On September 10, 2001, I flew from the Bay Area to Seattle. At the gate, my father was waiting, ready to greet me when I walked off the plane, to give me a hug, to ask about my trip, to walk with me to the baggage claim, and then to drive me home.
 
The very next day, of course, all of our flying habits changed.
 
No more family members going through security to say tearful goodbyes to children heading off to college for the first time; no more gaggles of enthusiastic greeters waiting at gates, arms full of flowers and balloons, necks craning to see if the beloved was walking up the gangway from the plane.
 
Nowadays, we are used to the idea that goodbyes are quick, muted affairs conducted curbside, that pickups are rushed, sweaty awkwardnesses accomplished in a cloud of car exhaust and honking horns.
 
Of course, we always wax nostalgic about yesteryear, preferring to focus on the good and forget the bad. My mother, for example, likes to recall the olden olden days of commercial airline travel, when passengers dressed up for the duration of the flight, when decent meals were served gratis with real silverware, when seats were wider and cushier and farther apart — maybe enough empty, even, for you to stretch out across several and sleep. But she’s a nonsmoker, so she never mentions the long-gone practice of allowing cigarette lovers to fill airplane cabins with secondhand smoke.
 
Still, the way we fly today makes me uncomfortable, and not just because the seats really have gotten smaller and closer together. And over Labor Day weekend last year, I realized why.

My nuclear family — two adults, two small children — took four flights to and from my cousin’s wedding in Colorado. We tried to anticipate as much as possible, from what we might need to bring on board (food, diapers, toys) to how long we might take to get through check-in and security (three hours, we have learned, is sometimes just barely enough). We looked up all the current regulations for flying with children on the Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Administration websites. We checked and double-checked.

And still we were caught off-guard by the unexpected, the unpredictable, the unknown. Most of it was minor, but some of it was deeply humiliating, and a little was downright threatening. We made it there and back, but we were profoundly disturbed.

To begin with, the rules of airline travel are always shifting. The last time we’d flown before the Labor Day trip was the fall of 2011; at that time, children under 12 had to remove their shoes to go through security, just like everyone else. On this trip, though, kids could keep their shoes on. Back then, children in baby carriers had to be removed to go through security, even if they were sleeping. A year later, that rule had changed, too; the baby could stay in a carrier, but the adult carrying the child had to have his or her hands wanded to check for traces of explosives.

At least those rules, however, were clearly posted at security. Other rules seemed to be verbal, and erratically enforced. Adults traveling with children, we were told more than once, could simply walk through the old-fashioned metal detectors instead of going through the controversial full-body scanners (also known as “naked” scanners) that have colonized many American airports (they’re banned in Europe). One TSA employee told us that if we weren’t traveling with children, we would have to go through the full-body scanners; refusing the full-body scanner was “not optional,” she said, despite the TSA website’s reassurances to the contrary.

Our biggest problem, though, was baby food. On previous flights, we’ve brought along commercially produced and sealed packets of fruit-and-vegetable mush, and have always had it breezily inspected and waved on through. On one of these flights, though, we were told that our baby food was “suspect” and that one of the adults in our group would have to step aside for a thorough pat-down.

I volunteered, and was told to stand on a mat just beyond the scanners. A TSA employee pulled on a pair of gloves and explained how, exactly, she was going to touch me in public. She offered me the option of stepping aside behind a curtain.
 
“No, that’s OK,” I said.
 
“Oh, yes, people used to be uncomfortable about all this,” she said, cheerfully. “But now they’re getting used to it.”
 
If I was going to be humiliated in the name of baby-food safety, I figured, it had better be in public, so others could see it and be made uncomfortable, too. But perhaps the TSA worker was right; the more pat-downs we see in public, the more we take them for granted.
 
She told me to spread my legs and lift my arms, a position familiar to anyone who watches cop shows. I thought of the recent TSA scandal at Boston’s Logan airport, where a program designed to target “suspicious” travelers resulted in harassment of black and Latino travelers.
 
