"I can FINALLY share this!" she wrote. "This was 10 weeks ago when I was having my C-section. Dr. Sawyer broke my water and my daughter reached up out of my stomach and grabbed the doctor's finger and my hubby caught this special moment. Truly amazing."

It is indeed a special moment. In the black-and-white photo, you can see an attending hand pushing Atkins' belly up as a small hand reaches past an umbilical cord and around the wet finger of the delivery doctor. It's an arresting image, one that captures baby Neveah – that's "heaven" spelled backward -- at precisely the instant she made her Oct. 9 entrance into the world. Her first human touch.

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At 13, I had no idea what my thick hips had to do with birth, but I was terrified by the prospect of having to care for (another) someone else. I was the loud one who drew my father’s ire — and his fists — away from my brother. I was my mother’s “little hero”: the one who powdered her black eyes and told her she was still pretty, the one who swallowed her secrets so she could shimmer in the eyes of her fellow PTA members. She taught me to draw and to drive, to bake lasagna that would make men lick their plates and to fill up with Crystal Light and water so I wouldn’t be too hungry, wouldn’t eat too much of my own food.

She’d been, in her words, “flat as a board” until plumping up while carrying me; then, she said, she “looked like a spark plug.” Her body was as soft as her will; she yielded to buttered biscuits and apologies whispered in the dark. When I was a teenager, both of our bodies embarrassed me equally. I remember the sight of us in one fitting room mirror: Her hips, narrow; her belly puckered by a Caesarean scar. My hips mocked hers with their abundance.

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It started with Piqué posting the image on his WhoSay account, with the caption "His first pic! #excited #cute." I'm not the dad, but it looks ... like an ultrasound. Shakira promptly retweeted it, and before the day was out you couldn't go online without seeing the black-and-white profile of Shakira's fetus and the random womb blobs surrounding him, accompanied by a headline about the "first ultrasound photo." That has a portentous ring of more to come, doesn't it? Parents, is this really going to be a thing with you from now on?

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The announcement Monday that Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, was expecting was one that royal watchers have been waiting for since before Middleton even married Prince William. Over two years ago, in the couple's first official interview after their engagement,  ITV's Tom Bradby eagerly begged, "Do you want lots of children?" (Subtext: "How soon can you two breed?") But the news that Kate was "finally" knocked up came with an unexpected and worrisome side note. The mother-to-be is currently in a London hospital for hyperemesis gravidarum, severe nausea and vomiting that affects a small percentage of pregnant women. Or, as Time explains about what's happening to the woman who is carrying a future monarch, "She’s throwing up. A lot."

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(This prescriptive advice wasn’t as random as it sounds. The pediatrician and I tend to talk books, while my children roll their eyes, especially since my first novel came out a few months ago.)

I didn’t know Faulkner had written a children’s book. The doctor looked pleased to have stumped me. He pulled out his prescription pad and wrote "The Wishing Tree" plus WILLIAM FAULKNER, in large letters, in case I forgot.

What, I wondered, would Faulkner have to say to kids? That when you mimic the help, it’s important to get the dialect right? That you shouldn’t drink while doing your homework, only after you’re done?

In academic journals, "The Wishing Tree" is described as Alice in Wonderland–esque, aimed at kids ages 8 to 11. It was originally written in 1927 but not published by Random House until 1964, when one of the children for whom it had been handmade offered it for publication (more later on the awkwardness of this). It had been out of print for years, but there were used copies online in middling condition for $30 to $50.

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When I became an Internet writer three years ago, I didn’t know much about the blogosphere, or the ferocious battles waged between different online representatives of feminism, or the popularity of mommy blogs, or the difference between Gawker and HuffPo. I just wanted someone to read my writing, and I wanted someone else to give me money for it. My first paid gig was at AOL; I did author interviews and wrote personal essays for the women’s site. I didn’t know to be embarrassed that only old people still use AOL. I gave them some dramatic stories, like the account of my cosmetic surgery. My husband’s great uncle called to let him know that when he’d opened his browser before breakfast, he learned all about how much I used to hate the way I looked.

I was embarrassed but determined. So what if people I saw once every few years at an awkward Christmas celebration knew my bra size and the details of my struggle with food-related guilt? I was a writer! I was making it big on AOL!

