If I’d lived in the Jersey suburbs or Chicago’s north shore, I might have recognized these qualities as the psychological price to be paid for all the benefits of having a loving, smothering, highly invested, over-involved Jewish mother. But because I lived in rural-suburban central Virginia where Jews were about as common as AFL-CIO leaflets, I didn’t know what to make of her. I only knew that I loved her, and that she loved me, and that on a daily basis, she drove me absolutely, positively crazy. I am 33 years old, and sometimes she still drives me crazy. The difference now is that since the birth of my son and daughter, I have steadily, inexorably been creeping toward the realization that I, too, am a Jewish mother, that the uniquely Yiddish bouquet of neurosis and psychopathology is likely woven into the double helix of my DNA. Is there a support group for this? Are there interventions?

It seems to me the term “Jewish mother” has little do with Judaism or Jewishness itself, but rather describes a style of mothering that can be broken down into four distinct but inter-connected components: anxiety in all its guises (arising from the mother and transferred to the child with the efficacy of an intravenous transfusion); overprotectiveness; high, at times unreachable, expectations; and finally, the ability and willingness to inflict shame, guilt and self-martyrdom to shape a child’s (and in this case “child” could mean 40-year-old man’s) character and moral worth.

Now my children aren’t yet preschool age, so I’ve really only had experience with the first two components, anxiety and overprotectiveness. But, boy, have these experiences been illuminating. Let’s begin with anxiety, which is really the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega of the Jewish mother paradigm.

My first moment as a Jewish mother came not when my son was born, but a few months later when he had his first upper-respiratory infection. I was sleeping heavily after several nights of mucus-suctioning and nebulizing treatments, sleeping the sleep of the dead, and all at once, though he was not crying or coughing, though he had not uttered a peep, my eyes flicked open, and I shot up in bed. How was he? Was everything going to be OK? Was he wheezing? Was he going to get pneumonia? Was the pediatrician we’d chosen really the best one in town? How was the humidity in his room? Why hadn’t I bought one of those grocery-store cart germ cover thingies? The questions went on and on. The anxiety was a real, physical thing inside me. It had a weight, a color, a texture. It wouldn’t let up; it demanded to be answered or fed or reassured back to sleep. Only there was no real reassurance it would accept, no permanent soothing. For the first time I understood what a relative had once told me: “A Jewish mother is only as happy as her unhappiest child.” At the time, I had scoffed and thought, “Please. It’s called boundaries. It’s called having your own identity and sense of self. It’s called getting a grip.” Now I feel as though the adage has come back to haunt (or nag) me.

If the non-Jewish mother thinks, “What’s the worst that could happen?” the Jewish mother thinks, “What’s the worst that can happen: Let’s consider.”

For four years now, I’ve considered.

I’ve harassed pediatricians and nurses, demanded extra conferences with preschool teachers, contacted speech therapists and occupational therapists over delays other mothers probably wouldn’t have noticed, stressed over magnet school applications three years before they’re due. I’ve found it difficult to restrain myself from grabbing a playground bully by the arms and giving him a good shaking. I’ve written out itineraries for baby sitters with years of experience. I’ve gotten up in the middle of the night and stood over my children’s sleeping bodies just to make sure they’re breathing, and breathing well. In short, I’m the worst Jewish mother in the world. I make Alexander Portnoy’s mother look like a laid-back Earth mama.

When I reveal these peculiar behaviors and fixations to other “Jewish mothers,” especially those to whom I related, they nod and press their lips together and give me a look that seems to say, “Is there anything you’ve forgotten? Is there anything else you should perhaps be worrying about?” There’s nothing Jewish mothers love more than out-Jewish-mothering other Jewish mothers. I remember emailing my mother a picture of my 1-year-old daughter standing happily on the beach. The reply came back almost instantly via text message: “No shoes? Aren’t her little feet going to burn?”

I remember other conversations with my mother-in-law that went something like this:

Mother-in-law: How are you? What are you up to today?

Me: Oh, just finishing up some work. Not gonna pick the baby up at daycare until 4 today.”

M-I-L: Four o’clock? PM?

Me: Yup.

M-I-L: What’ll he do there for so long?”

Me: I don’t know? Baby stuff?

M-I-L: I hope he doesn’t get bored.

Me: I’m sure he’ll be fine.

M-I-L: I guess if he’s bored he’ll just go to sleep.”

Me: I guess.

Silence.

Me: Maybe I’ll just go get him now.

When I tell this to my own mother over the phone, I can almost hear her smile. “Ah,” she says. “Now you see. Little Miss You-did-this-wrong-you-did-that-wrong understands.”

Kind of, I do. But that doesn’t mean I have to accept it. I start thinking that surely if I better understood the origins of this Jewish mother mentality I could somehow tame it. And about a year ago, I came close.