As she ran her fingers lightly down the middle of my back and up between my legs, I thought of the man who, angry about being patted down by the TSA at the Portland airport in April 2012, decided to protest by stripping nude.

When she asked me to lift up my T-shirt so she could feel my bra’s underwire, I thought of the escalating scenario in the recent based-on-a-true-story movie “Compliance,” in which a restaurant’s staff detain, humiliate, and eventually assault a fellow employee, all because they think they’re following orders from a police officer.
 
Did I mention these incidents to the TSA employee? Of course not; since 9/11, we’ve all learned to keep our heads down and our mouths shut. After all, we just want to get where we’re going in the shortest time possible. So we’re willing to partially disrobe and allow public groping in the name of public safety.
 
Will any of this prevent terrorist attacks on airplanes? Hardly; as Malcolm Gladwell noted in the New Yorker way back in October 2001, airports and airlines institute screenings only in the wake of hijacking attempts, not as creative, preventive measures. Which means that a clever terrorist need only come up with a technique that nobody else has tried yet, preferably by finding loopholes. Those loopholes need not be hidden, either. Plastic explosives hidden in the shoes of a 10-year-old? Perfect.
 
“Security theater,” my husband whispered to me as we repacked our rifled-through bags. He was referring to the idea, popularized by security expert Bruce Schneier, that such public screenings and searches are just for show. In other words, people in uniform doing inspections and looking serious provides mental if not actual security.
 
Late in 2011, a Vanity Fair article titled “Smoke Screening” interviewed Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, about security theater:

When 9/11 shattered the public’s confidence in flying, Slovic says, the handful of anti-terror measures that actually work — hardening the cockpit door, positive baggage matching, more effective intelligence — would not have addressed the public’s dread, because the measures can’t really be seen. Relying on them would have been the equivalent of saying, “Have confidence in Uncle Sam,” when the problem was the very loss of confidence. So a certain amount of theater made sense. Over time, though, the value of the message changes. At first the policeman in the train station reassures you. Later, the uniform sends a message: train travel is dangerous. “The show gets less effective, and sometimes it becomes counterproductive.”

So if security theater is fraudulent, why do we put up with it? As a recent New York Times review of Garret Keizer’s book Privacy noted, definitions of privacy vary; Europeans tend to categorize privacy in terms of dignity, while Americans visualize privacy in terms of liberty. If true, this explains why we are increasingly willing to trade our personal dignity for what we think of as our collective liberty.
 
Except how free are we, really, when we allow ourselves to be humiliated and threatened by the people who are supposed to be protecting us? Flying can be liberating, yes, but how liberated can we truly feel, knowing that not only are our public security measures ineffective, but they mask such questionable private practices as the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS), which assigns “risk scores” to every airline passenger? (Not to mention the as-yet-unknown health effects, if any, of the nation’s rapid adoption of all those full-body scanners and their X-ray emissions.)
 
But from the point of view of the average traveler, the biggest everyday challenge of commercial air travel is simply its arbitrariness. Will I be able to bring baby food on board, or will it be thrown in the trash? Will I waltz through the metal detector, or be pulled aside for an intimate pat-down? Will the airline staff allow my family of screaming toddlers to board early, or force us to wait until the plane is nearly full?
 
Some levelheaded travelers have begun to channel their frustration into organized protest. Professional musicians, for example, have always been officially told that they can bring their livelihoods into an airplane cabin — even if they have to buy a separate seat for, say, a cello. But in practice, musicians never know if airplane staff will let them board or not. So last year, the International Federation of Musicians ran a Change.org petition to demand consistent enforcement of the rules; the petition collected more than 43,000 signatures. By March 2013, the European Union had begun expressing interest in clarifying the rules.
 
Knowing what to expect when we fly — the simple concept of consistency — would go a long way toward alleviating the anxiety of air travel. We might even begin to abandon security theater in favor of genuine security measures.
 
And what about that Portland man who stripped naked in public? A judge found him not guilty of public indecency, declaring that his protest was protected constitutional speech.

So perhaps we haven’t all gotten used to the theater of modern flying — yet.

