Let’s put aside the merits of Badinter’s book here, because that’s a whole other can of worms, and focus strictly on the wisdom of a respected newspaper framing an entire conversation in such starkly reductive, not to mention dumb, terms. In that spirit, you’ve got to take your hat off to the women who bravely made a go of answering the question sincerely — even though a few of them really did step in it.

Comedian Heather McDonald, for instance, leapt right out of the gate with the admission that “Yes, women’s obsession with being the perfect mother, especially ‘attachment parenting,’ has been bad for working mothers.”  Wait, I did not know that we “women” were obsessed in the first place, unless by “women” you mean a small, privileged, neurotic portion of them. McDonald goes on to brag that she “did not breastfeed, make organic baby food or co-sleep with my children. I instead slept with their father, and I am still happily married to him today,” because apparently there’s a correlation between breast-feeding and divorce. And lest you think sweeping generalizations about motherhood are just for this side of the Atlantic, Pamela Druckerman, author of “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting,” airily declares that  “French mothers haven’t succumbed to this spiral” of “guilt.” Good for you, French mothers! All of you!

There isn’t much in the entire package that doesn’t feel shamelessly manipulated to incite an old-fashioned chick fight here. Though author and former “Blossom” star Mayim Bialik wisely asks, “Tell me how attachment parenting is inconsistent with feminism?” the out-of-context pull quote beside her piece is instead, “The women who pioneered attachment-parenting support groups and publications are not competitive celebrity divas with nannies on the side.”

And most provocatively of all, LaShaun Williams, a “columnist and blogger who writes about parenting and culture,” uses her time at bat to declare feminism “a movement that, while liberating women to follow their dreams, devalued marriage and the familial and societal benefits of homemaking and encouraged self-indulgence.” People, this statement happened. In the New York Times. TODAY. It’s not that the Times, once it got the burning itch to put it out there that motherhood and feminism might somehow be at odds, shouldn’t have brought in a decidedly anti-feminist voice. But why choose someone whose qualifications include the fact that “She is on Twitter”? What is this, Fox News?

To be fair, there were occasional flashes of common sense to be found. Author Erica Jong said, “Let’s first agree that there is no such thing as perfection in motherhood — or in any human activity.”  And Maria Blois, author of “Babywearing: The Benefits and Beauty of This Ancient Tradition,” sensibly pooh-poohed the whole question, saying, “Attachment parenting does not do anything to us, it does not  ‘destroy feminism,’ it is not ‘bad for working moms.’ It is simply an ideology we can use within the context of our own life and priorities.” And blogger Annie Urban wisely declared that “To achieve meaningful equality, we need to push for a society that values fathers” as well. It’s unfortunate their insights are mired in such a steaming pile of editorial tosh, and the flimsiest of pretexts. Most of us do the best we can with what we’ve got. And in 2012, there shouldn’t be any room for debate that being a mother and being a feminist are very much in harmony.

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.

I loved that shot because of what it meant to my mom, something I understood even at a young age. She had tried being a housewife after my sister was born the year before, but the drudgery of washing and folding diapers, the inanity of popular soap operas, the lack of tangible accomplishments at the end of each day, had her clawing her way back to a steadily rising corporate career when I was only 6 weeks old.

Contrast this with my own children’s more feral birth stories, which involve some or all of the following: midwives, birthing tubs, hospital-grade pads lining my sofa and living room floor. And breastfeeding. Lots and lots of breastfeeding. I squeezed what maternity leave I could from federal laws. In the end, though, I quit my job so I could figure out this life-shifting role without the hassle of long commutes, expensive child care, and pumping breast milk while perched over a toilet.

The way I looked at it, I was taking the maternity leave my society didn’t want me to have and that women like my own mother never wanted. But the French feminist and philosopher Elisabeth Badinter argues in her 2010 book, which was finally released in English this week, I was yet another newbie mom screwing things up.

In “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women,” Badinter explains that, 30 years ago, things were looking good for a generation of moms in Western Europe – women had total control over reproduction, they had achieved financial independence, wage gaps were shrinking. Then a global economic crisis kicked women off the job, pushing them back in the home and searching for meaning. At the same time, a renewed interest in the environment persuaded grown-ups to look to the earth and tradition for answers. Marry the two, Badinter argues, and a new type of mom was born — one who knew what she wanted for her babies and believed she possessed some innate wisdom to make it happen. Problem is, these moms, the daughters of Badinter’s and my mother’s generation, set women back decades with things like drug-free births, generous, state-sanctioned maternity and paternity leaves, and, of all tools of the Man, cloth diapers.