My son had just recovered from a tonsillectomy. It was an awful surgery, and in my despair I began googling “tonsillectomy recovery” and stumbled across an article in Tablet about Lower East Side moms in 1906 who rioted after a principal at P.S. 100 arranged for doctors from Mount Sinai to come to the school and perform tonsillectomies on kids with chronic tonsillitis. Apparently, having heard rumors that uptown doctors were being dispatched to the school to “cut the throats of Jewish children,” a throng of mothers descended on the school. The article describes how, “greeted by locked doors, the screaming throngs surrounded the schools and began smashing windows and pounding on doors. On Essex Street, some white-hot mothers clambered up ladders in an attempt to break into P.S. 137 through the second-floor windows.”

At last, I thought, some Jewish mothers who make me look calm and reasonable. But of course, this happened in 1906 and many of these Jewish mothers, poor immigrants from Eastern Europe, had come from places where horrible, unfathomable acts were committed on Jewish children, not to mention Jewish parents, Jewish men and women, Jewish anybody — see Kishinev pogroms of 1903 — a massacre where the New York Times described “babies … literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and blood-thirsty mob.”

What’s the worst that could happen? The terrible truth is that it probably already has.

I know what you’re thinking. I can see the hate letters coming in already: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, anyone? She clearly needs to relax, have a drink, go on a vacation. I couldn’t argue with any of this. And I’m sure others will point out how there are plenty of “Jewish mothers” who aren’t even Jewish, just as Amy Chua pointed out in her controversial essay how not all Asian mothers are “tiger mothers,” and not all “tiger mothers” are Asian. People will argue that culture or ethnicity is beside the point. Maybe, but I for one couldn’t help wondering when I read Chua’s essay if the people who were so offended by the exaltation of the tiger mother (or the ones who will surely be offended by the notion of a stereotypical “Jewish mother”) are in reality put off more by style than substance.

I mean, don’t all mothers basically want their children to succeed, to excel, to be healthy and safe, to be valued and appreciated or admired by a worthwhile community, to prosper greatly and to suffer little? I believe nearly all mothers would like these things; what differs is the resources at their disposal to achieve them and the cultural tools (pride, shame, guilt, tradition) they employ toward their end.

What an awful burden we mothers and fathers, Jewish and not, have to bear — to hatch a thing we love more than ourselves into a world so fundamentally unworthy. I’m reminded of Grace Paley’s exquisitely beautiful story about an old Jewish lady watching two young fathers out her window — aptly titled, “Anxiety.”

And I’m reminded of an interview in which Philip Roth recounted how after the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” a reporter asked his mother if she considered herself a “Jewish mother.” He told how she gave an answer “worthy of Pascal,” replying simply, “All mothers are Jewish mothers.”

It has to be true. How could it be otherwise?

My husband, loyal first and foremost to his students’ intellectual development, and also an unwavering believer in the inherent value of a liberal arts education, tells me about these conversations with an air of indignation. He wonders, “Aren’t these parents aware of what they signed their kid up for when they decided to let him come get a liberal arts degree instead of going to welding school?” Also, he says, “The most aimless students are often the last ones you want to force into a career path. I do sort of hate to enable this prolonged adolescence, but I also don’t want to aid and abet the miseries of years lost to a misguided professional choice.”

Now, I love my husband. Lately, however, I find myself wincing when he recounts these stories.

“Well,” I sometimes say, “what are they going to do?”

The answer, at least according to a recent article in the New York Times, is rather bleak. Employment rates for college graduates have declined steeply in the last two years, and perhaps even more disheartening, those who find jobs are more likely to be steaming lattes or walking dogs than doing anything even peripherally related to their college curriculum. While the scale and severity of this post-graduation letdown may be an unavoidable consequence of an awful recession, I do wonder if all those lofty institutions of higher learning, with their noble-sounding mission statements and soft-focused brochure photos of campus greens, may be glossing over the serious, at-times-crippling obstacles a B.A. holder must overcome to achieve professional and financial stability. I’m not asking if a college education has inherent value, if it makes students more thoughtful, more informed, more enlightened and critical-minded human beings. These are all interesting questions that don’t pay the rent. What I’m asking is far more banal and far more pressing. What I’m asking is: Why do even the best colleges fail so often at preparing kids for the world?

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors and mentors reinforced this complacency. I was smart, they told me. I’d spent four years at a rigorous institution honing my writing, research and critical-thinking skills. I’d written an impressive senior thesis, gathered recommendations from professors, completed summer internships in various journalistic endeavors. They had no doubt at all that I would land on my feet. And I did (kind of), about a decade after graduating.

