Recently, we were tipped off through the school PTO grapevine that she has a criminal record and is an addict, and that stories about her have appeared in the town paper, and also that she has been banned from volunteering in the school because of this.

I didn’t believe it, but asked a librarian if there was a way to find out. The librarian gave me a link to a criminal records database for our state. All I had to do was type in her name. A long list of arrests came up for both the baby sitter and her spouse. Most were driving without a license or marijuana possession. Two were for domestic violence. I called our police station to ask if I could find out more about someone’s arrest on a domestic violence charge. I explained I wanted to know if a rumor about our baby sitter is true. The police gave me a copy of one of the domestic violence case documents. The date was just over a year ago.

It’s pretty bad: She and her husband were beating each other up in front of their kids, blood was spattering all over the kids’ toys, they were swearing at each other. The mug shot was awful. I guess mug shots usually are, but she doesn’t look at all like the person I know. I mean, it’s definitely her, but she has a weird look in her eyes.

This is as far as I got with what to do: I am not comfortable having her as a baby sitter. Whether that’s right or wrong, I am OK with my decision. I know some people might focus on her kindness and think she has moved on from her troubles, especially since there’s no record of arrests within the year.

I got halfway to this: I am ethically required to tell the people I recommended her as a baby sitter to about this. (I’ve told some of them, but only the ones I trust to not gossip.) Do I need to tell everyone?

I am completely stuck on this: Should I tell her what I know? Would she want to know? Or would it just be rude and unnecessarily confrontational of me to bring it up? She still thinks we are friends. And I guess we are. But I have stopped asking her to baby-sit (obviously) and also have stopped asking her for medical advice. I never reach out to her anymore. She is a nice person. She is kind and smart. Her arrests are from over a year ago. Should I, as her friend, let her know that the PTO grapevine is sharing her criminal record info with the rest of the town?

Thank you for reading and considering my question. I value your advice!

Need a New Sitter

Dear Need a New Sitter,

When you ask your daughter where she picked up that new vocabulary and she says, “It’s prison lingo, Mom,” it makes you feel kinda funny inside.

So I completely understand your decision to stop using this baby sitter.

There’s just something about the person who’s making sandwiches in the kitchen while your kids are watching TV that doesn’t go with “mug shot.”

Generally, when I find out somebody has an arrest record, I give them the benefit of the doubt.

But parents are funny. They’re really touchy about who tucks their kids in at night. While they’re out having dinner, they like to imagine some clean-scrubbed honors student doing her homework on the couch while the kids are watching TV or tucked into nice, clean, warm beds.

So yeah, sad as it is, I think you gotta be the snitch. You got to drop a dime on this character.

You gotta tell. Seriously. You may be depriving this person of work, but hey.

The Buddhists say we ought to seek our right livelihood. Baby sitter isn’t the right livelihood for this person.

Nobody loves a snitch. But your reputation would suffer more if it came to light that you knew about this and didn’t tell anyone. It’s like you’re endangering their kids. So tell.

Domestic violence is a definite no-no for baby sitters. Sure, she’s innocent until proven guilty. But a baby sitter can’t afford to even get arrested for such a thing. It’s a well-understood professional liability and a common-sense deal-breaker. She should find a new line of work that’s not “domestic” anything.

As I grew older, I went from “difficult” to “rebellious.” There were accusations, door slams. We are both temperamental and quick toward theatrics, both prone toward shaking our hands at the heavens and screaming, “Why me?!”

Eventually, though, we learned to get along. We still do. When I had children, I promised our home would be calm and reasonable. We would talk everything out. We would never, ever yell.

At first, I was a different kind of mother than she was. My son was quiet and compliant — and sweet. He hugged me when I put my arms out; he never defied me, at least not until much later. My mother would visit, and I would show her how loving and not screamy I was with him. I sat on the floor with him and played with him during those visits, though I find stacking and shape-sorting excruciating. By my example, I would try to teach her how nice and easy it could have been. On our daily phone calls, I would show how I was the model of patience and how I was understanding and not reflexively impatient. I was showing her how she could have been a better mother; in truth, I was waiting for an apology.