There’s a new tyrant oppressing women’s lives, Badinter claims. And it’s a nipple-sucking, nap-fighting, incontinent little baby.

Sure, children have been ruining their mothers’ lives since we evolved from chimps. But what makes this snapshot in time so different, according to Badinter, is the fact that modern, emancipated mothers are so complicit in their own destruction. Lactating, co-sleeping, time off from work – that’s a bunch of “naturalist” mumbo-jumbo and a distraction from a woman’s duty to herself and a society that wants to see her as equal but can’t quite get past the milk stains on her blouse. These days, though, not only do women welcome the career interruption, according to Badinter, but they also buy into the idea that mothering is an instinct. So women adopt a “naturalist” lifestyle, carrying their babies, spending time with them, actually purchasing, on purpose, diapers that have to be scraped and washed rather than tossed in the trash.

For Badinter, this naturalist parenting has taken over, triggered mom guilt, convinced us that we should refuse epidurals, breastfeed off-schedule, and, of all things, take advantage of long, paid maternity leaves. Who cares that these things might actually be the woman’s choice, make sense for her family, satiate her curiosity about the thresholds of human pain? By participating, women are ceding power back to men. The men? They don’t have to lift a finger – thanks to moms, they’ve regained control over everything.

I’ve been a modern mom long enough to look at mommy-wars rhetoric like Badinter’s with the skeptical eye of a wounded veteran. I mean, she makes a great case that mothering trends come and go and are rarely based on irrefutable science. Epidurals? Safe. Breast milk? Not all that. Skin-to-skin bonding with babies? Fun but hardly crucial. I think we all know we’re not going to be snacking on placenta forever. Then again, does a home birth really have a negative impact on the stubborn wage gap?

Badinter particularly has it in for breastfeeding, something she thinks too many women have been tricked into and something French women aren’t all that interested in trying. Why bother, she wants to know. It ties moms down, adds a layer of guilt, isn’t any better than bottles and formula. Anyway, it’s taxing – on the woman and her “conjugal partner.” When it comes time to bed down, rather than offering up bountiful breasts for her mate to fondle, moms are pushing fathers to the couch to make room for her new lover – a co-sleeping baby. It’s an arrangement, she recounts with seeming horror, that can last for years.

Badinter’s critique is not surprising, given how zealous the “breast is best” messengers can be. (She dedicates a delightful number of pages to taking down La Leche League.) But as a mom who breastfed her kids for years, I can assure you that nurslings are a ball-and-chain only as much as the outside world won’t welcome them in. In which case, it’s not breastfeeding moms who are undermining women’s status, it’s the same old mother- and child-averse institutions – work, school, swimming pools swarming with conservatives. Modern engineering has made babies a kind of go-anywhere accessory. Problem is, too much of society prefers they’re not anywhere, no matter what they eat.

Badinter isn’t the first aging feminist to accuse younger women of trying to settle the score with their feminist foremothers. Was my decision to take a career break, suckling my babies for years and even, occasionally, wrapping them in cloth diapers a rebellion against my mother’s hard-driving, job-focused ways? The artificial milk and endless hours at a babysitter’s? That’s not how I see it. My mother and I both reacted to the demands of our time. In this book-length attempt to scold the young’uns for screwing up progress, Badinter, like others before her, fails to see that what her generation gave us were real choices.

After I was born, the corporate career window was closing on my mom with every day that I got older. She crawled back through just in time and made a decent life for herself and her family. I, on the other hand, felt like I had time. Sticking with one company for life was as outdated as a postpartum estrogen shot. I didn’t have to rely on the one job that I left. I could start a new career when I was ready. My mother’s urgent return to work had paved a slow and meandering path for women (and men!) of my generation. I wasn’t expected to leave my job to be with my kids, which is exactly why I could consider it.