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I don't remember everything that happened. Memories change. But I remember one day in the summer of probably 1963 a typewritten page appeared on the refrigerator. At the top it said, PROCLAMATION. It said that henceforth, it being that the washing of dishes was a task unfairly foisted upon certain individuals and not others, this being not fair, etc., HENCEFORTH each child was to be allotted one stainless steel drinking glass, each to be of a distinct and different color, and each child was henceforth to be responsible for his or her own drinking glass and no other and that throughout the day when any child under the jurisdiction of this PROCLAMATION wished to have a drink of water he or she was to wash and reuse his or her own glass and no other.

My mother had begun making such proclamations right after she started going to work and wasn't around to personally supervise our caucus.

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She’d last spoken to him on Sunday, five days earlier. “It’s so good to hear your voice,” she had said. “I was worried about you.” She’d never told him that before. Of course she felt it; worry consumed her, and she barely slept. But she didn’t want to add to his stress, and she wanted him to feel he could share anything with her. Two days earlier, when Ian told them he’d gotten his first kill, during the March 3 firefight, she had tried to sound supportive, even let out a little cheer.

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I spent hours studying my baby’s development on a website called Babycenter.com, which explained that he resembled a sesame seed at week 5, a kumquat at week 10 and a bell pepper at week 18. Perhaps subconsciously inspired by their comparisons, I consumed so many raw vegetables and legumes that I walked around most days enveloped by a noxious cloud of gas.

I attended prenatal yoga, where the instructor encouraged us to gripe for a full half-hour about our blown-out backs and throbbing feet and constipation, and where the other women all pretended not to notice that I was the stinkiest among them, though they all sat at a respectable distance, having realized that downward dog tended to stir things up down there.

The power pregnancy exerted over my body and my brain freaked me out.

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At the ultrasound eight weeks later, we laughed when we found out the baby was a girl. Her older sister was vibrating in anticipation of learning her sibling’s gender and entirely unprepared to accept the possibility of a little brother. The ultrasound technician found nothing troubling when she scanned the baby’s anatomy. Turning her attention to my ovaries, though, she saw a black circle that she couldn’t interpret. When they told me I could get dressed before the doctor came to talk to us, my spouse and I exchanged an anxious look: They never let you put your pants back on. The cyst on my ovary had grown significantly, it seemed, and now they thought they saw another growth on the other ovary, developments that could put my health and the baby’s at risk.

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The six-page results arrived in the mailbox. I didn’t understand most of it, terms like “perceptual reasoning index” and “crystallized intelligence.” What? Intelligence crystallizes? And at such a young age?

I did, however, understand these lines: “Your child has not met the required criteria for placement in gifted. Your child’s intellectual ability falls within the average range.”

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I remembered that cloudy day when I was 17 and ran barefoot down the pebble path to the mailbox. When I saw my SAT score, I sank into the grass and cried.

I got a 1090. Back then, in 1985, the highest score was 1600. All of my friends — the smart kids — got somewhere around 1400. I thought I was one of the smart kids.

In fifth grade, I was put in Miss Thweat’s Language Arts class, which I knew was the hardest. In junior and senior high, I took honors classes and graduated Palmetto High in the top 10 percent.

Being smart meant getting into a good college, then becoming a brain surgeon, or a Supreme Court justice or winning a Nobel Peace Prize by ending world hunger. These were on my list of things to do when I grew up. Until I took the SAT and I found out I was average.

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“I trust you,” I promised. “And I don’t want to sleep with bugs in my hair.” I really, really did not want to sleep with bugs in my hair. Lice bite you. They suck your blood, something I hadn’t fully considered even six weeks earlier when they’d romped around on my youngest son’s head. “You already demonstrated your ability with the clippers,” I reminded him.

Six weeks earlier, I’d looked on as my husband buzzed our youngest boy’s hair. It was my husband’s first foray with the clippers, and he’d proved his mettle. For the 9-year-old to lose his long, blondish, constantly-matted-with-tangles locks was tough. He’d never cut his hair. He protested each of his extremely infrequent trims. The hair that blanketed his back helped define his identity. But because he’d been completely infested with the little buggers, he’d succumbed — not by choice — to the buzz cut. That extreme haircut was the only way he’d be admitted to a beloved two-week overnight camp.