Then my younger son was born. He is beautiful — you should see him — and he is charming. He smiled, I swear, the day he was born. He laughed when he was just 4 weeks old. Then, about two months after we brought him home, he opened up his mouth and began screaming, and he didn’t stop for something like 15 months. He has not yet slept through the night for more than a week in a row. He is old enough now to get very angry at me and throw tantrums, and for those tantrums to upend our household. He’ll grow out of them, or maybe he won’t. Maybe he’ll sit at his desk in 34 years and write an essay about what a terrible mother I was.

But that will be his essay. In my essay, I start to scream. I scream so loud that the neighbors want to know if, um, everything’s OK in there? I scream so much that my throat is raw. I give looks that are identical to the ones my mother gave — sharp and pointed — not just to the younger one, but to the older one, who has started testing my limits, too. I send the 2-year-old to his room. I try to speak the way my sister speaks, to tell them that I understand their frustration, but honestly, I don’t, and I don’t think I should have to. I tolerate no amount of disobedience or backtalk. My husband comes home to find me a frazzled mess.

I am, in short, the kind of mother my mother was.

But my mother is a different person than I realized. I first came to understand this after the delivery of my older son. It was traumatic, and I was depressed for months following it. My mother came to stay with me and tried to show me new ways of having perspective on this, but all I kept saying was that she had never had to triumph over anything this difficult. As I sat in a dark trance, rocking my baby, she told me to put him down while he slept. I wouldn’t. I was going to be a calm, peaceful — OK, completely depressed — presence for this kid in a way she never was for me.

Once again, she didn’t understand what I was going for. I wanted to be rock solid. I didn’t want my own emotional limitations to get in the way of being a parent. Not my sadness, not my temper, not anything. I wanted to be better than human. I wanted her to have been better than human.

The day before she returned home from her visit, she had been told that a lifelong heart condition had reached critical condition. I knew nothing about this. She told me about it when she returned home. She called to tell me that she was scheduled for open-heart surgery. I knew she had a heart murmur, but that sounded so — I don’t know — benign.

She told me the whole story: She’d been born with a heart condition. When she was a young child in Israel, the doctors told her she wouldn’t live very long. They didn’t let her play in gym class or ride a bike. They told her she would never have children. When she got to America as a teenager, she decided that she would live on her own terms. She bought a pack of cigarettes and didn’t tell anyone about her heart condition. No one would tell her how to live her life. She married my father, and she spent the next 10 years gestating me and my several sisters and smoking Kents, alternately.

I was stunned. I had never known my mother had such a secret. I’d never know that it was she who was the rebellious one. I started to see my mother as someone about whom I did not have the whole picture. I was starting to find common ground with my mother. We were both rebellious, it turns out, but she was truly brave.

I came to imagine a new side to my mother: The bad-ass side, the take-no-crap-from-anyone side. And here is where I should mention my mother’s looks. She is so, so beautiful. She was devastating to look at. Even with her children in tow, yelling at them in some public mall, men would turn to look and women would comment with envy on some aspect of her body or face. In her jewelry box, I found letters from old boyfriends, begging her to stay.

And you should see the photo albums: The white bikini, the strapless dress, the beehive hairdo with the liquid eyeliner, that trench coat. She did not know how long she would live, but she would live until then. She would live and die according to her own terms. V’ze-hoo, as she’d say in Hebrew: And that’s that.

But we have no idea who our mothers really are. They are mysteries to us, and we don’t ever have all the information. Even my kids, who will one day use their Google brain chips to read my essays — me, the oversharingest woman in the world — still won’t know my entire story.