Generation gaps aside, Badinter’s book ultimately feels outdated. Most of her data comes from the 1980s and ’90s, and family life has evolved dramatically since then. I’m in Year 11 of motherhood, and I feel I’ve witnessed modern parenting change right before my eyes. Where Badinter reports regression for women, I see signs of progress.

Instead of the old-guard patriarchy taking over the wheel, more and more partners share the load – either through necessity or a sincere desire to be with their kids. I have as many stay-at-home-dad friends as I do similarly barely employed mom friends. These dads can work the cloth diapers as well as any oppressed French eco-femme. They heat formula, thaw frozen breast milk and pack healthy lunches. They attend playgroups and work the co-op preschools during the day and send out resumes and story pitches and teach classes at night. Want to piss them off? Just call them “Mr. Mom.” Or tell them they’re doing a great job babysitting their kids.

I’m not saying Badinter is completely out of touch with Western mothers’ lives. It’s true that motherhood lowers women’s status. But that’s not a modern phenomenon – and it has little, if anything, to do with cloth diapers. Has she even seen modern cloth diapers and accompanying accessories? If it weren’t for the fun colors and ridiculous brand names (Fuzzi Bunz?), you could easily mistake them for Pampers.

Where modern women do undermine themselves is the constant questioning of their choices and allowing for an onslaught of guilt. No matter what we do, it’s wrong in someone’s eyes – so why do we take any of this criticism seriously? Instead of doing as we please and moving on, as Badinter praises French women for doing, we do as we please and then punish ourselves with guilt. I should know: Though I stand by the choices I’ve made as a mom, this book made me feel like shit. Then again, so did the Tiger Mom treatise and, more recently, the book about how superior French parents are to me. Why so little faith in my own decisions?

My mom, on the other hand, never regretted her estrogen shots or worried that baby formula had made me fat. Yet she absolutely loved the idea that I nursed her grandkids. For a baby shower, she gave me cloth diapers. My mom even managed after a while to stop making negative comments about mothers who didn’t go to work every day. These weren’t slights against me — just an old habit from when she had to defend mothers who did.

Motherhood is undeniably both incredibly difficult and profoundly satisfying. And had the P&G spot ended with its other refrain, “Thank you, Mom,” it might been more palatable — even if it still conveniently ignores the fact that fathers can play an active role in both nurturing their children’s talents and getting their breakfast on the table.

There’s something simultaneously arrogant and exploitative about the incessant mantra that motherhood is the “best and hardest” job in the world. Sure, you could say that it’s just an expression. But it’s a turn of phrase that’s constantly bandied about as accepted truth. And as Meghan Daum pointed out in the L.A. Times last week, the same rhetoric that was in action when Barack Obama recently declared, “There is no tougher job than being a mom” takes “the formerly quotidian institution known as parenthood” and shoehorns it into the realm of “professional status.” It turns motherhood into a title, creating a false equivalency between child rearing and every other calling in the world.

More insidiously than that, though, it tells mothers that nothing else they accomplish in life has the same value as their ability to raise kids, that their status in the world is always going to be viewed through the prism of their offspring and their successes. It tells both men and women who don’t have children that their efforts are simply not on par with the MIRACLE OF CREATING LIFE. It tells every person who’s chosen not to have children that they’re somehow lesser citizens. It’s also painfully insulting to everyone who’s ever wanted children and been unable to have them.

So you’re a woman and you’ve had children. That makes what you do harder and better than anything Angela Merkel or Oprah Winfrey or Condoleezza Rice or Ellen DeGeneres or Ann Patchett, or for that matter, the Dalai Lama have ever done? I don’t think so. And I definitely don’t believe a soap company is the last word on what constitutes a worthy vocation. Motherhood is work — wonderful, fulfilling, exhausting, intense work. But it’s not a job. And even in a celebration of the spirit of the Olympic games, it’s absolutely not a competition.

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.

I had no idea that going natural would be so unnatural.

It started off simply. I weaned myself off coffee, kept the wine bottles corked, and threw away my Cocoa Puffs (caffeine might disrupt hormonal balance, alcohol might impair ovulation, and sugar is just plain bad for you, according to my fertility nutritionist). I put the kibosh on two of Ron’s favorite weekend activities: cycling, which could potentially damage his Super Sperm, and grilling out. I was being crazy, I knew, but I promised him it would only last a few months — just until I got pregnant.