In the interim, I floundered. I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa. I mooched off friends and boyfriends and slept on couches. One dreary night in San Francisco, I went on an interview to tend bar at a strip club, but left demoralized when I realized I’d have to walk around in stilettos. I went back to school to complete the pre-medical requirements I’d shunned the first time through, then, a week into physics, I applied to nursing school, then withdrew from that program after a month when I realized nursing would be an environment where my habit of spacing out might actually kill someone. I landed a $12-an-hour job as a paralegal at an asbestos-related litigation firm. I got an MFA in fiction.

Depending on how you look at it, I either spent a long time finding myself, or wasted seven years. And while all these efforts hardly add up to a tragedy (largely because I had the luxury of supportive parents willing to supplement my income for a time), I do have to admit feeling disillusioned as I moved from one gig to another, feeling as though my undergraduate education, far from preparing me for any kind of meaningful and remunerative work, had in some ways deprepared me, nurturing my natural strengths and predilections — writing, reading, analysis — and sweeping my weaknesses in organization, pragmatic problem-solving, decision-making under the proverbial rug.

Of course, there are certainly plenty of B.A. holders out there who, wielding the magic combination of competency, credentials and luck, are able to land themselves a respectable, entry-level job that requires neither name tag nor apron. But for every person I know who parlayed a degree in English or anthropology into a career-track gig, I know two others who weren’t so lucky, who, in that awful, post-college year or two or three or four, unemployed and uninsured and uncommitted to any particular field, racked up credit card debt or got married to the wrong person or went to law school for no particular reason or made one of a dozen other time- and money-wasting mistakes.

And the common thread in all these stories seems to be how surprised these graduates were by their utter unemployability, a feeling of having been misled into complacency, issued reassurances about how the pedigree or prestige of the institution they’d attended would save them. This narrative holds true whether their course of study was humanities or social sciences. My baby sitter, for example, who earned a degree in psychology from a Big Ten university, now makes $15 an hour watching my kids.

“I was not the most serious student,” she admits. “But I do wonder, why was I allowed to decide on a major without ever sitting down with my advisor and talking about what I might do with that major after graduating? I mean, I had to write out a plan for how I’d fit all my required courses into my schedule, but no one seemed to care if I had a plan once I left there. I graduated not knowing how to use Excel, write out a business plan, do basic accounting. With room and board and tuition, my time there cost $120,000.”

I asked Sarah Isham, the director of career services of the College of Arts and Sciences at my alma mater about this discrepancy between curriculum and career planning, and she repeats the same reassurances I heard 10 years ago: “What we do is help students see how the patterns and themes of their interests, skills and values, might relate to particular arenas. We do offer a few self-assessment tests, as well as many other resources to help them do this.”

When I ask how well the current services are working — that is, how may recent graduates are finding jobs, real jobs that require a degree — she can only say that, “The College of Arts and Sciences does not collect statistics on post-graduation plans. I could not give you any idea of where these students are going or what they are doing. Regrettably, it’s not something in place at this time.”

I went on to ask her how the college’s curriculum was adapting to meet the demands of the recession and the realities of the job market, and she directed me to a dean who asked not to be identified, and who expressed, in no uncertain terms, how tired he was of articles like mine that question the rationale, rigor or usefulness of a liberal arts education. He insisted that while he had no suggestions regarding how a 22-year-old should weather a recession, the university was achieving its goal of creating citizens of the world.

When I asked him how a 22-year-old with no job, no income, no health insurance and, in some cases, six figures of college debt to pay off is supposed to be a citizen of the world, he said he had no comment, that he was the wrong person to talk to, and he directed me to another dean, who was also unable to comment.

The chilliness of this response was a bit disheartening, but not terribly surprising. When I was an undergrad, it seemed whenever I mentioned my job-search anxieties, my professors and advisors would get a glassy look in their eyes and mutter something about the career center. Their gazes would drift toward their bookshelves or a folder of ungraded papers. And at the time, I could hardly blame them. These were people who’d published dissertations on Freud, written definitive volumes on Virginia Woolf. The language of real-world career preparation was a language they simply didn’t speak.

And if they did say anything at all, it was usually a reiteration of the typical liberal arts defense, that graduating with a humanities degree, I could do anything: I could go on to earn a master’s or a law degree or become an editor or a teacher. I could go into journalism or nonprofit work, apply to medical school or the foreign service. I could write books or learn to illustrate or bind them. I could start my own business, work as a consultant, get a job editing pamphlets for an alumni association or raise money for public radio. The possibilities were literally limitless. It was a like being 6 years old again and trying to decide if I’d become an astronaut or a ballerina. The advantage to a humanities degree, one professor insisted, was its versatility. In retrospect, though, I wonder if perhaps this was part of the problem, as well; freedom can promote growth, but it can also cause paralysis. Faced with limitless possibilities, a certain number of people will just stand still.

