I wish I could tell you exactly why we didn’t get along. Maybe I resented my parents’ divorce, and because she screamed louder, I blamed her more. Maybe I blamed her for seeming to hate me. (I was what was called, back before all children were pathologized, a “difficult child.”) She felt mothers should be respected universally, and I felt like we should talk everything out. I wanted to be understood. She wanted me to understand that I wasn’t her friend, I was her daughter. When she hears my sister using the parenting language of today on her son – “I hear that you’re frustrated, because it’s frustrating to not be able to own a machine gun, but you just can’t have one” – she rolls her eyes and thinks back to the days when a kid who asked for something unreasonable could just be sent to his room.

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My mother was 37 years old, twice divorced and childless when she met my father. She had been living in Manhattan for 17 years, having grown up in Connecticut and gone to the Rhode Island School of Design to study painting. She had dozens of friends, went to parties and attended art openings. She smoked pot in the Village and spent Tuesday nights in smoky jazz clubs, sipping martinis and recrossing her legs.

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.

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Unshockingly, the National Review Online was quickest to leap into pearl-clutching position. After deeming the image "as bad as it will ever get," Glenn T. Stanton pronounced that "This poor boy may be diggin' life now, but will soon be forever teased as the Got Milk? boy that Time magazine and his indulgent mom made infamous." And in the Contra Costra Times, Tony Hicks decided that all the mothers who appeared in the story's photos did so "simply to have something really embarrassing to use against their kids when they become teenagers."

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Over the next five years, I got that seat. I spent Hanukkahs, Passovers, even Purims in Judy’s plant- and music-filled home in Amherst, Mass., my picture hanging on her fridge alongside her children and grandchildren. To her, I was a done deal. I was family. To David, not so much.

After thousands of dollars spent on couples therapy, David still couldn’t make up his mind about me. He kept saying he “wanted to want to marry me.”

“What did I do wrong?” Judy asked me one day, in a stolen, private moment, not understanding why David was unable to commit to me.

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In case you thought, nay, hoped, that the barrel-bottom had been fully scraped last week when the New York Times asked, in a query straight out of the Onion, "Has women’s obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism?," now Time magazine has upped the ante with a cover story brazenly challenging "Are You Mom Enough?"

It's accompanied, by the way, by a picture of a hot blonde and her 3-year-old son standing on a chair to suckle her breast.  Yo, take THAT, Room for Debate page! I guess Time felt it really had to bring it after uber-troll Katie Roiphe's piece last month on why feminists just want a good spanking.

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Last week, the conservative Christian group One Million Moms, already enraged that the retailer ignored the call to fire beloved, "open homosexual spokesperson" Ellen DeGeneres as its spokesperson, took on another quest. This time, vowing "the loss in sales from traditional families," they're taking aim at an image of a smiling same-sex married couple with their daughter in one of the retailer's ads. This, to them, somehow represents "the immorality, violence, vulgarity and profanity the entertainment media is throwing at your children." There they go again, giving moms a bad name.

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A year earlier, I had tumbled into a mid-life crisis. I had one child who was nearly three, and my husband and I were planning for a second. This had always been our intention, and I approached this second foray without much anxiety. But when my younger sister called to tell me she and her boyfriend were going to London, something inside my head was knocked loose. “Damn,” I thought. “I’m going to be a MOMMY.”

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.

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You'd have to go all the way back to January, when the Times hilariously asked if it should be a "truth vigilante" – i.e., fact-check its sources – to find such a fanciful query in the paper of record. This time, the "Room for Debate" Op-Ed page jumps off from French feminist Elisabeth Badinter's contentious book "The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women," asking, I kid you not, "Has women's obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism?" It may take its inspiration from a controversial book on the tyranny of attachment parenting, but rarely has a single, short sentence strung together so many incendiary words. You've got obsession, motherhood, perfection and the destruction of feminism all in one tidy package, centered about the tacit acceptance of the notion that by, say, co-sleeping with your infant, you're undermining The Sisterhood. As Time.com editor Jessica Winter mused Tuesday, "Next up:  Fatherhood vs. Sports, Childhood vs. School, Coats vs. Shoes and Cats vs. Dogs."