Instead of hamburgers, dinner now consisted of daikon seaweed soup, a recipe I got from Julia Indichova, author of the book “Inconceivable” (Indichova conceived naturally after changing her diet and lifestyle, and I clung to her book like a map in the wilderness). I began eating more fruits and vegetables, except for peas, which, according to Indichova, contain a natural contraceptive.

A friend had gotten pregnant with the help of acupuncture. Some studies have found it can boost the chances of IVF success. Though I was skipping the IVF part, I began visiting a practitioner weekly; he poked me with needles to awaken my Qi, which, according to Chinese medicine, is the body’s vital life energy. After listening to my pulse, checking the coating on my tongue, and listening to me spill the details of my life’s struggles in a therapy-like session, he told me that my reproductive area was weak and that the acupuncture would move my Qi to help regulate my menstrual flow. Then he stuck a needle in the external part of my ear, and I yelped in pain. I began to suspect acupuncture wasn’t for me.

Next, I worked with an herbalist who gave me a combination of 15 plant extracts mixed and bottled into a tonic to drink daily. The herbal concoction looked like brown goop and tasted so disgusting I had to hold my breath to swallow the stuff.

When I described my new regimen to my fertility doc, he was open-minded about acupuncture but cautious about the herbs: “Herbs aren’t regulated by the FDA,” he warned. Still, I liked the idea of using plants as medicine; it seemed better than drugs designed to coax my ovaries to pop out 10 eggs at a time instead of one. There was no evidence that the herbs would be effective; other women who had my problem only turned to alternative medicine as a last resort, after IVF had failed. I held out hope that if I tried alternative medicine first, I could avoid IVF altogether.

But even with plenty of sex, followed by Viparita Karani (a yoga pose where I elevated my legs up the headboard to help the sperm along), goji berries (reputed to be an aphrodisiac), and week after week of acupuncture sessions, I didn’t conceive. In fact, I could barely tolerate acupuncture. The needles left me feeling anxious, not relaxed, so I stopped. Instead, I turned back to Indichova’s book to see what additional strategies she suggested to boost fertility: yoga for stress reduction (I practiced regularly), colonics to clean out my intestines (no way), and visualization techniques to bring about physiological changes in the body. That sounded safe enough. A stretch maybe, but much less painful than sticking a hose up my butt.

Indichova cited Gerald Epstein, a physician in New York City, as the go-to guy. So I called him at the American Institute for Mental Imagery and arranged to see him.

Epstein faxed me a visualization exercise to do before my appointment, one that he called the Egyptian Healing. Once a day, for seven days after I ovulated, I was to picture a larger-than-life me taking a journey up my cervix and into my uterus. Maxi-me had five eyeballs —one on the end of each finger of my left hand. I also had five small hands on the end of each fingertip of my right hand. If that wasn’t strange enough, I had to envision using these hands to gather yellow rays from the sun and vanilla beans from a field before climbing into my uterus to take a look around (with five eyeballs, I could see well in there). I cleaned away my hostile uterine lining with a golden brush, planted vanilla beans, and watched orchid petals unfold along my uterine wall. Gold, Epstein said, represented transformation; vanilla was a purifying aroma; and orchids represented strength. I tried to take the imagery exercise seriously, but it was hard not to giggle, which made me feel bad. That’s one of the problems I kept running into with alternative medicine. If I wasn’t diligent and earnest enough, I feared I wasn’t doing it “right.”

When I met Epstein in person I liked him right away. He wasn’t a quack. The more I listened to him, the more I felt what he said had merit. He believes that the mind is a powerful force. “It can both create and destroy health,” he said. To demonstrate how the mind exerts influence on the body he had me hold my arm in place, parallel to the ground, while he pressed down on it. I had an easier time resisting his push when I thought of things I loved (like my husband), but my arm sank when I thought of things I hated (like acupuncture). I was surprised; Epstein wasn’t. “People try to separate the mind and body, but they’re one,” he said.