“So let me ask you something,” my husband says, my wonderfully incisive husband who will let me get away with only so much bitterness. “If your school had forced you to declare a career plan or take an accounting class or study Web programming instead of contemporary lit, how would you have felt about it at the time, without the benefit of hindsight?”

It’s a good question, and the answer is, I probably would have transferred.

There were courses I took in college, courses in Renaissance literature and the anthropology of social progress and international relations of the Middle East and, of course, writing, that will, in all likelihood, never earn me a steady paycheck or a 401K, but which I would not trade for anything; there were lectures on Shakespeare and Twain and Joyce that I still remember, that I’ve dreamt about and that define my sensibility as a writer and a reader and a human being. Even now, knowing the lost years that followed, I still wouldn’t trade them in.

A new Harvard study suggests that it’s not an abandonment of the college curriculum that’s needed, but a re-envisioning and better preparation. The study compares the U.S. system unfavorably to its European counterparts where students begin thinking about what sort of career they’ll pursue and the sort of preparation they’ll need for it in middle school. Could that be the answer?

At the end of my interview with Sarah Isham, she asks me if I might come back to Charlottesville to participate in an alumni career panel. “We always have a lot of students interested in media and writing and the arts. It would be wonderful,” she says “to have you come and talk to them.” She asks me this, and I can’t help but laugh.

“I don’t think I’d be much of a role model,” I say. “I don’t have what you’d call a high-powered career. I mostly do freelance work. Adjunct teaching. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” she insists. “Our students will love that. So many of them are terrified of sitting in a cubicle all day.”

They should be so lucky, I think. But I would never say that — not to them and not to my own students. They’ll have plenty of time later to find out just what a degree is and isn’t good for. Right now, they’re in those four extraordinary, exceptional years where ideas matter; and there’s not a thing I’d do to change that.

So I won’t deny that I owe a debt to the traditional high-school English class, the class in which I first learned to read literature, to write about it and talk about it and recite it and love it. My English teachers were for the most part smart, thoughtful women who loved books and wanted to help other people learn to love them. Nothing, it seemed to me at the time, could make for a better class. Only now, a decade and a half later, after seven years of teaching college composition, have I started to consider the possibility that talking about classics might be a profound waste of time for the average high school student, the student who is college-bound but not particularly gifted in letters or inspired by the literary arts. I’ve begun to wonder if this typical high school English class, dividing its curriculum between standardized test preparation and the reading of canonical texts, might occupy a central place in the creation of a generation of college students who, simply put, cannot write.

For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I’ve puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I’ve sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don’t know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.

I’ve stared at the black markings on the page until my vision blurred, chronicling and triaging the maneuvers I will need to teach them in 14 short weeks: how to make sure their sentences contain a subject and a verb, how to organize their paragraphs around a main idea, how to write a working thesis statement or any kind of thesis statement at all. They don’t know how to outline or how to organize a paper before they begin. They don’t know how to edit or proofread it once they’ve finished. They plagiarize, often inadvertently, and I find myself, at least for a moment, relieved by these sentence- or paragraph-long reprieves from their migraine-inducing, quasi-incomprehensible prose.

Sometimes, in the midst of this grading, I cry. Not real tears, exactly — more a spontaneous, guttural sob, often loud and unpleasant enough to startle my husband or children. There’s just too damned much they need to learn in such a short period of time. It seems almost too late before we’ve begun.

And so recently, I’ve started asking them: “What exactly did you do in high-school English class?” And whether I ask them as a group or individually, whether I ask my best students or my worst, the answers I get are less than reassuring. I should add here that my students matriculate from a wide array of schools, everything from expensive prep schools and Midwestern publics, to military academies and boarding schools abroad. But despite this diversity, the answers I get from them about their preparation in the language arts are surprisingly similar.

Those who didn’t make it onto the honors or A.P. track hardly mention writing or reading at all. They talk about giving oral presentations and keeping reading journals evaluated with a big, meaningless check. They reveal putting on skits, reenacting some scene in a novel or play whose title they can’t recall. One student recounts a month of junior English class in which she and her classmates produced digital short film adaptations of the trial in “The Scarlet Letter.”

“Sounds fun,” I say to this student, a girl who would not know how to summarize a source or correct a sentence fragment if her life depended on it.

As for the students who did make it to more accelerated English courses, their recollections are a little less disheartening, but only a little. They read Shakespeare, they tell me, usually “Romeo and Juliet,” sometimes “Macbeth.” They read “Catcher in the Rye” or “Huck Finn,” “The Sound and the Fury,” a little Melville or Hardy. They read these works and then they talked about them in class discussions or small groups, and then they composed an essay on the subject, received a grade, and moved on to the next masterpiece. Did their exposure to a few of the great works challenge or change them, did it spur them to read more widely or more critically, or did it make them better writers? Occasionally, I guess. Mostly, they seem to recall struggling with comprehension of these classics, feeling as though they just didn’t “get it,” and for those students who know they will not major in English, does it really matter, they wonder. But not much time is spent pondering the question because, now, thrown into the cauldron of college-level coursework, they have bigger fish to fry. They have professors in every area and every discipline telling them they’re going to fail if they don’t learn how to write a comprehensible, grammatical and at least marginally organized academic essay.

