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At 2, I had no idea that my mother had a name of her own. Why would she need one? It wasn’t as if there was anyone else in our house who cooked eggy bread as a treat on Sunday mornings and who knew where the string and the Band-Aids were kept: Surely there could be absolutely no confusion at all. Nor did it seem likely that my mother had been something else, to someone else, before I was born. She, like all things animate and otherwise, owed her existence to me.

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Naturally, it didn't take too long on the gossip site's TV show Tuesday to get into it. "So what do you think about breast-feeding, folks?" asked Harvey Levin, before segueing into a clip of Moakler in a garage somewhere saying, "I didn't breast-feed. I'm selfish." Tabloid jackpot! "I look at my breasts as like, sexual," she explained, while gesturing in the vicinity of her famed front matter. "I think it's like, incestual. It's gross. I don't like it. Sorry."

Later, she called the show to clarify her stance.

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“There's the cervix,” she said, as though I'd driven two hours to get the inside scoop on my cervix. “And there's the placenta.” She ran a computer curser over a fuzzy white mass.

But I wanted a profile or a full-body shot, some image that would tell my brain, Yes, there's a person in there, which would tell my heart, Yes, you can risk loving this person.

Right now it was still an it, and I still called it “Baby X.” Right now I still imagined a giant mathematical variable in my pelvis, offering a host of faceless unknowns.

But the tech held off on the print-worthy images and dwelled instead on organs. A flapping, four-chambered heart. A black marble of a spleen. Look, there's the brain: two hemispheres inside a globe.

Finally, the face. “There,” she said.

Except it was not the usual ultrasound profile of sloping forehead, dainty nose, and chin. It was a square shot, and I saw deep and ghostly eyeball cavities. The angular bone structure of the cheeks. A black opening for a mouth, gaping wide. It was a skull in my uterus. A Halloween icon floating in my womb.

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In recent months, Yahoo has not won a reputation as the most family-friendly of organizations, in spite of its new CEO, Marissa Mayer. You may recall hearing a word or two about how everything in the world was going to be different henceforth for working parents back when Yahoo hired her last year, while she was still pregnant. Instead, Mayer made good on her vow to power through her own brief maternity leave like a character out of Monty Python, popping out a baby while never breaking stride. True to form, by November, she was confidently declaring, "The baby's been way easier than everyone made it out to be."

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“Henry,” I said brightly. “Do you want to go to school?” Henry loves school. Although I was seething with frustration, I had read the parenting manuals that encourage a person in my situation to redirect a recalcitrant child by focusing on future rewards.

Henry nodded without much enthusiasm.

“You have to walk up the stairs to get to school,” I reminded him, firmly grasping his hand.

Reluctantly, he got to his feet and slowly climbed to the street, stopping emphatically on each step. At the top, he sat down again. An icy rain was starting to fall.

“Henry, we’re going to school! Remember?”

He shook his head, pulling his hand away. I pulled back more energetically, thinking about everything I had to do once I got to work. Henry lay down on the wet sidewalk.

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The table next to my waiting room chair was littered with pamphlets—Botox, chemical peels, implants, liposuction, procedures that would either suck matter out or pump matter in. I picked up one entitled “The New You” and flipped through glossy pages detailing breast implants. I dropped it, face down on the table, disgusted with myself.

I was called back by a nurse named Linda, a middle-aged woman whose facelift had left her eyes pulled into an expression of wonderment, as though she held permanent interest in nearly everything I said. She asked me a few questions and then popped in a DVD.

“Just watch this, jot down any questions, and the doctor will be in shortly.”

Buxom blondes rode bicycles with—by the looks on their faces—orgasmic delight. Women played tennis in short skirts and bulging sweater-vest tops. They all confided how happy they were, how confident they felt, now that they were “fixed.”

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Korean children get a lot of fuss made over them, I guess because life was tough in the old country, and it was a big deal if you survived. There’s a big party thrown when you are 100 days old, followed by another when you make it to one whole year. My parents took a lot of pictures of me at these parties, although I don’t remember a thing as I was really drunk at both. From the pictures I see the cake, though — all these big multicolored rice cakes, each pastel stripe a steamed layer of pounded and steamed rice flour, not sweet like birthday cake but a delicious treat all the same. It looks like a chewy Neapolitan ice cream, or a gay pride flag made of carbs. It’s the best and I want it, but I think wanting that cake isn’t enough reason to have a baby.

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At 49, Falco is busier than ever: In addition to promoting the season 5 premiere of "Nurse Jackie," which airs on Sunday, she's currently starring onstage off-Broadway in a new play titled "The Madrid," written by Liz Flahive (incidentally, one of the writers of "Nurse Jackie"). Like Jackie, the mother she portrays in the play, Martha, wants to flee from her life. But unlike Jackie, who relies on drugs and an affair as an escape, Martha literally runs away from her family, and no one, except her daughter, knows where she is or has any sense of why she left.

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"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have," she says in the spot. "We haven't had a very collective notion of, these are our children. We have to break through our private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it's everybody's responsibility and not just the household's, we start making better investments."