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My mother would have none of that. She was gassed into a twilight sleep and shot up with opiates for the pain. Flat on her back and feet in the stirrups, she pushed on command until I fell into the doctor's arms. My arrival – another girl! -- was announced to my dad, who sat with other bored men in the waiting room. He would first see me through a window, where I was displayed among the other newborns, swaddled tight and sleeping.

One final detail I insisted that my mom include with each retelling: "And then you got a shot?"

"That's right," she would say, referring to the heavy dose of estrogen once routinely injected after a birth. "That way my body wouldn't make milk, and I could go back to work." I couldn't help myself; I cheered.

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So why is the "Best Job" ad so freaking annoying?

The narrative is simple, following a handful of dedicated moms around the world as they rouse their young children in the early morning, do countless chores, shuttle boys and girls to sports practices and, eventually, cheer their kids on at the London Olympics. It's an ode to maternal devotion in its many forms, from moral support to doing the laundry and washing the dishes. (This is, after all, a spot created by people in the business of selling you detergent.) But the spot's kicker message, the all-too-familiar refrain that "The hardest job in the world is the best job in the world," undermines all the sweetness that preceded it. Really? This old trope again?

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Attempts to fix my cycle didn’t work. Over time, my bleeding worsened. That’s when my fertility specialist recommended in vitro fertilization. IVF, he said, would allow him to “toy around” with my hormones. As he explained how many types of drugs he planned to inject in my body, I nodded politely while screaming no way inside my head. I was skeptical of high-tech baby-making measures. All that medication didn’t appeal, for one thing. Neither did the odds: I’d seen friends go through multiple failed rounds of IVF (chances are about one in three). From what I could tell, the stress of IVF wreaked havoc on relationships. Couples pillaged their savings and retirement accounts (the procedure is $15,000 a pop). I figured if traditional medicine wasn’t for me, perhaps I could cure my infertility a more traditional way, by changing what I ate and how I lived.

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Lizzie has been trying on bits and pieces of religions for years now, discarding each after a little wear. A few years ago, as we read the decidedly secular Nancy Drew together one night, she asked out of the blue if I believed in God. As she snuggled into the crook of my arm, chewing on a strand of dark blond hair, she waited for an answer.

“Well, some people believe in God,” I answered, carefully putting on the same serious but accessible voice I’d used to answer previous uncomfortable questions about where babies come from and why there are Republicans.

“Do you believe?” Lizzie said, stressing the you so I could almost see the italics flying out of her mouth. There was no getting around it. I had to answer.

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For years, I have tried to pretend otherwise, to brush them off as a mere New York Times-manufactured conspiracy involving the hand-wringing trials of a tiny group of Sarah Lawrence alums. Even this week, as I felt the tremors of a nation of my fellow mothers face-palming over the gleeful feeding frenzy that Hilary Rosen and Ann Romney's war of words ignited, I struggled to ignore yet another exploitative attempt to turn grown women into mere catfighters engaged in a round of metaphoric hair pulling. Yet I can't look away anymore. I won't, because I've been in the middle of this stupid battle forever. And I know it will keep raging until we figure out how to collaboratively fix it.

We as women spend our whole lives being judged, and never more so than for our roles as mothers. We suffer for it, and frankly, we dish it out in spades. We park ourselves in separate camps, casting suspicious glances across the schoolyard. And it sucks because the judgment is there and it's real and it stems so often from our own deepest fears and insecurities. We pay lip service to each other's "choices" – and talk smack behind each other's backs.

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I tried to hold her, but she was hyperventilating a bit. "I’m 'the girl whose dad died when she was 13'?" she choked out. "Oh my God. That’s who I am now.  When people ask me what my dad does, or how we get along, or anything, that’s how I will have to answer: ‘My dad died when I was 13.’”

Words. Labels for things, for people. We spend our whole lives making sense of them, I guess. Figuring out which one is the best, most accurate choice.

So many words become insider jargon in families: We are the only ones who know that “black toast intolerant” means “lactose intolerant”; that “minimisize it” means “minimize it,” which big pot is the “pasta pot.” These special languages that families create are another way they are individualized, that a family becomes a unique organism of its own.