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I nodded sympathetically.

“How are you managing?” she asked.

I began to shake my head, to remind her that my kids were not yet in kindergarten and attended a private preschool, but then I stopped. “Oh, you know,” I said. One of the kids started screaming for Fruit Loops, and the two of us parted ways. It wasn’t until I’d made it to the checkout counter that it occurred to me what I’d done. That I’d basically lied, letting this woman go on with her misconception that I was, as she was, making my way through the public school system.

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This week at New York, Ann Friedman takes Mayer's story — and the very real issues of insufficient paid maternity leave and the "professional repercussions" for those who do take time off — to leap off the rails with the radical case for "mandatory" parental leave to "normalize" family time for new parents. Making people stay home with babies — that's way more progressive than making them go to work, right?

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If you’re wondering why, in the darkest, scariest period in my family’s life, I got the bright idea to sign us up for a club where moms and dads die all time, the answer is: because I didn’t really think it through. I had joined the club, a support organization for people with cancer and their loved ones, at the recommendation of my friend Annie after I was diagnosed with stage-4 melanoma last year. Annie had been the one who’d seen right through my flippant assertion that we were all doing “great,” and had suggested tenderly, “Maybe you need a place to sometimes be not great.” I made the call that day.

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Will, a book editor and author, was one of the relatives and friends who accompanied Mary Anne during these sessions. Often, the conversation between mother and son would turn to what each one was reading. To make these discussions more interesting, they decided to read the same books, beginning with Wallace Stegner's "Crossing to Safety," a novel that let them address, obliquely, Will's worries about how his father would get by once his mother was gone. Will and Mary Anne's two-person experiment in communal reading is the focal point of Will's memoir, "The End of Your Life Book Club," a tribute to a remarkable woman and an exemplary reader. I met with Schwalbe recently to talk about it.

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But I am paying someone to watch my children so I can have the night off from the dinnertime power struggle. My best friend said, “I don’t understand. Why not get a sitter when the kids are asleep so you can go out for a drink? Blow off some steam.”

Oh, and I do that too. Hiring baby sitters while the kids are awake offers freedom from playing the role of miserable domestic goddess. I don’t want to fill the dishwasher yet another night. I don’t want to tidy up after their sweet little messes — all the Legos and Pokemon cards and miniature dogs and dolls. I am calm and not so frazzled because for $15 an hour — sometimes $7 an hour or $10 depending on which sitter I can secure — I pay someone to watch my children.

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I stalk my kids.

Surely there are worse parents than I. (Surely there are better ones, too.) But last night, I spent so long on Facebook that my legs went numb, and I almost collapsed when I stood up from my computer. It was probably worth it, however, to find out that the twins had made 68 new friends at college, each of whom I checked out for the 10 seconds it took to realize I was crossing some line between "healthy interest" and "psycho-parenting."

I didn’t start out this way. My daughter Annalisa was the first to go, in 2004. Back then, we didn’t have such powerful tools as Facebook and Twitter, but I was invited to join Wesleyan University's parents' email group. In retrospect, this sounds suspiciously like an activity of the dreaded "helicopter parent" set, but at the time, we new college parents all thought it was wonderful. We commiserated together online, realized we were not alone and asked each other questions. ("Why did your kid get that class with Professor Brilliant while mine didn't?")

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“Do you mind me asking where you found that skirt?”

“Oh, it’s not a skirt,” she said. “It’s a skort. There are shorts under here. It doesn’t wrinkle, and it doesn’t stain.”

By jove, the woman had full coverage! That explained her smile. And such an intriguing concept, this wicking fabric. I have two children under the age of 5, so for the foreseeable future, my wardrobe needs resemble those of a typical frat boy. As in, we both want clothes that puke won’t stain.

Full coverage could be had, other mother said, with a visit to the Athleta website. Available in khakina, asphalt, dismal, dumpy, cheerless and sexless, the “Whatever” skort is one of 18 styles of skort sold by Athleta, the sporty sister in the Gap family.

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