Reading obituaries is a creepy habit — so the stereotype goes. But a good obituary is an art form, a grace note to a life that was lived with distinction, whether laudable or notorious.

The New York Times does well by the obit. The paper has at least one excellent writer on the Dead Beat, the perfectly balanced Margalit Fox. (I never knew that Dear Abby had such a dry wit, for example, until I read Fox’s recent eulogy for Pauline Phillips.) And the end-of-the-year New York Times Magazine issue devoted to obituaries of people both noteworthy and not — always titled “The Lives They Lived” — is an annual ritual documenting the great variety of humanity. In the issue for the year just past, for example, I learned that Judy Freudberg wasn’t just the woman behind the toddler juggernaut that is “Elmo’s World”; she was also responsible for shifting the long-running television show “Sesame Street” away from its origins as a sketch-comedy show aimed at both adults and children and toward a vehicle of pure child entertainment, pitched exactly to the four-year-old mindset.

From the magazine I also learned about a psychologist named Susan Jeffers, who carved out a niche for herself as a subversive self-help expert. Unlike most American cheerleaders, who tend to accentuate the positive, Jeffers embraced the negative; the title of her best-selling book, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, pretty much says it all.

So, although I usually shun self-help books in general and parenting/baby books in particular, I decided to check out the Jeffers canon, sampling a 1999 book called I’m Okay, You’re a Brat! Much of this book appealed to me: the so-called “conspiracy of silence,” in which nobody ever tells you how hard it’s really going to be to be pregnant, have a baby, and then try to parent it; the corollary of what Jeffers deems “Bad Thoughts” (the caps are hers), in which frustrated parents find themselves feeling not only wretched about themselves but about their offspring; and the hypocrisy of society’s expectation that people should become parents and then love every minute of it.

But the book withered for me when I realized that, despite her supposed subversiveness, Jeffers was falling into the same old self-help trap of expecting her readers to simply take control of their lives. (This is the fundamental flaw of the self-help industry: after all, if we were in control of our lives, why would we turn to self-help books in the first place?) When you are told that only you can solve your own problems, not only does that put an impossible burden on you, it lets society completely off the hook.

Jeffers waves the second-wave feminist banner of equality at work and in childcare. But she fails to extend her banner across the big picture. She derides breastfeeding, for example, as a painful, disgusting practice that mothers are pressured into; it doesn’t occur to her that perhaps a society that truly supports breastfeeding (and lactation consultants are just a start) would normalize the practice, ensuring that mothers and babies don’t have a terrible time trying to nurse. And she declares that not only is it OK to not want to have children, but that more people should refuse to have kids, for their own sanity as well as the health of the planet. Did it never cross her mind that having kids might look more appealing if our culture genuinely valued and rewarded parents for all the hard work that goes into raising kids?

Yes, it’s refreshing to read that it’s not unusual for parents, especially stay-at-home parents, to feel lost, alienated, isolated, trapped, frustrated, bored, afraid, angry, desperate. And to hear her say that society’s expectations — fostered by what she calls the “guilt gurus” — just make us feel worse. But her solutions are not helpful: they boil down to “Trust yourself” (exactly what most parents do not know how to do) and “Get help” (an expensive indulgence that many parents cannot afford). Thanks, Susan. Thanks a lot.

The book includes an addendum titled “A Survival Guide!” (Jeffers is inordinately fond of exclamation points) that’s basically a list of mantras parents are supposed to repeat to brainwash themselves. These fatuous bits of false wisdom include the following:

Whatever happens in the life of my child, I’ll handle it.
It’s all happening perfectly.
I have the power to say YES to this. I will learn and grow from it all.

Somehow I doubt that the suffering, struggling parents featured in Andrew Solomon’s new book, Far from The Tree — parents of schizophrenics, psychopathic criminals, and the otherwise profoundly disabled — would find Jeffers’ deep thoughts reassuring. Sometimes you can’t handle it. Often things don’t happen perfectly. And it’s the height of solipsism to treat the world — much less your own children — as merely a learning opportunity for yourself.