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Paltrow is circumspect about when the pregnancy occurred and exactly how it ended. Just a year ago, she casually brushed off questions about whether she wanted more children, saying, "I don’t know if I can go back to diapers and things like that. I’m so past that, I think I may have missed the window. I think maybe when Moses was 3 I would have done it." Now, however, she says, "My children ask me to have a baby all the time. And you never know, I could squeeze one more in. I am missing my third. I’m thinking about it. But I had a really bad experience when I was pregnant with my third. It didn't work out and I nearly died. So I am like, 'Are we good here or should we go back and try again?'" Paltrow's cryptic reference to the child she says she's "missing" comes within the context of a conversation about her healthy new "It’s All Good" cookbook, which she claims sprang out of a health crisis in which "I was vitamin-D deficient, I had anemia, I had thyroid issues, my liver was congested, I had hormonal imbalances and a benign tumor on my ovary that had to be removed."

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Our children are both 13 now. They live in different towns and move about in different circles, and they will, when the time comes, pick their own damn prom dates. And though it should have been obvious back then -- especially for a gay-friendly, big city mom whose children would grow up going to pride parades with their lesbian aunts -- not every boy is going to go to the dance with a girl. Not every little princess dreams of marrying a prince. I had been talking about my children's world as a strictly heterosexual place while they were still in the womb, even though I knew it wasn't. But I'm trying to do better now.

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Nothing unusual except that in the middle of it, I found it physically painful to get out of bed. All day, going about my stay-at-home mom business, I cried. I cried while asking my kids if they wanted their morning bagels with cream cheese or peanut butter. I cried while driving them to school. I cried at the coffee shop where I go to write and in the dried foods aisle of Trader Joe’s. There was no sobbing, no blubbering or nose blowing, just a stream of tears stopping and starting all day long without any real cause.

My husband worried. My children were fussy and confused. And I couldn’t blame them. I knew exactly what they were going through, because long before I knew what depression was, before I’d ever heard of mood disorders or anxiety, I knew what it felt like to live with someone who was often, inconsolably, unhappy.

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Friedan's book was a wallop of a tome, a peek behind the placid façade of the happy homemaker and into the dark heart of a seemingly enviable segment of American womanhood. Educated women, with their nice families and pretty homes, Friedan revealed, weren't fulfilled by staying at home and waxing their floors. They needed more. And by starting the conversation about that need, by making it OK for women to want something else, Friedan helped start a revolution.

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Graduate students streamed by us clutching coffee cups. "Finish up,” I chirped to the boys, who were stuffing their mouths with oatmeal cookie. The absurdity of the situation kicked my voice up an octave. “Now, who has to go potty?”

Like a lot of first-timers, my husband, Brian, and I went into parenthood with a plan. Ours was to give Jack an unhurried childhood (though Jack is not his real name). Both teachers, we distrusted the amped-up achievement culture in affluent communities like ours, with its tendency toward high-pressure schools, anxious parents and stressed-out kids. Yes to mud pies and bubbles, we vowed; no to flashcards and Brainy Baby preschools. What mattered was letting Jack figure out what he liked and helping him do that. “I don’t care if he ends up a surfer living out of the back of his van,” Brian said.

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On the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I heard an interview on “Fresh Air” that stopped me in the middle of my workday. Terry Gross was interviewing Carolyn Jones, a woman in Texas who had an abortion for reasons that sounded familiar.  She wanted her baby, just like I had wanted mine. Unlike me, though, she was forced to have an ultrasound and wait 24 hours because the lawmakers in her state had recently decided she should. She talked about how the doctor apologized for having to do it, how the nurse spoke louder and tried to distract her while the doctor verbally documented the ultrasound. She explained how the law required that the volume be up loud enough for her to hear the heartbeat.

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I'm heartbroken and frightened and it would all go away if I did nothing.

A year ago I met and fell in love with a man I met online after eight years of terrible loneliness. We were immediately attracted to each other but we decided to stop seeing each other almost right away. He didn't want any more kids and I was desperate to be a mom. We kept in touch and dated and broke up a few more times. I'd only known him a few months and I was already trying to convince him to have a child with me. That's something I never would have done in my easy-breezy youth, but I'm turning 41 and all my friends have kids (boy, do they ever, this peer pressure is worse than anything I ever felt in high school). He 'd just gone through a terrible divorce where his ex-wife used legal tricks to screw him good. Most horribly, she tried to keep him away from their 5-year-old daughter and he had to fight in court, deal with her calling the police, and move his life and his job so he could see his little girl again. So he's burnt. But he also says he never wanted kids in the first place. His ex-wife pressured him. He also never wanted to get married but she pressured him into that.

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I don’t know much about being ready, I thought. But I know a lot about the idea of it. The trick is that it’s just fantasy, a picture in your head of financial security or marital stability or optimal fertility. The picture alone doesn’t help you find the path. And the path doesn’t always help you get to the picture.

Only I didn’t say it that way. At all. I created this fake friend Doris and wrote a letter to her. She was a satiric combination of me pre-kids, every dog owner who’s ever annoyed me, and some blogger I came across once who had a site entirely dedicated to whether or not she should have children. Usually the stuff I write is dry and non-controversial. I string together vanilla observations and academic analysis regarding how we think and how we use language. But I figured, this is the Internet — my story should be edgy. It’s hip and edgy to trash people, right? And so I began:

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