ve never. But now I had no chance to be cool. Any possibility was off the table. I considered getting a tattoo or tarting up my wardrobe, but then I realized that doing these things to avoid being a mommy cliché was a cliché in and of itself.

Eventually, I realized I needed to get over myself. The demands of parenting a small child did not leave time to wallow, and at lucid moments I recognized that I would not have young kids forever. I would be able to go to London someday, and I didn’t have to drive a minivan. But my mommy fears still nagged.

A year later — pregnant as can be and irreversibly a mommy — I learned that a favorite local photographer was looking for models for a project on pregnant women. It was an appealing proposition, but there was a catch: She wanted nudes. I dismissed the idea; I couldn’t do a nude photo shoot. But I also realized I did not want to be the type of person who would say no to this.

This is how I found myself in my yard in the nude. I had spent an hour posing with my clothes on — the black bike shorts and black tank that had become my uniform in those sweltering final weeks. The photographer, Ellen, posed shots of me contemplating my belly on the back deck, family portraits in front of a nearby dilapidated barn, and shots of my boy and me frolicking in the neighboring cemetery. We chatted while she clicked away: about pregnancy, our kids, our town, and her work, and I tried not to think about where this was leading.

Eventually it started to rain and we ducked into the front yard, sheltered by a tall hedge. I ignored my misgivings, summoned a little confidence, and shed my clothes.

All along, I hadn’t been sure I could strip. I may not be the person so neurotic she changes in the bathroom at the gym, but I’m also not the woman who wanders around the locker room stark naked. I’ve often struggled with my weight, and I fight the urge to hide my body: too much belly, too much breast, flab and curves where I don’t want them.

But pregnancy gave me a freedom with my body that I didn’t have before and haven’t had since. At nearly nine months, my body was supposed to look like this. I was supposed to have an enormous belly, giant breasts, and a little something extra in the back. I could have done without the tree-trunk thighs, but I could live with those, too. Much to my surprise, revealing this body felt fine. So did the rain on my skin — it was awfully hot being pregnant in June.

Once Ellen began shooting, I adopted a strategy of “don’t look down.” It was best to ignore the absurdity of standing in our tiny front yard, separated from the sidewalk and street by only a hedge. As the shoot progressed, I felt an amazement that I could do this, that I was doing this. I can still see it in the small, pleased smile I’m wearing in the photos. It is equal parts relief, surprise and satisfaction.

Looking at the photos now, years later, I feel a bittersweet pang for those last few days when we were just three, before we became something new. I’m gobsmacked not only by the size of my belly and breasts but also by my nerve.

Later that day, after Ellen left and I had dressed, my husband observed, “Now you’ll never have to get a tattoo.” I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful that the postman didn’t choose that moment to deliver the mail.

“Oh, just living with Mom,” I said, throwing an ironic thumbs up. I shrugged. “You know, with this economy…” Not even a full sentence, it worked as an excuse without technically being a lie. They all nodded with sympathy as if something had happened to me, and not because of me.

They’d heard I’d been in the Peace Corps and surely they pictured me suffering, knee-deep in river mud, hand-scrubbing a tattered poncho. Surely they didn’t picture me lounging on a Brazilian beach, or drinking red wine in Buenos Aires. Surely they didn’t picture my fellow volunteers and me heading to the capital at least once a month, watching dubbed American cable and feeding each other crème brûlée we got delivered to our hotel rooms, almost as a joke on poverty. Surely they didn’t suspect that I’d bought myself an air conditioner when my host mom offered to sell me hers and a horse just because it would probably be my only chance in life to have one, even if being a single woman going out in fields by herself started rumors that I was a hussy. They assumed I suffered in poverty, because suffering was supposed to be part of the fun.

But, out of sight of our host families, we gave in to the temptation to grab at the luxury within reach to break up the sweat, grisly meals and discomfort, both social and physical, that made up so much of our lives there. All you had to do was think in dollars, take out a 20 here and there from that one ATM that accessed American banks, and over two years you could deflate your savings on so many small comforts of the First World.

Even though it was my job to teach the locals about sustainability, I was leading my own unsustainable life, outspending my earnings 2-to-1, living on the edge of my credit limit and willfully ignoring the ticking of borrowed time. This is what leads to recession, on any scale.

At my high school reunion, I let the assumed victimhood ride, but at home, Mom knew better.