What we need instead is to talk to each other, to be honest about what having kids really means. We need to discard the ideal of the American individualist — the myth that tells us we can have it all by doing it all, and that if we don’t succeed it’s our own fault. Life isn’t that simple or easy. We need extended families of relatives and friends to help out. We need workplaces that recognize that parents can contribute just as much as non-parents — and that parents need flexible schedules and creative thinking about work. We need well-trained childcare providers who are well paid for their work, preferably subsidized by a system that encourages their education and provides salary and benefits. We need to develop a culture that values each child, not just those who get into Harvard or make lots of money or never get sick or disabled. And that culture must value each parent, too.

Such a culture will only come about if we make it happen. It’s too easy to just nod and agree with the status quo. So I have begun to speak up.

When my midwives told me, at six months postpartum, that on top of everything else I needed to get more exercise and go out on date nights (guilt! guilt!), I said, “Good luck with that, ladies. Will you come to my house every night and take care of my kids for free so I can get enough sleep to actually enjoy exercise and date nights and can afford to join a gym or go out?” (No points for guessing what their response to this was.)

When my cousin-in-law had a baby earlier this month, I broke old-fashioned etiquette and asked her how the labor and delivery went. But I think she still buys into the myth that successful people can do it all without breaking a sweat; at any rate, she wouldn’t tell me, and emphasized instead how wonderful it was to have a healthy baby. (Never admit stress, much less failure! Oh, and once the baby comes along, the mother becomes irrelevant; that’s the dirty secret behind all that “healthy baby” rhetoric.)

When I was buying diapers last week at Babies R Us, the cashier complained about how her co-worker wasn’t around to help out because she had to go to school. I said, “Well, if your employer encourages her to get more education, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”

When my mother tells me, over and over, that it’s so wonderful I get to stay home with my girls when they’re little, I reply, “But it’s better for them to have multiple adults taking care of them, at preschool and at home. And it’s better for me to have breaks from parenting.”

When I run into other parents at the local coffee shop and find out that their kids don’t go to preschool, I don’t accept their arguments that “preschool is too expensive” and “I’m really glad I get to spend time with my kids at home.” Preschool in Portland costs $6 or $7 an hour, people. That’s below minimum wage. And for that, you get not just childcare and playtime but social training and sometimes even potty training. I call that a bargain. Oh, and all that quality time you’re supposedly having with your child? I’m sure she really loves hanging out at the noisy, crowded coffee shop with no toys or books or anything to do while you try to have a work meeting.

I am looking forward to Emily Matchar’s forthcoming book, Homeward Bound, which I hope will dissect the “urban homesteading” movement and reveal it to be fundamentally disempowering to women. Sure, it may sound empowering to stay at home with your kids and run a small business from your closet. But it’s not; it’s isolating and insanity-making. Your kids need more than you. And you need more.

You need to realize that you can’t do it all alone. Oh, sure, maybe one or two women out there manifest the independent American ideal — you know, the women who give birth alone with no pain and happily homeschool their four children and make millions selling crocheted doilies on Etsy. Yeah, I know you know lots of those women. They don’t need you . . . and you don’t need them. What you need are other people, ordinary people, the kind you can help and the kind who can help you.

The people who will help you have a baby in whichever way seems to work best, instead of pushing you to do it their way. The people who will do an excellent job nurturing and educating your children at daycare and preschool and school. The people who will offer you a challenging, creative, well-paying job despite the fact that you have children. The people who understand what life is actually like. Especially life with kids.

Find them. Make them. And then work with them. Because this isn’t about you; it’s about all of us.

A couple of years ago, the fabulous parenting magazine Brain, Child asked readers to share their areas of unexpected parenting expertise. No, not Deep Mommy Philosophy, but those zones of knowledge that, thanks to the propensity for children to have intense, transitory obsessions, had become areas of amateur specialization for their parents as well.

