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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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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And they do: People ask all kinds of probing questions -- from the sometimes innocent, “Do twins run in your family?" to the blatant, “Was it natural?”

And it wasn’t. Our twins were the result of ovulation stimulation drugs and an IUI (intrauterine insemination).

But the question I started asking myself was: Why should I care if people suspected or knew I needed “help” getting pregnant? Especially in an age in which so many women seek medical intervention when they have trouble conceiving. And especially at a time when twins are becoming the new normal: Recently, the CDC reported that 1 in every 30 babies born in the United States today is a twin.

Part of my self-consciousness came from the fact that infertility treatments are an intimate affair. Your private parts are prodded, your internal organs scrutinized, and your bodily fluids drawn. Nobody looks at one little baby and thinks, “Gee, wonder how that thing got made?” whereas multiples beg the question: How exactly did that happen? I wasn’t crazy about my reproductive process being speculated upon or, more to the point, given any thought at all.

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When my daughter was born, I decided I’d be the kind of mother who emphasized bonding and nurturing touch over schedules and order. I pored over attachment parenting manuals and message boards. Versed in the lingo of my new way of parenting, I set out to find like-minded mom friends, the kind of ladies who knew the virtues of calendula.

I sprung for a six-week session of holistic infant care classes. The instructor, a soft-spoken doula, ranked among the hippiest hippies I knew, and that's saying something, since I spent two years living in a Berkeley cooperative. In her ankle-length broomstick skirt, the doula purred out instructions on infant massage and optimal co-sleeping arrangements to a small klatch of mothers and their newborns. It was a relief to find women with whom I could trade tips on swaddling and adjusting our ring slings. The mothers and I got along so well that a few of us continued to gather in a park every week after the class ended. Throughout the spring, we’d take over a sun dappled lawn and let our exclusively breastfed babies dine al fresco.

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Five months ago, I started drinking again after being sober for three years. Since then, I’ve developed so much paranoia. I feel watched all the time, even in the dark. Walking home, I stay behind buildings, in alleyways, like a criminal, pushing the stroller as I take my discreet sips from a bottle of wine I've stored on the bottom of the diaper bag. I know I’m the worst of all villains: a mother who drinks. A mother who endangers her child. Part of me drinks to forget this.

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The truth was I'd always intended on breast-feeding my baby, knew that nutritionally there was no match for breast milk, but mind and body were not on the same page of this particular parenting manual. It was just that, well, I was uncomfortable with the idea of another human being feeding from me. If I said that breast-feeding conjured an image of lactating farm animals and how I was reluctant to be milked or suckled, I would likely be beaten down by the lactation advocates and the battalion of advice givers who think their word is The Word when it comes to parenting. (You know the type.)

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It's one of the two questions I hear most often when I tell people my partner and I are expecting our second baby. The other common question -- "Do you know the gender?" -- makes more sense. People like to attach a concrete image to the fuzzy notion of a fetus. But, was I trying? That's an oddly intimate inquiry. And how is your sex life, stranger? 

Yet I've heard it from all corners, with this pregnancy and the last: co-workers. Bosses. Neighbors. My daycare provider. The guy at the deli where we buy our bagels. (OK, the deli guy didn't ask, but I could see it in his eyes.)

Do these people really harbor a burning desire to know whether we are careful planners or total screw-ups? Because that's what it boils down to. You were either trying -- under the sheets or, perhaps, the steely gaze of fertility specialists -- or you weren't, and are shocked, delighted, confused or feeling litigious toward your birth control manufacturer.

The funny thing is, we've been on both sides of the coital coin. My first pregnancy, although utterly welcome, was not entirely intentional. More recently, we were pretty careful about not being careful. So I should have two simple answers: last time no, this time yes.

