“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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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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A few weeks later, however, I discovered something no one ever warned me about: Babies are pretty freaking boring.

Despite my initial moral superiority, I looked longingly at my phone across the room, yearning to caress it. I was afraid that exposure to my phone’s evil waves would seep into my baby’s brain (even though men have them nestled in their pockets next to their precious packages all day), but the idea of interacting with my phone became more compelling by the day. There’s a whole universe inside there. Articles to read, seeing how many people liked my status update, friends to talk to, one more time with that status update, and Twitter feeds from celebrities to make me feel inadequate. Parenting can be isolating, and monotonous, and lonely, and monotonous. My phone is my connection to the outside world, and it was too hard to abandon.

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Manhattan may boast bloated salaries, Indian food delivered at 4 a.m. and the glorious perfume of Central Park in autumn and of damp and dying leaves commingled with the smoke of Halal carts, but as I aged, I learned these perks came with a huge anthropological flaw: its ratio of men to women. Statistics cite our city’s population of single women as being 210,000 more than its available men. It feels more like one man for every six or seven women. This biological trip-up is easy to ignore in a Neverland of middle-aged Peter Pans and Wendys. As I enjoyed an exciting career at CNN and Bloomberg TV, matched by an invigorating social life, my 20s and early 30s blew past me in a torrent of late nights at the Spotted Pig, front row seats at the Marc Jacobs show and Moet at Rose Bar. Did I mention Michael Stipe once hand-rolled me a “cigarette” at 60 Thompson? I am finally good enough, I thought, as I considered my boozy, status-driven pursuits.

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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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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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