Readers wrote in and detailed their recently acquired, in-depth familiarity with such topics as dinosaurs, astronomy, and, of course, the universe of “Star Wars.” In our house, the topic that currently qualifies as The Thing I Never Thought I Would Learn So Much About is the long-running children’s television show “Sesame Street.”

As kids, Caleb and I (and pretty much everybody else we grew up with) watched “Sesame Street.” According to my mother, at age two I watched it at least twice a day — the same episode aired once in the morning and once in the afternoon — because it was the only time she got to focus on my baby sister without me getting in the way. She also plunked me in front of the Canadian, en français version.

When we ask our friends today what they recall of the show — what we watched, roughly speaking, from the late 1970s into the early 1980s — their answers are remarkably consistent. People typically remember at least a few of the main human characters and the chief Muppets, and they especially dig the show’s vivid, often trippy animations and goofy live-action sequences, such as the popular pinball animations and the opera-singing orange.

What’s surprising is both how much we can remember (nearly everyone recognizes the tune to “The Ladybugs’ Picnic,” for example) and how little. Everybody knows the main Muppets of that era (Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, Grover, Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, Snuffleupagus, and the Count) but few recognize the other Muppets, including the friendly Herry, the cutup Roosevelt Franklin, and the untalented Don Music. (If you say, “Don Music was the composer who was always getting frustrated and banging his head on the piano,” then people will say, “Oh, yeah, I remember that guy!”)

Of the human characters, Gordon and Susan, the black couple who functioned as the parental figures on the show, usually get mentioned first. Maria and Luis, the Hispanic actors, are often mentioned next, because we all remember the inclusion of Spanish on the show. (Even if the only word I remember learning was “agua,” that’s something, right?) Mr. Hooper, the crusty-yet-lovable store owner whose death was written into the show as a teaching moment, typically gets a few shout-outs. And then people mention the other two white characters who had a lot of screen time but strangely unmemorable names: the dorky avuncular guy who sang a lot (Bob) and the dauntless deaf gal (Linda).

But, as with the ancient Muppets, what’s startling about watching old episodes now is how many other human characters were regulars on the show. Chief among these is David, the assistant in Mr. Hooper’s store, who was on the show for nearly two decades. He was hip and hilarious and had some amazing roller-skating moves — how come none of us can remember him? And what about Olivia, Gordon’s arty photographer sister, who had cornrows decked in clicky beads and an astonishing singing voice? Why were these characters — so vivid on the screen, even now — apparently so forgettable to our five-year-old selves?

It’s also fascinating to find out how little we knew about what we watched literally every day. Thanks to the wide variety of clips and trivia available about “Sesame Street” online — not to mention such metamedia as the show’s 40th-anniversary DVDs and coffee-table book, which have been Delphine favorites for nearly a year now — these factoids now take up precious parental brain space. None of us knew as kids, for example, that the vocalists in the pinball sequences were the Pointer Sisters, and that the orange was singing the Habanera from “Carmen.”

When Delphine first started watching brief YouTube clips of “Sesame Street,” she was about two years old. I had turned to YouTube out of desperation, on the suggestion of a friend, who relied on its three-minute videos to get her daughter to sit still long enough to have her fingernails cut. I tried this technique, and — as the current “Sesame Street” Muppet Abby would say — it was so magic. From there, of course, it was a greased-lightning slope into watching 15-minute segments of “Elmo’s World” and then entire hour-long episodes of the show. (I’d like to thank the Multnomah County Library for making most of this possible, with its many Elmo and other Sesame-related DVDs and books. Who knew that the Spanish-language cookbook C es de Cocinar would prove to have such staying power in our house?)

“Sesame Street” was always, mercifully, a show that included humor for the adults watching in the background. When Delphine watches it, she snickers at the slapstick, especially anything featuring Mr. Noodle (a clown character, most often played by Bill Irwin). When her parents watch it, they snort at the spoofs. Most of the best parodies on the show feature Cookie Monster, either singing in his gravelly voice (his “Shaft” takeoff, “Cookie Disco,” is hilarious and a pretty great song to boot) or playing it absolutely straight (his pipe-chomping turn as Alistair Cookie, the host of “Monsterpiece Theatre,” was one of the few spoofs I actually understood as a child, since my parents religiously watched “Masterpiece Theatre” every Sunday night). There are even parodies that aren’t really parodies; the single-shot opening sequence of episode 536, for example, replicates the lively street vibe of the more famous opening sequence of the Orson Welles noir “Touch of Evil,” without the film’s ominous ticking time bomb.