Was it really so essential that these students read Faulkner? Most of them, frankly, seem to struggle with plain old contemporary prose, the level of writing one might find in, say, the New Yorker. Wouldn’t they have been better off, or at least better prepared for the type of college work most will take on (pre-professional, that is), learning to support an argument or use a comma?

I raised these questions with Mark Onuscheck, the chairman of the English department at Evanston Township High School, a large, suburban school with a diverse student body and an excellent reputation, a school that’s matriculated more than a few students into my classroom. I asked him how exactly a school like his teaches or tries to teach kids to write, and his initial answers make me start chewing on my nails. He talks about processes and collaboration, about students working together and doing peer review, about how they keep writing folders, and do writing frequently in various, informal ways.

“But the writing they’ll need to do in college won’t be informal,” I say. “And it won’t be reviewed by peers but by professors. So what about specific writing and research skills? What about style and grammar?”

Almost instantly, his tone shifts from one of back-patting, pedagogy-speak to something more honest. He laughs. “It’s very hard to get a lot of teachers to teach those things, especially grammar. We have such a need to engage students. There’s such an emphasis on keeping student enthusiasm going and getting them to want to actively participate. When you start talking about grammar, it’s like asking them to eat their vegetables, and no one wants to ask them to do that. They prefer class discussion, which is great but to a certain degree, goes off into the wind.”

And of course, there’s also the logistical issue, the almost insurmountable challenge of teacher-to-student ratios, miserable ratios that are only going to get more miserable in light of the devastating teacher layoffs taking place around the country. At this particular school, every English teacher teaches five sections of English, and each section has approximately 25 students — a dream load compared to what teachers at, say, a Chicago public face. But that still means a three-page formal essay assignment would translate into 375 pages of student prose to be read, critiqued and evaluated. The very thought makes a cold, dark dread creep across my soul. It makes my own burden, two sections of composition, 15 students to a class, seem laughably light. And yet, to my more successful, tenured friends, even my numbers seem grueling. One of them says flatly, “I’d teach four sections of lit before I’d do one of comp. Four sections with my hands tied behind my back. It’s just too much work.”

So says a college professor getting 80 grand a year, summers off and the occasional sabbatical. Hearing this, it’s hard to blame the overworked high-school instructors out in the trenches. It’s hard to blame anyone for not wanting to teach writing, which, while it might not involve manual labor or public floggings, is hard, grueling work. Often it demands maximum effort for minimum payoff, headache-inducing attention to detail, wheelbarrows full of grading, revision after revision, conferences with teary-eyed students. Who wouldn’t prefer to talk about books or stories or poems? Problem is, the hard, grueling work to be done doesn’t go away. Ask any college composition teacher.

I wonder at times, is it even worth it? Do students really need to learn to write?

I bounce the question off another friend, Amelia Shapiro, a longtime writing tutor and composition professor who now directs support services at a university in Hawaii.

“I hate that fucking question,” she replies. “I hear it all the time and I hate it. No one asks this question about calculus, but who uses calculus besides math majors? If the question’s going to be asked about writing it should be asked about every subject. Even students who aren’t going to stay in college need to know how to write. We’ve all gotten emails or cover letters where we’ve judged people based on the writing. It’s not an essay but it’s still communication and people fail at it all the time in profound and meaningful ways.”

When I ask her why she thinks there’s such resistance to prioritizing and teaching writing, given its numerous applications, given its overlap with critical thinking skills, analytical skills, basic communication skills, she hesitates for a moment, then answers in three words: “It’s not fun.”

True, but then, teaching (and for that matter, learning) isn’t always fun. Changing my kid’s dirty diapers isn’t fun. Dragging my fat ass onto a treadmill isn’t fun. Helping my grandmother “fix” her computer isn’t fun. Sometimes we do things not because they’re fun but because they’re important.

Each year, about this point in the semester, the point when I’ve decided that I will never teach composition again, that it’s just too damned frustrating, that I’d rather be focusing on my novel, or reading my favorite writers, writers who make it look so easy, so seamless — the point at which I think, life’s too short; I’d rather be spending time with my family, or watching cable television, or doing absolutely anything but teaching composition, the point at which I would rather remove my own molars with a pair of garden shears than grade another paper, a student will stop by my office or catch me after class, not to tell me I’ve changed her life or inspired her to write the great American novel, but that, thanks to me, and the hours she herself has put in, she feels as though, in some small way, her writing has improved, or that she knows what she needs to do to improve, or that she can at least envision a future in which she is a better, more confident and more forceful writer of prose, and I tell her that no matter what, no matter how hard it is, she has to keep plowing ahead, because slow but steady progress as a reward for hard work is one of the few things we can count on in this life — if we’re lucky, that is — and then I tell myself the same.