“You have three months,” she said. My stimulus package: 90 days of free rent, free food, unlimited pool and pool floatie raft access, as well as full-time use of her Jeep Cherokee while she drove her husband’s work truck with the 7-foot blind spot.

I slipped into the refuge of her life, but at night, lying under her seashell comforter, I felt the absence of everything I’d let myself lose. She knocked on her own guest bedroom door and came in, smiling, delighted to have her daughter on the same continent. She sat on the edge of the bed, stroking my hair. “Everything will be OK,” she said, seeing my red eyes. Her voice smoothed the hot shame, even though I had no reason to believe what she said.

The story was always that she and Dad had balanced each other out in every way, except that they were both bad with money. This was my breeding. I had lived paycheck to paycheck since I started scooping ice cream for a living at 14. In middle school, I was the one asking if anyone had 50 cents. In high school, I was the one losing the clothes I’d borrowed from friends. In college, I was the one lying in a clinic, selling my plasma for $20 of beer money.

Windfalls came at times: a tax return or a student loan check. After swearing I’d hold tight to the money this time, I never failed to let it slip through my fingers. Mom had bailed me out so many times that we put her name on my bank account so she could make deposits more quickly. Over the years, I sunk into debt with greater and greater abandon until I now found myself wearing my mom’s shoes to a temp job processing insurance forms.

Mom and I crossed paths in the kitchen while getting ready in the mornings, just like when I was in high school. “Honey, do you want a fruit cup?” she asked, packing me a lunch just this once. As I left, she handed me an insulated turquoise lunch box.

At work that day, I scraped my fruit cup with a plastic spoon and said to the other temps, one of whom was living in a homeless shelter, “You know, right now you just gotta do what you gotta do.”

I couldn’t even begin to make a plan. Plans required hope. After so many failures, failure became an all caps noun that I wore across my forehead at my second job as a bad waitress, pouring coffee for my former high school classmates out to organic brunches with their husbands and babies.

I could barely scrounge up the gas money to visit my best friends in their adult lives. They listened to my speech about digging myself out of the hole, doing the right thing this time and said, “That’s good.” When we went out to dinner, I let them pick up the check, making clear once again who was who.

Though already on hardship forbearance for my student loans, I thought the best move would be to apply to grad school. Acceptance would mean those magical student loan checks, a years-long break from paying back my undergrad loans, and, best of all, another smokescreen. You can be poor because you’re in the Peace Corps, you can be poor because of the recession, you can be poor because you’re a grad student, and no one will know that you’re poor because you’re too immature to stop yourself from getting a frappuccino when you have $7 in the bank. I’d worry about paying the debt back later, of course, once I had the great job a fine arts degree would land me.

So, instead of using my paychecks to pay back my mom, I spent them, more than $1,000, on the GRE testing costs and fees to apply for schools that would require more loans to attend. I mailed in the checks and did the approximate math, figuring they’d be OK. I let days pass without facing my bank balance. The longer I procrastinated, the more scared I became of what awaited me behind my user name and password. I held out another day. Then my debit card got declined at the gas station. I used my credit card, which I was pretty sure had at least $12 left to use. Then I went home and had to confront my computer.

Red. NSF. NSF. -$34. -$34. Balance: -$97. By the time I weighed the entire situation, I was hot all over again, panicked as if trapped somewhere, though I was only trapped inside myself.

There was only one place to turn, but the thought of asking my mom for money one more time almost made me nauseous. I had already stretched her generosity so far, who knew when it was going to snap?

When she asked how my day was, I told her what was going on, and she didn’t even make me ask.

“How about $100?” she said, just like I hoped she would.

“How about two?” I said, just to be safe.

She scrunched her brow and stared a second, as if she didn’t recognize the person in front of her.  “Don’t be a taker,” she said.

I had no facial expression in my repertoire to respond to my own mother, looking at me like that, so I just looked down.

Weeks later, I got an acceptance letter to grad school, an invitation to spend $40,000 a year living in one of the world’s most expensive cities, educating myself in the arts, paid for with interest by my future self, guaranteed to be bolstered by emergency loans from my future mom and dinners out from my future friends picking up the tab for their broke grad student buddy. The person I hated myself for being would have accepted. But by that time, I knew what a better person would do, and I knew I wanted to be a better person.