For parents of very young children, who are desperately trying to just get enough sleep each night, another bonus of “Sesame Street” is its guest stars. Don’t know current pop songs? That’s OK, “Sesame Street” will invite the singers on the show for you! (The only drawback here is that it makes it hard to hear, say, Feist on the radio without images of dancing penguin and chicken Muppets popping into your head.) It also makes the “Sesame Street” world even more dreamlike, in that the idea of Stevie Wonder just setting up shop on the Street to play some tunes is completely normal.

Ultimately, though, it’s not the ageless Muppets and fantastical animations and improbably chummy celebrities that make the show compelling for adults watching today. Rather, it’s the unusual emphasis on real people changing in real time — a basic fact of life that eluded us as kids.

Yes, we remember Mr. Hooper dying suddenly. But nobody from our generation seems to recall any of the subtler relationships and changes-over-time on the show. Did you know, for example, that Maria and David were a romantic couple on the show for years, and then somehow that fizzled, and Maria and Luis got together instead? And then they got married, and had a baby (Delphine loves the episode in which Gabriella was born), and that baby grew up, and is now in college?

Or that Bob, who knew sign language, was romantically paired with Linda, the deaf woman? (As Caleb says, this coupling is almost tragic, in that Linda is deaf and Bob is a musician.) Or that not one but four different actors played the Gordon character? (The current Gordon actor, Roscoe Orman, has played him since the 1970s. If you grew up watching the show, you’ll remember him as “the bald guy.”) Or that Gordon and Susan eventually adopted a baby boy named Miles? Or, heck, that the show finally acquired Asian-American characters in the form of store owner Alan and laundromat manager Leela?

Delphine, in her unquestioning acceptance of not just the “Sesame Street” universe but the world in general, has no trouble with any of this. She clearly knows that Maria and David are a couple, and that Maria and Luis are also a couple. She doesn’t get confused by all the many Gordons, although she will identify pretty much any bald guy as “Gordon.” (Her latest: bestowing the Gordon moniker on James Earl Jones counting to 10.) She can watch a clip from, say, 1973 and easily identify all the young, lithe actors, and then watch a clip from 2003 and accurately peg all the same actors, now older, grayer, and frequently plumper, with no difficulty. It is a universal present, in which Susan, say, is always young and always old, always in 1970s polyester and 2000s scarves. Mr. Hooper is always both surfing in Hawaii and dying of a heart attack, and Maria is always in love with both David and Luis.

When “Sesame Street” first aired, in 1969, we weren’t even born. Now we’re feeling our age. The show has changed significantly, both for its own sake and to compete with the revved-up, highly animated world that is children’s television entertainment these days. But I appreciate the fact that the show has allowed its human characters to age in real time. Big Bird will always be six years old, and Elmo will always be three years old, but for the humans, things happen. They fall in and out of love, marry, have kids, get old, and die. That’s life. And it’s kind of amazing that Delphine — even if she won’t consciously remember it down the road — blissfully accepts it all right now.

A writer friend is currently running an online workshop called “Writing Your Birth Story.” If you don’t want to explore your own birth experiences by writing about them, you can read about other women’s experiences at a number of websites, ranging from the mainstream BabyCenter to the bloggy Birth Story Diaries to the extremely loaded Unassisted Childbirth (tagline: “If you want the job done right … do it yourself!”) and Positive Birth Stories (“Our aim is for you to use these real life positive birth stories to encourage yourself to be confident in your natural ability to give birth gently.”).

Most of these share-your-story websites are, well, positive. On the other hand, there are many support groups out there (both in-person and online) for women who are angry, frustrated, disappointed, sad, and grieving over birth experiences that didn’t go as they expected or hoped. The bulk of these groups, for obvious reasons, are aimed at women who underwent C-sections.