I’d spent the majority of my pre-pregnancy years bouncing around in the top third of this range, always a little heavier than I might have liked, never the sort of girl who would ride a bike in a bikini or ask a salesgirl why the stores carried so darn few size zeros, but a solid, healthy woman with a healthy Body Mass Index. Suddenly, with a 6-month-old and a lot less time on my hands for working out, I was firmly outside of this zone and not only at increased risk for diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, but — more immediately distressing — fits of despair in front of three-way dressing room mirrors, emotional breakdowns brought on by the bridesmaid dress I wore for a friend’s wedding, a red strapless number in which I resembled a ripe maraschino cherry. Through all this, I could make joking reference to my “empty pouch” or my “leftover maternal reserves,” but when I stepped on the scale, I knew the truth. Pregnancy had pushed me over that threshold so many women fear crossing. I was no longer curvy, no longer a stubborn but reliable size 10. I was fat, and I wasn’t alone.

Despite the fantasies of celebrity magazines, in which bone-thin women drop baby weight before they’ve changed a diaper, for the average-size American woman — that is, a size 14 — pregnancy is a gateway to years of elastic waist bands. It’s not hard to see how this happens: When you’ve given up caffeine and alcohol, when you have to struggle to tie your shoes or roll over in bed, chips and Häagen-Dazs are no small comfort. A friend confided in me about the last few miserable weeks of her trimester: “I was drinking a chocolate milkshake every freaking day. I was shameless.” Problem is, however easy it is to pack on the pounds, it can be really, really hard to get them off.

In decades past, the dominant way of thinking was to acknowledge this reality and fight against it tooth and nail. But lately, against the backdrop of eerily vanishing celebrity baby bumps, a kinder, gentler approach is on the rise. Forget fitting back into your skinny jeans a few weeks postpartum. Love your post-baby body. Embrace the extra “you.” Katie Gentile writes in the Daily Beast that, “When women shed the baby weight, they are not merely getting back their pre-baby bodies, they are obliterating all evidence of ever having had a baby in the first place … The post-baby body is wrung of its recent life-giving feat.” In a Jezebel item, Sadie Stein admonishes the new “baby weight craze. She quotes a commenter on UrbanBaby who tells women to “think about all your body’s been through and don’t be so hard on yourself.”

There’s even a book devoted to this anti-Hollywood, anti-dieting perspective, a feel-good meditation on baby weight — “Does This Baby Make Me Look Fat: The Essential Guide to Loving Your Body Before and After Baby.” Its authors plead with new moms not to be too hard on themselves for having a little postpartum flab, encouraging women to love their bodies, to eat healthy and to embrace their roundness. All of this is part of an understandable pushback to the beauty-industrial complex, which creates impossible standards for women made worse through airbrushing and Photoshopping. But the big, fat truth is that most mothers aren’t going too far to shed their excess baby weight. We’re not going far enough. Sixty-two percent of American women are overweight, and so for the majority of American women, excess, lingering baby-weight is a real problem: health-wise, self-esteem-wise, and otherwise. There’s a reason women are buying those “baby weight craze” tabloids; because in a world of stubborn belly fat and clinging cellulite, that fantasy is powerful.

If I’d heard someone making this argument four years ago, I probably would have rolled my eyes. What’s changed between then and now is a 2-year-old (mine), two pregnancies (I’m currently in my third trimester for No. 2), and 15 pounds of excess weight that have made my second pregnancy a lot more uncomfortable than my first.

I take full responsibility for this predicament. I have a profound and unshakable love of good eating. A slice of perfectly buttered, warm-from-the-oven bread has been known to bring tears to my eyes. I don’t know that I want to live in a world without cheese. I adore cooking and baking and holiday feasts and dining with friends and spending too much money on mind-blowing meals in wonderful restaurants, but mostly, and quite simply, I love food. Before my pregnancy, I stayed healthy (never skinny) by exercising regularly, eating tons of fruits and vegetables all summer and not getting too down on myself if I plumped up a little, hibernation-style, in the winter. It was a delicate equilibrium that took years to achieve and only a few months to unravel, specifically the first few months of my pregnancy, a dark, cold winter in Chicago when, elated by the knowledge that I was nurturing a little life and relieved by the fact that I could keep nausea at bay with the continuous ingestion of egg bagels, plain pasta, white rice, baked potatoes and every other starchy goodness known to woman, I dispensed with moderation.