Yet, lately — maybe because of the behavior that I’ve tried and failed to control — I’ve started to wonder if the kind of mother I had wasn’t exactly the kind of mother I needed. Because I turned out fine. I am a loving daughter, a loyal and warm wife, a doting (if screaming) mother. I am what my mother wished for. So are my three sisters. And we are sure of nothing if not that we are loved by our mother.

Could it be that every bit of tension was aimed particularly at a part of me that required it? Could it be that the screaming and the anger worked like water and sunlight and helped me grow? Could it be that her disapproval was what I needed to learn to parse what I found approvable?

Or could it be that motherhood is far more forgiving than we ever could imagine? Could it be that, later, our children will forgive us our faults because there is nothing like a mother who screams at you and suspects you and checks on you at midnight and is afraid for your future to show you how loved you are?

My older son was just a few months old when my mother’s heart surgery was scheduled. We flew back to New York on a redeye and went straight to the hospital just in time to see my sisters head into the waiting room: It was almost time to begin. I sneaked into the pre-op room, where babies were not allowed, and where she’d been given a drug to relax her as they arranged the IVs and monitors so they could be wheeled into the operating room.

“I’m sorry I made your life hard,” I told her, just in case, as two nurses carefully guided her bed out of the pre-op room and into the hall.

“You made my life a joy,” she told me. I held my son close on my hip as they wheeled her down the long hall, all the way down, until she became so tiny that I couldn’t see her at all.

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.

Our culture certainly didn’t help these insecurities. “Mommy” is used to denigrate female parents. Professional women planning to have children are on the “Mommy track.” When we write about our experiences, we are “Mommy bloggers.” When we differ about parenting, we engage in “Mommy wars.” When we get into a little erotica, it becomes “Mommy porn.” Once identified as a “mommy,” we’re identified as little else.

No matter that I was never that cool or adventurous in the first place. I was the high school valedictorian, the Goody Two-Shoes. I’d had two boyfriends and married one of them. I always win “I’ve Never” because, really, I’ve never. But now I had no chance to be cool. Any possibility was off the table. I considered getting a tattoo or tarting up my wardrobe, but then I realized that doing these things to avoid being a mommy cliché was a cliché in and of itself.

Eventually, I realized I needed to get over myself. The demands of parenting a small child did not leave time to wallow, and at lucid moments I recognized that I would not have young kids forever. I would be able to go to London someday, and I didn’t have to drive a minivan. But my mommy fears still nagged.

A year later — pregnant as can be and irreversibly a mommy — I learned that a favorite local photographer was looking for models for a project on pregnant women. It was an appealing proposition, but there was a catch: She wanted nudes. I dismissed the idea; I couldn’t do a nude photo shoot. But I also realized I did not want to be the type of person who would say no to this.

This is how I found myself in my yard in the nude. I had spent an hour posing with my clothes on — the black bike shorts and black tank that had become my uniform in those sweltering final weeks. The photographer, Ellen, posed shots of me contemplating my belly on the back deck, family portraits in front of a nearby dilapidated barn, and shots of my boy and me frolicking in the neighboring cemetery. We chatted while she clicked away: about pregnancy, our kids, our town, and her work, and I tried not to think about where this was leading.

Eventually it started to rain and we ducked into the front yard, sheltered by a tall hedge. I ignored my misgivings, summoned a little confidence, and shed my clothes.

All along, I hadn’t been sure I could strip. I may not be the person so neurotic she changes in the bathroom at the gym, but I’m also not the woman who wanders around the locker room stark naked. I’ve often struggled with my weight, and I fight the urge to hide my body: too much belly, too much breast, flab and curves where I don’t want them.

But pregnancy gave me a freedom with my body that I didn’t have before and haven’t had since. At nearly nine months, my body was supposed to look like this. I was supposed to have an enormous belly, giant breasts, and a little something extra in the back. I could have done without the tree-trunk thighs, but I could live with those, too. Much to my surprise, revealing this body felt fine. So did the rain on my skin — it was awfully hot being pregnant in June.