Along with my fertility nutritionist and my ex-acupuncturist, Dr. Epstein wanted to “investigate my inner conflicts.” Especially those surrounding parenthood. Like most women, I was worried about whether I could successfully juggle my career and motherhood. I hated to admit it, but I was dreading the pregnancy weight gain, and I could easily work myself into a panic when I thought about the logistics of pushing out an 8-pound baby. We also talked about the fact that my extra-long periods began the same month I’d learned Ron and I had to leave California for Washington, D.C., a move I was less than thrilled about. Could my unhappiness about our relocation be causing my period problems? Epstein thought so. He told me about a cluster of cells in the mid-area of the brain known as the locus coeruleus, or blue nucleus, which typically sends neurochemicals to other parts of the brain to help the body function optimally. But in times of anxiety, the adrenal gland secretes stress hormones that deactivate the blue nucleus. To get it functioning again, Epstein suggested that I try reducing my stress hormones with visual imagery and by taking long, slow exhalations.

“Your mental concerns are reflected in your uterine instability,” he said. Now that’s something I never heard from my mainstream doc.

Maybe a super disciplined person can “imaginate” (as Dr. Epstein termed it) faithfully, practice yoga every day, and resist all urges for peanut butter cups, but I struggled to maintain all the rules of my routine. As I fed beets into my juicer, I felt grateful, I did, but I also felt impatient and frustrated. It’s hard being crunchy.

Two months later, my cycle did begin changing; my luteal phase had lengthened by a day. Was it thoughts of vanilla beans that made the difference? The Bound Supta Baddha Konasana I practiced on my yoga mat? With so many factors in play, it was hard to know for sure. But instead of feeling buoyed by this turn of events, I began to feel like a prisoner of my kinder, gentler routine. Giving up cookies was one thing, but after trying to give up wheat (too inflammatory!), meat (too acidic!) and dairy (too mucus-y!) I felt like a martyr, especially when I’d stare hungrily into my cupboard, bare but for a container of uncooked quinoa. I also felt perpetually paranoid. Would I sabotage my chances of pregnancy if I drank one cup of coffee? I canceled a weekend trip with girlfriends — what if I ovulated while I was away? I spent my free time Googling holistic fertility treatments. Ironically, I was caught up in the fertility obsessiveness I’d wanted to avoid in the first place. And I also couldn’t help thinking that while there may well be power in positive thinking, there is also value in giving voice to truth, even if that truth involves a messy uterus and the sadness of infertility.

Whether I pursued holistic medicine, Western medicine, or took a middle ground, I was beginning to suspect there were things I could control (diet and exercise) and things I couldn’t (whether a blastocyst implanted in my uterus). I’d been frantically running in mad little circles with my yoga practice, baked kale chips, and visualization exercises, hoping that I could create a baby by dint of sheer determination. Meanwhile, I’d ignored the fact that there are things that nobody can bring about by force. No matter how perfectly I tried to follow any routine, there were no guarantees I’d conceive.

A few days later, when Ron brought home a bottle of red wine, I let myself enjoy a glass. I needed to loosen my grip on other areas, too. Because whether or not we eventually ended up with a baby, I wanted to move forward in my life, welcoming whatever lay around the bend.

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.

“No, I don’t,” I said as concern creased her face.

Should I have lied and just said I believed? After all, God seems to lurk in almost every nook and cranny of this country. Way back, in kindergarten, the Pledge of Allegiance told her she’s part of one nation under God. Lizzie sees friends and family go to church or temple each week and smiles at the store clerk who tells her to “have a blessed day.” Giant decorated trees and huge menorahs are everywhere she looks each December (rather, menorahs used to be everywhere — then we moved to Portland). Every time I dig through my wallet to find bills to buy a gallon of milk — or anything at all — I see His name. In God some may trust, but not all of us.

There are chunks of society saying if you don’t believe in God you’re a bad person. Will Lizzie intuit that she’s bad if she doesn’t believe — or that her mother is? Or is it OK to tell her what I believe: It’s a superstition that many people believe but I don’t, and that, to me, it seems like mystical make-believe. Maybe I should take what I like about religion — the moral and ethical bits — and drop the rest, my own personal ecumenical smorgasbord. I’ll take One Golden Rule and seven of the Ten Commandments, please, and hold the mortal sin and transubstantiation.

