“What’s that?” James asked.

I wanted to tell James how personal this was. It made me crazy to watch for 16 years as this monster responsible for killing what might be as many as 250,000 of my countrymen eluded authorities. “It’s the modern-day Nuremberg trial,” I said, wishing I could explain better.

I grew up in Bosnia, and fled to America in 1993, at the age of 13, after my family was exiled. A 31-year-old survivor of the war, I am one of the 5,000 Bosnians living in Astoria, Queens. Not long ago, I went back to visit my hometown for the first time since we fled. Vacation for other guys my age means partying, or hanging out with old friends. I spent two weeks visiting graveyards.

On the runway at JFK, I sat between my brother Eldin and my 72-year-old father, Senahid, nervous to return to the land after so many years.

“Which day are we going to the cemetery?” my father wanted to know.

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

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

My parents had been set up on a blind date by mutual friends, but the night they were supposed to go out, my mother stood my father up. She’d gone to Long Island that day with a friend to pick strawberries, and by the time she came home, the last thing she felt like doing was going on a blind date with some older businessman from Atlanta.

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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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This was all my fault.

Great timing for my high school reunion. That one question to sum up my first 10 years of adulthood: “So, what have you been up to?”

“Oh, just living with Mom,” I said, throwing an ironic thumbs up. I shrugged. “You know, with this economy…” Not even a full sentence, it worked as an excuse without technically being a lie. They all nodded with sympathy as if something had happened to me, and not because of me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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We sat together at our breakfast counter, she with a mug of Bengal spice tea, me with a glass of OJ. My mother was, and is, a very pretty woman, with bright blue eyes, skyscraper cheekbones, and an easy laugh. She sipped her tea and took a breath.

“Karen and I aren’t just friends, honey.” Her features tightened, but her eyes met mine, clear and steady. “We’re more than friends.”

“Yeah, I figured that out,” I said.

“You did?”

“Of course!” I gulped. “Jessica and me aren’t just friends, either, you know.”

“I had a feeling about that.” She nodded with a faint smile.

Mine was the most amiable coming out story I knew. If only the experience of my early sex life were so breezy.

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I had so many other questions to ask: What did he do for a living? Did he have other children? Was he married? Did he drink coffee? Was he happy? Were there pictures of me -- a smiling, chubby baby -- on the walls of his home or was it easier for him to forget I ever existed?

But I could not ask him any of this, because we had not actually met in person. At the age of 27, I saw my father for the first time when I found him on Facebook.

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I didn't freak out when I found out my wife and I were going to have a son. But as the day approached, I had a crisis of confidence. We were living in a studio in Los Angeles, sleeping on a mattress that smelled like pumpkin beer from the previous fall, driving a two-door, 30-year-old car. How were we supposed to do this?

It turns out I was asking the right questions. We needed a new car and a new house; we got Ford’s least-monstrous SUV and a three-bedroom rental that cost as much as my old Brooklyn one-bedroom. And then, in the final weeks before our son arrived, we started watching "Game of Thrones." By the time our boy was born, I didn’t want to swaddle him; I wanted to thrust him to the heavens on top of a parapet and declare, “All this will be yours!”

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

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

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“I’m not sure how I feel about you anymore,” he wrote.

How could this be? A week earlier, he professed his love. He wanted to change his Facebook status to “in a relationship.” How did it go so wrong so fast?

More curiously, why was I feeling devastated by my 14-year-old daughter’s first breakup when she seemed unscathed by it? Katie replied to her new ex that these things happen and there were no hard feelings. I couldn’t move on so quickly.

“He’s not sure how he feels about you?!” I shouted. “You are smart, beautiful and kind. For God’s sake, you play piano for old folks at nursing homes and knit hats to support children in Africa! You’re borderline perfect. What’s he not sure of?”

Katie told me to take a deep breath. It would all be fine, she assured me. She explained that John was a nice guy whom she enjoyed getting to know, but ultimately they had very different interests. They lived on different coasts. It could never work.

“But … he was so cute,” I said, pouting.

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

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

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

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

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“Your grandmother always made this,” he said, stirring the bubbling brown stew and pinching in cumin. “I’ll teach you how to make it. Here, try it.” He raised the dripping spoon to my mouth. The mild tingle of cumin and the soft squish of beans lingered on my pallet, like a spicy fingerprint.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt the push and pull of growing up biracial in America. In the Mexican side of my family I was known as the white one. Even though I spoke Spanish, it was the formal kind learned from classrooms and reading, rather than the one you pick up by bartering with local shop owners over the price of firm avocados, or arguing with parents over a ridiculous curfew. On the other side, my cousins called me a “Wexican,” a white Mexican despite my similarly toned skin.

Cooking, however, taught me to channel my frustrations by creating foods through the addition of sour cream, cilantro, cayenne pepper and tender meat. I could make a food that doesn’t have to be Mexican or American.

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

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

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

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

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I had a fleeting thought that she was actually asking me to pick up those items for her, but I preferred to think we were playing a cellphone game. I try not to be a helicopter parent. Experience as a mother and professor has taught me how badly that can backfire.

Instead, I prefer a more hands-off approach, which came naturally. From the time Allison turned 18 something kicked in, and I simply no longer had any desire to know her work schedule or pick up her tampons. I remember wondering if this was as instinctual as nursing her or bundling her up when she was a baby.  But that's not what I see at Drexel University, where I teach and where my daughters go to school. The vast majority of my students talk to their parents three times a day or more. One student's mother called when she didn’t hear from him for a few days. He picked up the phone, but he was in the library and so he whispered “hello.” She accused him of being hung over or drunk, even though it was about 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.  He tried to convince her, avoiding eye contact with those library patrons giving him exasperated looks, but she insisted that he take a picture of himself, in the library, holding a newspaper with that day’s date, and send it to her. I cannot shake how similar that is to a hostage situation.

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My mind could not comprehend what my eyes were seeing. I studied his mug shot on TV. Here was the face of the man I had loved, the cleft in his chin, his square jaw, the soft, smooth skin just below his eyes, which I’d kissed a thousand times. Who was this broken man with the downcast eyes? Did he look away when the shutter closed because he was thinking of his children? What happened to the proud young father who cradled his newborns like fragile glass, the guy with a contagious laugh and shiny blue eyes, who owned any room he walked into?  A hometown celebrity, a respected journalist, with a good wife and four great kids -- now, reduced to this. Who was this man?

The kids in bed, I turned down the volume on the TV in a futile attempt to shield them for just one more day. My colleagues in the press, with whom I’d jockeyed for position at many a crime scene, were now covering a crime that would deal my kids a blow unimaginable. “The accused is charged with three counts of statutory sodomy stemming from a series of sexual encounters with a teenage boy at a high school field house.”  For years I’d been blase about broadcasting the worst day of someone else’s life. In one minute, I knew what that felt like.

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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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