For the first time in my life, I felt light and free, even as my thighs and hips grew heavy. I did things I never would have done sans fetus. I “treated” myself to drive-through junior bacon cheeseburgers on my way home from the gym. Guacamole-laden tortilla chips replaced seasonal salad as my first course of choice. I bought a maternity tee with the words, “We’re hungry,” printed across the belly. I didn’t stop exercising, but it seemed like the more I exercised, the more I ate. In 39 1/2 weeks of pregnancy, I gained 39 1/2 pounds, and then delivered, to my astonishment, a little peanut, a 6-pound, 10-ounce baby boy. When I came home from the hospital, I hardly recognized myself. It took me about a year to lose the first 25. I was still working on the last 15 when No. 2 made an appearance on the sonogram screen.

It’s because of women like me, or women in far worse health predicaments — women entering pregnancies with a lot more than 15 excess pounds — that many healthcare providers are beginning to focus more on nutritional counseling programs as an integral part of prenatal care. The medical director of one such program at Northwestern University, Alan Peaceman, explains that in addition to the risks of gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, and cesarean sections, new research suggests that “women who gain excessively during pregnancy may be putting their children at risk for obesity. So they’re not doing this to fit back into their jeans six weeks after pregnancy. They’re doing this for the health of their babies.”

When I asked Peaceman if he worries some women might take the message too far, falling prey to the body-hating, “pregorexic” mentality, he laughs: “That’s just not the major issue that affects the population in this country. The much bigger problem is the women who gain too much and then can’t lose it. A lot of women who’ve fought weight issues their whole life look to pregnancy as a time when the rules are off, when they don’t have to engage in the struggle. We need to get the word out that this is not the case.”

The program is intended for women with a pre-pregnancy BMI over 30, which means I’m not quite fat enough to join in. Nonetheless, it inspired me. I wouldn’t say I’ve been on a diet during this pregnancy, but I haven’t been throwing caution to the wind, either. Unlike last time, the woman at the fast-food drive-through doesn’t know me by name. And unlike last time, when after the birth of my son I put off diet and exercise for as long as possible, I plan to be working off the weight this time as soon as my doctor gives the green light. Look, any woman who’s given birth and nursed a child knows there’s no fighting physiology at least in some respects. But I want to recognize myself in pictures. I want to feel sexy again in a short skirt. I don’t want an entire lot of pre-baby clothes to languish in the back of my closet for the next 20 years until I pass them along to some smug, skinny niece who loves their “vintage” look. I could say that I’m doing it for my health, and this would be partially true. But frankly, I’m doing it because however short my pre-pregnancy body might have fallen from the celebrity ideal, it was mine, and even with two babies in tow, I want it back. 

I dashed for the remote.

The desire to keep television out of our son’s life was one of the few parenting priorities my husband and I agreed on from the beginning. We debated the pros and cons of co-sleeping, of pacifiers, of chemical-free crib mattresses and baby sign language. The television question, on the other hand, was a no-brainer. I knew the American Academy of Pediatricians recommended against all television viewing for kids under 2. I knew the statistics — that by 3 months of age 40 percent of infants are regular viewers of television, DVDs and videos, and that by the age of 2 this number jumps to 90 percent. I’d read about the potential effects on brain development, the increased risk of obesity in kids who watched, the poor attention spans, the lagging social skills, the exposure to racial and gender stereotypes.

And, to be honest, the very idea of lethargic children sprawled out in front of the set brought to mind all the things that had for so long terrified me about parenthood; it seemed synonymous with huge, graceless strollers, cupboards crammed with Fruit Loops and sticky-mouthed gremlins going berserk in Target. Having a kid who begged for “just a few more minutes” of television was the antithesis of what I had hoped parenthood would be. It was resigning ourselves to a universe of want and consumption. Most of all, it was too much like the dynamic I had with my own parents as a kid who wasted hundreds, thousands of hours slack-jawed and zombified in front of the tube.

I don’t know exactly when I started watching television, but I know that Muppets and Smurfs hold privileged places in my memory. Without television, I surely could have mastered several classical languages or learned to play the violin, right? I could have been romping in the Virginia sunshine, riding horses and swimming in creeks, Twainian mischief, undoubtedly, just yards away. Instead I kept company with that weird robot on “Small Wonder.” My husband will sometimes cast down his eyes and ask questions like, “Do you remember that episode of ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ where Nancy Reagan showed up at Arnold’s school and told the kids not to do drugs?” And I will lower my head and say, “Yes, yes I do.”

We didn’t want Roscoe to look back with the same sense of regret and self-loathing, and so, when his eyes fixated on the screen as if it were the coming of the messiah, I panicked.