The problem with these websites and groups, however, is that they’re simply too narrow. They give the impression that either you have a birth experience that’s wonderful (even if somewhat startling or even scary) or a birth experience that’s dreadful. And there’s a threatening undertow to match: If your birth went well, it was because you did the right things (exercise, diet, acupuncture, coping skills, whatever) to deserve it. If your birth went badly — well, you must not have done the right things.

This attitude ignores the vast range of possibilities for pregnancy and giving birth — most of which are, frankly, random. But who wants to hear that their lives are random? No, no, there must be meaning in everything, and an explanation for everything! And every mom wants to feel good about her birth experience — which means if she doesn’t feel good about it, something must be wrong with her.

One of the midwives I hired for my prenatal and postnatal care with Sibyl addressed this indirectly during a postnatal visit, when I voiced mild regret for not having handled my labor and delivery better. “Oh, nobody thinks they handled their labor and delivery as well as they could have,” she said.

On the one hand, that’s reassuring to hear. On the other hand, why all the guilt? Why do we feel inadequate when it comes to having babies?

Moms who’ve done nothing more than read a book or two, or attend a pro-forma childbirth class, often wind up bewildered by what actually happens when a baby is born. We’re supposed to be able to handle pregnancy and labor and delivery just like everything else we’re accustomed to as confident grown women: with aplomb.

But if I’ve learned anything from having babies, and from talking to dozens of other moms about having babies, it’s that each pregnancy and labor and delivery is different, and there’s always some level of surprise in store.

Nobody tells you this beforehand. Most first-time moms, frankly, don’t want to hear it; they assume and expect that their labor and delivery will be ordinary and doable. Difficult deliveries? Surgeries? That won’t happen to me!

So while we read books and take classes, we think we’re preparing ourselves. But we’re not. Not really. And when we’re told things like, “Healthy baby, healthy mom — that’s the outcome we want,” we just get more confused. Wait a sec — wasn’t the entire journey supposed to be important, not just the final destination?

Moms in America are told that, on the one hand, they’re supposed to strive for an ideal birth experience — be that an unassisted backyard homebirth or a highly medicalized C-section. On the other hand, they’re told that the birth experience doesn’t matter, that the final outcome is what counts. But of course, the birth experience generally dictates the outcome. So what gives?

At bottom, I think, maternity caregivers want moms to feel good about their pregnancies and births, no matter what those experiences are actually like. There’s an obvious societal benefit to this: moms who accept how they came to have their babies will, presumably, take better care of their babies. But this push for acceptance can lead moms to acquiesce to things they really shouldn’t — poor care, unnecessary surgeries, hippie guilt. And it can prevent moms from researching all their options, and demanding the best.

I met a mom recently who had had a dreadful birth experience with her first child — an attempted birthing-center birth that didn’t go well, with the center’s midwives abandoning her to the care of a hospital that then treated her even worse. This mom was pregnant with her second child, and had hired a different group of midwives to attempt a home birth. I asked her what she planned to do if the home birth didn’t go well, and she said, resignedly, that she was just going to go back to the hospital where she’d had her first child. When I expressed my astonishment, she said, “Well, I’d rather go with the evil I know than the evil I don’t know.”

I admired this mom for trying for a better birth experience the second time around. But I was disappointed that, as she said, she was “too tired and too daunted” to research better options than simply hiring a different set of midwives. She was, in many ways, like the first-time moms who are more comfortable hoping for the best than worrying about the worst.

It shouldn’t be this hard. It should be easier to find out what’s available, and easier to find out what’s right for you. And, above all, it should be easier to get good-quality care everywhere, instead of hoping that your midwives know what they’re doing, or hoping that you don’t get pushed around when you go to the hospital.

It’s too easy for us, as a society, to put this burden on moms, by telling them that no matter what their birth experience is, they should embrace it and move on. We should be doing a better job of giving them good birth experiences to begin with.