Once Ellen began shooting, I adopted a strategy of “don’t look down.” It was best to ignore the absurdity of standing in our tiny front yard, separated from the sidewalk and street by only a hedge. As the shoot progressed, I felt an amazement that I could do this, that I was doing this. I can still see it in the small, pleased smile I’m wearing in the photos. It is equal parts relief, surprise and satisfaction.

Looking at the photos now, years later, I feel a bittersweet pang for those last few days when we were just three, before we became something new. I’m gobsmacked not only by the size of my belly and breasts but also by my nerve.

Later that day, after Ellen left and I had dressed, my husband observed, “Now you’ll never have to get a tattoo.” I’m grateful for that. And I’m grateful that the postman didn’t choose that moment to deliver the mail.

Doug is a veritable trailblazer. For the past 12 years — first when his wife was sole breadwinner and now as a work-at-home entrepreneur — he’s handled “all the home-related stuff, such as laundry, cooking, shopping, getting the kids to school, taking the kids to the dentist, etc.” When his family was living in the Bay Area a dozen years ago, “I’d be the only dad dropping off his kid at school,” he recalls. “Nobody was mean to me, but they’d look at me like, ‘What are you doing here?’ There was not a lot of community for me.” However, now that “my entire work group is all men, and all of them work from home,” he says, “people don’t seem as stunned” by his lifestyle anymore.

Even as things are changing, though, old expectations persist. We experience them in dated, stupid references to 30-year-old Michael Keaton movies. We see them in ads that suggest that dads are innately incompetent at simple tasks like changing diapers. We hear it in the subtle jabs about what a dad’s role is. Chris Read, who runs Canadian Dad, says he deals with “negativity from backseat parents who still feel like I am ‘babysitting’ when I watch my kids and feel the need to interject with their advice on what I’m doing wrong.” And sometime HuffPo blogger Dave, who’s home with three young sons, says, “People ask my wife, ‘Do you worry about the kids home with him all day?’”

Along with the assumption of male domestic ineptitude, SAHDs deal with the persistent equation of masculinity with income and career achievement. Stay-at-home dad Christopher admits, “You hear from a wide variety of sources that it’s a man’s duty to provide for his family, and it stings when I hear it. I get teased in my own family about it sometimes.” But, he adds, “When I’m with my daughter and watching her grow up and not missing it, it’s then that I really don’t give a flip what anyone might think of me.” And Russ, a Minnesota stay-at-home father of two young daughters, thinks that “When you overlay the gender role a man is supposed to have in our society with the notion of being a stay-at-home parent, there’s a lot that’s very hard for people to understand.” He says that one of the first misconceptions is that a man at home is a man who has it easy. “It’s really hard,” he says. “It’s really, really hard to be a man in a traditional women’s role. Nurturing children is an extremely difficult job. I have guys say to me, ‘How did you get this gig?’ My response is that if more men stayed home with their children, they’d be getting their wives a lot less pregnant.”

It’s not just other men who have a hard time getting their heads around a guy in the domestic sphere, either. When mothers create support networks for one another, dudes are often iced out of them. Russ says, “There is no question that isolation is huge. I was in a community that had a play group they called Mom’s Morning Out. When I joined, they changed it to Parent’s Morning Out. But then they decided to limit the size of the group, and the women met and let me go. This was a pretty progressive group. It’s not like they had no experience with discrimination. But I was the only man in the group, and I was the only one who was excluded.” And blogger Dave echoes the experience, saying, “I was involved in play groups, and some of the women were very angry that there was a man there. They felt invaded. There were several people who gave me stinkeye, so I decided it wasn’t worth it.”

I’ve certainly witnessed the dad snubs myself, the circling of the lady wagons. I often suspect there’s a fox-in-the-hen-house aspect to it — the unspoken concern that any daytime interaction between hetero men and women will inevitably bust out in a Tom Perrotta novel.