As adults, my husband and I would be considered pretty minimal television viewers, but we couldn’t say the same about our families. My parents are not extravagant people, but as of this past December, they are the owners of not one, not two, but three large-screen plasma televisions. That’s one for roughly every 400 square feet of their home. Were my husband’s little sister not also a dancer, we would have serious concerns about her susceptibility to couch-borne bedsores. If television is as addictive as it seems to be, and if addiction is hereditary, it would seem that Roscoe has cable wires woven into his DNA.

“You’ve got to get rid of it,” a relative advised. “If it’s in your home, it’s in his life.”

“But he’s only 2 months old,” I said. Could a newborn really be that interested in some wonk’s analysis of the subprime mortgage crisis? Could he really be that engaged by a quick clip of a Syracuse-Villanova basketball game?

At first, I tried to protect him from my habit. If I couldn’t resist the urge to watch (I’m a grown-up and fully entitled to my vices), I’d put him in his chair facing away from the screen. This worked for about three minutes. He could watch television from any spot in the room and from any angle. He could watch it upside down. I tried turning it on mute while he was nursing, but somehow able to sense my waning attention, he’d pull off of my breast and follow my gaze. If we held him, facing us, in our laps with our knees blocking his view, he’d crane back-first over the peaks of our legs to see.

“Is his head supposed to turn that way?” became a common refrain.

Worst of all, the moment his ears picked up the cable box’s telltale click, the objects that normally delighted him — our two small dogs, his squeaking elephants and wrist rattles, even his mommy’s smiling face — ceased to exist.

My breaking point occurred when I was feeding him his rice cereal while my husband watched basketball in our adjacent living room. Normally, nothing could distract Roscoe from his rice cereal. Boob, bottle and cereal were his holy trinity, his tasty alpha and omega. But for some reason, he didn’t seem interested. His eyes were glued to the dining room window, gobs of white mush clinging to his lips.

“What are you lookin’ at?” I asked him in the doting, high-pitched voice he loved. “You lookin’ out the window? You lookin’ at a pretty bird?”

But there was no bird. He was watching a reflection in the glass — Andres Nocioni dribbling a basketball down the court.

Apparently, my relative was right; if we didn’t want Roscoe watching, we had no choice but to banish television from our lives. I didn’t think this would be a great loss. After all, my husband and I were both enlightened, literate individuals. We set aside time for “Lost” and “The Wire,” like we’re supposed to. I enjoyed a little CNN with my morning cereal, and my husband might glance at a basketball game after work. That wasn’t so much, really. And then, of course, there were the somewhat less sophisticated but equally entertaining shows we ordered from Netflix, like “Deadwood.” But really, that was all. Except, of course, the programs I thought of as “multitasking” shows — reality shows and fashion programs and cooking shows and celebrity gossip spots I’d only let myself watch while I was doing something else, running on the treadmill at the gym, grading papers or answering e-mails or cooking dinner (never mind if a five-minute chore stretched out into a full half-hour). And then, of course, there were … others.

It took having an infant fixated on television to realize just how hooked I was. And even after becoming aware of the time I was wasting, I still wasn’t sure I was ready to live in a TV-free home.

“Personally,” my mother said, “I don’t see what the big deal is. As long as you pay attention to what he’s watching, how’s a little television going to hurt?”

“Because every minute he spends watching is time we’re not interacting as a family,” I said.

“Interacting?” she said. “When I was a kid, we didn’t have television. We had yelling. That was our entertainment. Taking bets. How long could Mom and Dad scream before the police showed up?”

Maybe she had a point. Maybe television viewing didn’t have to be an isolating, soul-sucking activity.

I have no choice but to admit that, for a while, I was a casual viewer of “American Idol.” By casual viewer, I mean I watched every episode aired between 2004 and 2007. And during this period, I did come to look forward to a weekly phone discussion with my father about the performances, and, my father being a psychiatrist, his spot diagnosis of the various personality disorders that exhibit themselves on that show with frightening regularity. I suppose it would have been better if we had called each week to discuss the war taking place right now or the spate of great new films coming out of Romania, if he’d been up for a regular heart-to-heart, an exchange of what he likes to call “sensitive thoughts,” but that wasn’t going to happen, and the “Idol”-centered conversations that did take place were honest fun.

The problem with letting tiny children watch, it seems to me, is that they’re not yet capable of this sort of exchange. I can’t exactly discuss the meanness of a particular episode of “Idol” with my 2-month-old or the genius of “The Wire.” For a baby, a child even, TV is purely passive, a series of received images with no outlet for response or examination. A baby’s world is an observed one; Roscoe’s only got what we place before him, flaws, faults and all.

And so while we’re not selling our set just yet, we are trying our best to let it gather dust. As to my own addiction: I miss my morning CNN. I miss flipping the channels. But then I look at my infant son, and I see something no news, no sports, no show at all can compete with. I watch him grab onto his plastic elephant and shake it and bite it and giggle unendingly at everything that surrounds him.