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I considered explaining to them that I had researched the topic thoroughly and found that modern hair dye chemicals likely pose little risk to a fetus in the third trimester. I considered mentioning that, just to be extra cautious, I was getting a semi-permanent color to limit my exposure to ammonia fumes. Instead, I buried myself in a copy of Us Weekly and tried to ignore the whispers of the other patrons.

I never thought I would be the type of person who would risk public scorn to get her roots touched up. I’ve grown increasingly granola-y over the past few years, and my forays into investigative journalism have made me wary of certain chemicals in cosmetics and other personal care products. These days, I consider myself dressed up if I leave the house wearing deodorant, let alone mascara. But that was before I was initiated into the world of upper-middle-class American pregnancy with all its hysteria and paranoia, and began feeling the urge to rebel.

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My young husband and I had moved to the Iron Range for a number of romantic reasons. We thought it was beautiful and in some way more “authentic” than the place we’d been living. We also believed the clean lake air would cure the asthma suffered by our younger son. What we failed to take into account was the 14 percent unemployment and a taconite-weary city with little but service work.

So Jim was stringing together two backbreaking, low-paying jobs and I — the 24-year-old mother of two — was trying to fill the long, icy, dark winter days. The library was my best bet. But on this particular afternoon, my nearly 4-year-old was behaving oddly. He wouldn’t sit with the other children for story time. He kept flapping his hand in front of his eyes. Twice, he jumped up and went to the wall, where he flipped the light switches madly back and forth.

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Three years before he was born, Abbie and I were married by an Episcopalian priest at the New York Botanical Garden. Over 200 guests attended, and the ceremony took place in an enclosed garden on a warm night in July. It was one of the first same-sex weddings featured in a national bridal publication (Modern Bride 2004), and there is a picture of us from that day — two blond women in gowns — on Tommy’s bedside table.

The day Tommy came out to me, we were walking home from school. He was telling me about Taylor, his most recent crush, when he stopped in the middle of the story, looked up and said, “Mama, you know how you and Mommy are gay?”

I nodded and figured he was going to ask more questions about why we had to get married for the second time.

“Well,” he said, “I’m not. I’m a boy who likes girls.”

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I grow fibroids -- blobs of muscle, basically -- which take up valuable space in my uterus and block my fallopian tubes. I’ve had them surgically removed twice, but they grew back. As soon as my husband, John, saw trouble brewing, he wanted to stop trying to make a baby and adopt one instead.

“I’m in my 40s,” he reminded me. “Neither of us are much of a prize, genetically.” He was right, of course -- it had been more than a decade since we met on the Salon Personals, of all places -- though I didn’t appreciate his rubbing it in.

“Besides,” he asked, “have you read the statistics on autistic kids born to older dads?”

Of course I read the statistics, but they didn’t matter. Since puberty, I’d been telling myself a wonderful story. It starts with the ecstasy of discovering that I’m pregnant, then moves on to feeling the baby kick and placing John’s hand on my belly. He feels it, too. We’re madly in love. I give birth in a hospital, aided by a midwife. No medication, no complications. I’m a champ. And the most fulfilling relationship of my life begins at that moment, when I’m handed my firstborn.

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Facebook, where you can create an entire album of your drunken, vomity, relieving-yourself-into-a-sink exploits, where you can share images of your child happily sliding around in his own diarrhea, has long maintained a surprisingly prim attitude toward the comparatively tame issue of breast-feeding shots. Though the company insists that "breastfeeding is natural and beautiful," and that "the vast majority of … photos are compliant with our policies, and we will not take action on them," it also maintains that "photos that show a fully exposed breast where the child is not actively engaged in nursing do violate Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities." Photos that are taken down, Facebook says, "are almost exclusively brought to our attention by other users who complain about them."

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Cross began in vitro fertilization treatments "a week after" getting married in 2006 and, unlike plenty of would-be moms her age, conceived easily. But the pregnancy itself proved a tougher ride, as she found herself on bed rest in the midst of her shooting schedule, developed preeclampsia, and delivered daughters Eden and Savannah four weeks early via emergency C-section. So when asked about how it feels to be a beacon of hope to other aspiring 40-something parents, it's no wonder that Cross says, "Are you kidding? It's a miracle I have these two daughters."

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