My disenchantment with religion started long ago, when I went to Mass each Sunday. I wore frilly dresses that my mother had carefully laid out the night before and the white acrylic tights that itched my legs and sagged uncomfortably as I sat, week after week, on the polished dark wood pew, standing and sitting on command, but not really listening to the priest. I chanted when everyone else did — my religion, with its comfort of ritual and repetition, seemed made for obsessive compulsives. But instead of mediating on God’s glory, I’d flip though the hymnal and wiggle on the hard wooden seat. After my First Communion, I’d go each week and eat Jesus, in Catholicism’s ritualistic cannibalism. As the wafer dissolved slowly on my tongue, I realized that to me it was just a wafer. The church didn’t fill me with the Holy Ghost, just the feeling it was a scam. There wasn’t one single event that made me feel this way — just a series of Sundays and something deep in me. I was a closeted agnostic at 6. But I kept going. When I was a teenager, I’d sullenly attend each Sunday morning, studying the other teenagers, potheads and cheerleaders. A cheerleader who, at school, strutted past with a flip of her feathered hair as if I didn’t exist, smirked a fake lip-glossed smile at me and shook hands when the priest told us to offer each other a sign of peace. As soon as Mass was over, the detente ended and everyone went back to their roles, the weekly pretend play over. I smoked dope with the potheads, and cheerleaders ignored lesser girls.

High school also taught me how malleable faith could be — religious beliefs seemed as steadfast and unbendable as tin foil. After losing my religion as a teen, I lost my virginity and got pregnant. My parents, avowed Catholics, took me to the clinic for an abortion without a second thought. We didn’t even consider any other alternative for more than 20 seconds — and thanks be to my parents for that. But it crystallized the feeling that religion was full of hypocrisies — and you could twist it and turn it to fit your needs. I still went to church, though, with my parents weekly. I didn’t ask them not to go and they didn’t tell me to go; it was expected that I go, so I did. And as soon as I left home, I left my religion without a second glance. During my 20s and 30s, I gave as much thought to religion as I did to my 401K — pretty much nothing. But in my mid-40s, I found myself back in church for the first time in decades.

My 40-year-old cousin and her two young children had been killed. There aren’t words to explain the awfulness of what happened, but here are a few to describe it: It was late. It was dark. My cousin was driving with her two kids tucked safely into their car seats. Something happened and the car hit a tree. It burst into flames. Everyone died.

Red electric candles flickered in the corners and incense burned my nose and eyes. Flowers and tiny white coffins were wheeled into the church and placed next to the larger coffin — children snuggled next to their mother in death, as in life. All around, mourners sobbed. My cousin’s husband was lost to his grief, his entire family gone in less time than it takes to say three Hail Marys. What can you say to someone drowning in misery, how can anything you say possibly make it better? You can’t.

The priest’s words, meant as comfort to the family, fell flat to me. Everything seemed like a false comfort offered for such bottomless loss. Part of me wants to be able to tell Lizzie her second cousins are in a better place, to buffer her from the sadness of children dying. But it feels like a lie. So what do I say when other people tell her they’re in heaven? Do I stare straight ahead when she looks quizzically at me? What’s wrong with a white lie to help ease grief? I fight the urge to answer like a therapist. (“Are my second cousins in heaven?” “What do you think?”)

I feel comfortable with what I believe about not believing, but I still find it hard to talk to Lizzie about it. I want to give her the wisdom I have but also the room to decide for herself and not have her beliefs trailer-hitched to mine. So we read my old children’s Bible, Greek myths and Native American creation stories. Her dad tells her the story about the Maccabees and the oil when we eat latkes at Hanukkah and about Moses at Passover. I tell her about Jesus during Christmas and Easter. But I feel compelled to stress to her that these are myths that some people believe. And is it hypocritical on my part to even talk about Moses and Jesus? To have a tree? To search for eggs? To eat latkes?

Lizzie is sifting and sorting and exploring theology in her own way. She and her dad started their own religion, Dalala, after her fish Sparkly died. It involves lighting a candle for all the people or animals who’ve died in the past year — so they can come back as babies. And it involves eating pancakes. We’ve observed it annually, every March 26, for seven years now. It sounds as plausible as anything I grew up with.

So Lizzie has the room to believe what she wants. I taught her to brush her teeth, to look both ways before crossing the street and to think about religion from a historical standpoint. She’s a kind and thoughtful child, a living Golden Rule. And if she one day decides to get religion, I’ll love her and forgive her.