Just over a year ago, the Tiger Mother was rattling mommy cages, encouraging insecure, guilt-stricken, wishy-washy North American moms to become strict disciplinarians with their children.

But the Chinese way (or the Chinese-American way, or just the demanding Amy Chua way) is now so last year. The parenting trend for 2012 — what with the success of Karen Le Billon’s French Kids Eat Everything and Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé — is Francophone.

Unlike Chua’s tome Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which presented a school of parenting thought by someone who’d been raised in that very school, Le Billon and Druckerman’s memoirs document how two white North American moms found themselves living in France, clashing with the French attitudes toward parenting, and then deciding that most (if not all) of the French way actually made a good deal of sense.

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I’ve been thinking about birth announcements lately. Not just how we send them — which has morphed, seemingly just in the past few years, from formal card-in-the-mail announcements to mass emails to Facebook posts published practically as soon as the baby is out of the womb — but what we say and don’t say in them.

Time was, the standard birth announcement was short, practically terse, and went something like this: “Baby XX (or XY) was born DATE at TIME and weighed X pounds, Y ounces and was Z inches long. Everybody is healthy and happy.” If the baby was born via C-section, that was sometimes noted as well.

Now the announcement is likely to include a brief description of the labor and delivery, as well as an explanation of the new baby’s name. I like this, because I always want more information on both counts.

The word that always bugs me in birth announcements, however, is “natural.”

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Our second daughter’s due date was Tuesday, January 17. Naturally, she didn’t decide to show up that day, which was perfectly fine with me, since I wasn’t quite ready for her yet. But by Thursday — my last peaceful day of just hanging around the house with Delphine, making pancakes and having a luxuriously long afternoon nap together — I felt like there was nothing left to do but wait.

And we didn’t have to wait very long. Around midnight that night, as I was getting ready for bed, I realized that the frequent Braxton-Hicks practice contractions I’d been having for weeks, plus the occasional menstrual-like cramp, had been joined by a new sensation: a dull, steady ache across my lower back.

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Back in September, I posted about our long journey down the byzantine pathways of obstetric care in America today. At that point, we had already received prenatal care for my second pregnancy from two different providers. We had also interviewed two other providers, and were searching for a fifth.

We were no longer the naïve couple that had casually strolled through the expected (and unexpectedly narrow) doorways of pregnancy and childbearing the first time around. We wanted to do things differently this time, to take charge — and to avoid making the same mistakes all over again.

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We are expecting the arrival of a second daughter any day now. (The due date is January 17, for what that’s worth.) Delphine likes to talk about babies, and pretend to listen to the baby’s heartbeat with her toy stethoscope. (She thinks, in fact, that everybody in our house is currently pregnant, including the cat, and stalks the cat with her stethoscope, calling, “Kitty baby! Kitty baby!”) But the actual materialization of a real baby sibling, of course, is going to upend her world. Nothing will ever be the same again — for any of us.

My sister was born when I was two. I don’t remember it, of course, but I’m sure I was less than thrilled. My parents still have a flashed-out snapshot of me holding my newborn sister in a contorted pose for the camera; on the back of the print, my mother’s brother scribbled, “One snap of the wrist and I’ll be queen again!” Which pretty much sums up the devastating devolution from Pampered Only Child to Mere Oldest Sibling.

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Just over a year ago, Delphine started therapy for developmental delays. She has since seen a physical therapist, a speech therapist, and a rotating cast of occupational therapists, plus two different caseworkers through the county school district. Now she’s in part-time preschool, which constitutes therapy of a more social sort.

As her parents, we are her therapy managers. During the initial evaluation process in May and June of 2010, it quickly became apparent that no one — from our family-care doctor to Delphine’s pediatric-development specialist to her private therapy nonprofit — was willing to take the lead on managing her care. Everyone clucked their tongues and said, yes, she’s behind by several months, she needs assessment and therapy — but no one, apparently, was expert enough to manage her care. So we do. And since, ultimately, the responsibility for our child resides with us, we’re fine with this.

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