There’s also a likely darker excuse for the shunning: our unfortunate modern uncertainty of men who spend time with children. There’s a sadly pervasive assumption they’re all predatory until proven otherwise. Stephen, an Illinois father of two young daughters, says, “If I take the kids to the playground, I’ll wave and say hi — and the moms will stay in their circle. I’ve wondered, do I look like a creepy weirdo? Am I not part of the clique? I’d understand if I rode my bike to the playground by myself, but I’ve got kids with me.” And Ryan McLuen, who writes the Dad’s Misadventures blog, says that even though “More often than not people are respectful of the fact I’m home with the children … there’s kind of a stigma to being a male who loves kids. In a lot of people’s eyes it’s creepy.”

So why do SAHDs put up with it — the skepticism and the criticism and plain old everyday bafflement? The same reason so many of us make the choices we do. Because it’s what’s right for us. Daniel, a work-at-home father of five kids ranging in age from 23 months to 19 years and the brains behind Post Post Modern Dad, says that his kids have “a happier parenting duo” with his family’s arrangement — one that makes for a more harmonious family all around. He says that he hopes his kids will someday “look back on their childhoods and appreciate that I was able to be part of their lives so much more.” Stephen, meanwhile, calls his choice to stay home with kids quite simply “the best decision I ever made.” And Ryan says, “My wife needs her work. Knowing her, and knowing me, this was a natural fit.” What’s natural isn’t always what’s traditional. It’s what works best and what creates the most nurturing environment for each member of a family.

You don’t have to be at home all day to be loving and supportive and involved with your children. But it should be more than OK if you are home all day — and that’s true whether you’re a man or a woman. A father, even a father who doesn’t go into an office, is not a babysitter. He is not Mr. Mom. He is Mr. Dad. He has his own way of doing things. He has his own set of challenges and struggles and frustrations. But diaper changing and peek-a-boo playing and being a loving human and a parent aren’t skills unique to women. Both men and women need to work together to remember that and to practice it. As Chris Read says, “I couldn’t imagine life without the joy of knowing that I did more than just create my kids.” And, he adds, “I’m hoping the non-believers start to see that we dads are not only capable participants in our children’s lives, we’re willing ones.”

“I think every parent has to step back and say, ‘I have an equal chance that any child I bear will be heterosexual or homosexual,” says Paul V., who created the Born This Way blog as a showcase for photographs and stories of growing up gay — and whose book based upon it comes out later this year.

A compelling argument for the persistence of identity, Born This Way is a powerhouse testimonial in words and images. “I knew I liked women at the age of five,” writes one woman. A photo at age 6 is accompanied by the words, “Though I didn’t really understand it then, I was attracted to Superman.” Another contributor writes, “I think I first realized I was gay around 3 or 4, but I didn’t know it was called being gay.”

Though Paul says he created the site for gay men and women to share their stories, it has also attracted a sizable — and different — audience that he hadn’t predicted. “Most of the emails off the blog have been from parents who say, ‘I see some of these signs in my own child,’ and they don’t know how to bring it up,” he says. “I tell them, just address the topic. Tell your children, ‘You can talk to me about anything because I love you.’ It’s not taboo and it’s not dirty and it’s not shameful. These attractions and these innate feelings you can’t describe — every kid goes through their own version of them. I think the big mistake these anti-gay people make is to confuse emotions and feelings with sexuality.”

When we conflate identity strictly with sex, we make the error of postponing having conversations about sexual orientation. We run the risk of not equipping all our children with the vocabulary for their feelings, and not preparing them for the social storms of middle and high school. When that happens, we wind up losing more children like Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a straight-identified kid who was bullied and taunted with gay slurs. He killed himself in 2009, before his 12th birthday.