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My wife Ann and I laughed about this while she was pregnant. "You're going to change our lives, baby," I teased the zygote as we lay like beached whales on the couch in our New Orleans living room. Our evening rituals barely needed tweaking after the pregnancy test came back positive. Nightly dates consisted of macabre or depressing TV ("Dexter," "The Wire," "Six Feet Under," "Treme") or a free horror movie from our crappy On Demand selection, punctuated by ads that popped up at the height of suspenseful moments.

Unfortunately, our life matched the tenor of our television. I was truly miserable in New Orleans, which is rotted through with two of the facts of life I find most unbearable: Public corruption and humidity. At the time, I was a lawyer investigating the egregious misdeeds of various government officials and their agents. But any progress I made in helping my clients, mostly institutionalized children and mentally ill adults, was undone almost instantly -- sometimes by my own agency.

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The three of us were never exactly partiers. We met in elementary school orchestra and solidified our friendship in the early '90s in a high school club called "Students Against Intolerance and Discrimination." We didn't drink, we barely danced, and only one of us dated in high school -- and by "dated," I mean she began a serious relationship with a guy who would become her husband.

It was miraculous, really, that we were all awake at 10 p.m. on a Saturday night, dressed in not-too-badly-baby-stained clothing, drinking hot toddies and engaging in an ever-so-slight flirtation with the two college guys perched on the giant leatherette ottoman opposite ours.

As the mother of a toddler, I was in serious need of flirting -- even the ever-so-slight variety. It had been forever since I'd been made to feel interesting and compelling, much less kind of sexy.

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"Will it be a boy or a girl, Mommy?" my 6-year-old asked as I sent her and her sisters off to school.

"You'll know when you get home from school today!" I said.

My husband and I joked easily in the waiting room of the high-risk maternity center (where I had automatically been placed because of my age), though couples around us sat in grim silence. We became slightly less relaxed as the minutes crept by. I had screwed up my appointment time (my special talent), and my husband became annoyed by the waiting. I had anticipated this moment with the intensity of a child counting down the days till Christmas, but it was not quite turning out as expected. By the time we were finally ushered into the ultrasound room my husband and I were engaged in a sotto voce round of bickering -- can't believe you messed up the time/stop ruining this for me -- only to be struck silent by the magical appearance of our baby on the screen.

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"Now that you're pregnant -- " she began.

There was a long, portentous pause. I wondered if Mom was about to reveal a family secret, something that could only be passed along to pregnant daughters. Then again, my mother is capable of making a dramatic production of advising me to eat more dark, leafy greens.

"Yes?" I asked, with some trepidation.

"Oh, nothing serious. I mailed off the baby clothes today."

I relaxed, relieved that there would be no drama. For over 30 years my mother had carefully saved a box of her children's baby clothes, many of them hand-knit by my grandmother. I smiled, imagining those tiny hats and sweaters on my own child. Then Mom dropped her bombshell.

"Oh, and I'm sending the maternity clothes, too," she added, casually.

"What maternity clothes?"

"Well, mine, of course. The ones I wore when I was pregnant with you!"

The enthusiasm in her voice made me blanch. "You saved your maternity clothes?"

Had I been one of those hip mamas so ubiquitous in my Portland neighborhood, sassy in their retro outfits, I might have been excited by this news. But I've always been a jeans and sweater gal. Besides, I was barely ready to contemplate maternity clothes at all -- let alone don the pregnancy garb of 1965.

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When a total stranger insists on feeling up my 1-year-old, though, that's when I lose my cool.

It happened at the end of a trying -- and tiring -- visit to my childhood home, which has, over time, become overstuffed with the relics of my brother's and my life as well as our parents' and their parents', too. For 10 days I prevented my toddling child from breaking any of a zillion pieces of crystal displayed on a glass cart in the dining room or choking on one of the various stray pills lurking in the woolly, hard-to-clean corners of the bathroom. My brother and I also managed to squeeze in the dreaded Conversation With One's Retirement-Age Parents that goes something like, "So where exactly are you planning to live when you can't, um, stay in the house anymore? And what are you planning to do with all this, erm, stuff?"