You’d think that in a world where kids now have far more opportunities to see both gay and straight characters and images, when your daughter is likely having play dates with a classmate with two dads, the notion that a child might be gay wouldn’t be so strange or confusing. Yet heterosexuality is still very much the expected course. From before birth, kids are jokingly paired off in future prom dates; they still get more than their share of princesses marrying handsome princes and swashbuckling pirates saving ladies in distress. If you’re looking for indoctrination, I think the straights have that one sewn up.

Lauren, who grew up gay in Kentucky in the late 1980s, says, “One of the things that makes it hard on very young gay children is that parents have a tendency to unintentionally force this very straight narrative on them, and to do so even in the face of evidence that said children might not be straight. I was mostly just called a tomboy, and it was assumed I’d grow up and get over it.” She advises, “The best things parents can do for both their straight and gay children is just not to presume anything about their kid’s sexuality — and to admit that, even early on, your kid has one. Talk openly — and casually! — about gay people. Then, years later, if they realize they’re gay, they can just be like, ‘Hey guess what? I’m gay!’ and their parents can be all, ‘Cool!’ and they won’t build it up in their heads as some arduous, difficult task.”

Furthermore, when they have those conversations with their children, parents need to respect what their kids tell them. Amelia, who has been writing about her parenting experience since her son began insisting that “Glee’s” Blaine was his boyfriend, says, “I think people are more dismissive of it than anything else. Like, ‘Oh, whatever, he’s 7. He doesn’t know.’ I say, this is my child. His feelings are serious to me. What’s important is that this is who he sees himself to be, and the last thing he needs is for us to give him the idea that he should be someone else.” She tells parents, “The more we take away that stigma and fear and hate, the more and more of those young people who know they are gay are going to talk about it. I get that it’s really frickin’ unusual to have a 7-year-old who identifies as gay. But I can’t help but think this is the tip of the iceberg.”

I agree with her. This year, when my elder daughter Lucy started middle school, she promptly formed a close friendship with a gay classmate. Fortunately, she’s in a school that has an active anti-bullying curriculum and LGBT resources for kids as young as sixth grade, but it’s still middle school. It’s challenging for anybody, let alone an 11-year-old child who’s out.

The other boys, Lucy says, horse around freely with each other or just can walk together in the halls. But when her friend tries to jump in, the kids are quick to speculate on his imagined hidden agenda. “I feel like that’s not fair,” she says. “Nobody makes a big deal about who I hang around with.” She adds, “Some of the kids are big jerks to him because they’re already big jerks anyway. Having one thing to be mean about and focus on makes it easier for them.” But it doesn’t change her friend. “He knows who he is,” Lucy says. That’s something that any uncomfortable classmates will just have to get used to.

All kids develop at their own paces, and that includes how they develop in their awareness of orientation. Not every 7-year-old is solid in his gayness or straightness. But what all of us as parents and educators need to do is create space in our children’s lives to let them come to their own understanding of themselves. Amelia says, “We need to start parenting equal rights. We need to ask, what kind of message am I sending my kids — and is that message harmful? I get letters all the time from people saying, ‘My dad didn’t mean to be awful.’” She reminds parents, “People have been trying to make gay kids straight for a long time and it hasn’t been working.”

It’s a sentiment that Paul echoes. “I grew up in a completely heterosexual society,” he says, “and it didn’t take. You can believe what you want, but when you’ve got 600 people on your blog telling you, ‘I knew when I was a child,’ why wouldn’t you believe them?” He adds, “Can you imagine how great and better the world will be when every kid is nurtured young, and isn’t quashed until he’s 19?”

If we can get past the idea that being gay is something you become one day because you did or didn’t play football or dress-up, and past the idea that sexual orientation equals sex, we can conquer fear and homophobia. We can stop freaking out and trying to change individuals. We can grasp that when we’re loving and accepting of all people, we’re including children in that number. And children need all the love and acceptance we can give them. As Amelia explains, “Parenting is something you choose. Being gay isn’t.” Then she breaks it all down to its most basic, essential element. “This is our kid,” she says of her 7-year-old gay son. “Whoever he is, he’s awesome.”