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When I grew up, I played with Legos. I never dreamed of baking or tea parties. I had dolls, but I didn't think they had feelings or needed to have their diapers changed. Then, when I was 9, my mother had my sister and I experienced all the hellish joys of raising an infant. My sister was a great kid, but by the time I was 25, I was quite sure that she was the only child I was ever going to have.

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Me, I don't much like attachment parenting. I agree with Jong that, in A.P. (as it's abbreviated), we are enslaving ourselves in the chains our foremothers fought to liberate us from. I think, deep down, A.P. sets up our children to become narcissists if they only see us as extensions of themselves, our bodies and time existing only for them. I don't love the green movement, either. I've tried making my own baby food, and it's not as smooth as the store-bought kind. It's also a mess.

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I've never been what you could call "sporty" or "in shape." I did once overhear my brother describing me to someone as having "an athletic build," but that was just a polite Midwestern way of saying "kind of fat" -- you know, athletic like a rugby player, not athletic like a marathoner. I do not and never have gone to the gym, worked out or owned any shorts made out of lycra, jackets made out of Gortex, or socks made out of anything that wicks. I hate sneakers that look like insects.

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But then I met my second husband. He was a rare breed, a retrosexual with motor grease under his fingernails and a garage stuffed with tools, but who also wept unashamedly and wasn't threatened by a mouthy New York-Puerto Rican with an Ivy League degree and a weight-lifting hobby.

And then I had a fateful visit with a gynecologist who asked me why at 40 I was bothering with birth control. "Either get the tubal or get pregnant now. You are officially out of time."

So I went home and told my husband. And two months later I was pregnant.

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"No," my 7-year-old, Beatrice, said.

"No," echoed her 3-year-old sister, Frances. Frances would chew glass if Beatrice said she thought it was a good idea. I knew she was just going along.

"Fine, but will you be OK if you have to be home while I have the baby?" I asked. "You know, if we can't get ahold of someone to come get you?"

"No," Beatrice said.

"No." That was Frances.

"Well, we'll figure it out." That's my mantra when I'm faced with too many or too few choices. I tucked my daughters in and closed the door.

That night, I went into labor.

I'm not exactly Type-A and planning doesn't come naturally to me. Added to that, this was my second home birth. It was easy not to get worked up over the details. It wasn't until two weeks before my due date that I finally requested the results of a first-trimester sonogram and genetics test be sent to my midwife. I had to pay rush shipping for my birth kit -- all the sterilized gauze pads, alcohol swabs, gloves and goop the midwife needs at the birth. We had only just picked names. Where to send the girls while I labored and birthed their younger sibling was even lower on my list of urgent tasks.

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I have done this before, handed my newborn over to a strange man who makes his business removing foreskins. Three years ago, when my older son was born, I'd had exactly the same feelings. Back then, they were surprising. I hadn't known this would be such a big deal. After all, I grew up in an Orthodox community. Every boy and man I had known had had this done; almost every mother I'd known had handed her child over in a similar fashion. I've been to many of these brises (ritual circumcisions), and there is a formula. The men cringe when they hear the cry. The women crowd around the mother, who is emotional. We shout "Mazel tov!" We eat bagels. But it all seemed like a play. Now I am the mother, and I am seized with desperation: Every morsel of my being, every maternal instinct I've earned in the last three years, says to run. How do women do this? I wonder.

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Some details are very clear. I am wearing my coat from the winter before; the top button is the only one I can still fasten, and the rest of the material falls around me like a cape. It’s all of five degrees, but pregnancy has stripped me of the ability to feel cold, and my belly juts into the air. The shirt covering it is my favorite, all in shades of brown, with wide horizontal stripes over a pattern of thinner horizontal lines. The pregnant can wear such things without fear of looking wide, a fact of which I take advantage at every opportunity.

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