What I’m noticing this time around are both the idealistic goals of the books and their gritty realities. Anne of Green Gables, of course, is the plucky, chatty orphan adopted by mistake onto a farm on Canada’s Prince Edward Island. Her backstory, glossed over in the book by Anne herself, is unrelievedly grim: parents dead of illness when Anne was a baby, abusive foster parents who put Anne to work as a skivvy and nanny, and no education to speak of. She doesn’t even have peers; her imagination instead finds solace in pretend friends, including one concocted out of her own reflection in a pane of glass.

So her relative normalcy, once she arrives at Green Gables, is something shocking. She is sent to regular school for what seems like the first time and, at age 12, does just fine. She makes friends with ease, despite no previous experience of real friendship. She works hard (something she was, presumably, used to in her prior life) but somehow still finds plenty of time and energy for wandering the hills and daydreaming, a talent all the more surprising for never having been encouraged.

Anne of Green Gables is, of course, the first in a lengthy series of books about the increasingly conventional life led by the heroine. She wins a scholarship to college, but chooses to stay home and care for her ailing adoptive mother instead. (Naturally, she does this while helping to run the family farm, teaching at the local school, and continuing her college studies by correspondence.) She eventually completes college and dabbles in a career as a writer, but then decides to get married and settle down. Numerous children later, in the book Anne of Ingleside, she has a midlife crisis of sorts, wishing she’d done more with her life, but then decides that, really, she’s OK with how things have gone for her. Anne Shirley, successful housewife.

In The Railway Children, three Edwardian-era kids accustomed to a petit bourgeois life in suburban London are suddenly uprooted and sent to live in a country cottage. Their civil-servant father has disappeared, their mother is very sad and won’t talk about their father, and they are forced to live on very little money — so little that, like Anne Shirley in her pre-Green Gables days, school is out of the question.

Instead, the three siblings, in a Shirley-esque idyll, wander the pristine English countryside, hanging out at the local train station and exploring their new community. Their mother shuts herself up all day to write, ahem, children’s stories, since this is how she supports her family now, and lets her real kids run wild on the moors, which they are quite happy to do.

Like Anne Shirley, the railway kiddos make friends everywhere, a talent they use to help their father return to them (he has, à la the Dreyfus affair, been wrongfully imprisoned). As the Guardian put it,

Like so much Golden Age children’s literature, The Railway Children is a retreat, the celebration of the rural idyll of an England that never existed. It also presents an idealised view of childhood, in which unfettered and tenacious children, unencumbered by school and drawing only on their own resourcefulness, prevent derailments and set in motion the wheels that allow their falsely incarcerated father to return to the bosom of the family.

Both the Anne of Green Gables series and the Railway Children are still popular today, presumably for their classic formula of winsome charm and virtuous earnestness triumphing over grinding circumstance. This, in fact, is the standard setup for pretty much every book featuring youthful protagonists, including such classics as Oliver Twist, The Children of the New Forest, and practically everything written by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Even fantasy books for kids (think Susan Cooper and Philip Pullman, not to mention J.K. Rowling) and the recent wave of what the New Yorker has dubbed “dystopian fiction for young readers” can be seen as ultimately upbeat, at least for their heroes and heroines.

But the vision of ultimate vindication peddled by these books, satisfying though it can be, starts to feel thin when compared with the real lives of the authors. Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote the Anne Shirley series, and Edith Nesbit, who wrote The Railway Children as well as several other children’s series, both had troubled marriages and difficulties with their children. Maybe they wrote about perfect couples and winning offspring because they needed to believe in both, despite the disappointments of their own lives. Maybe they wrote such appealing visions because they knew the mirages would sell.

Both women were the breadwinners for their families, in an era (more than a century ago) when this was surpassingly uncommon. Of course, this was also the era of cheap, live-in servants, but presumably both women still frequently felt terribly isolated. And while Nesbit, in her non-writing life, was heavily involved in radical politics, the sad fact is that the legacy of both women was not female empowerment but popular books that, not so subtly, told women that empowerment waited for them in the home.

This distinction — between individual satisfaction and societal contentment — was underscored in the recent, much-discussed New York magazine article about modern parenting, “All Joy and No Fun”:

One hates to invoke Scandinavia in stories about child-rearing, but it can’t be an accident that the one superbly designed study that said, unambiguously, that having kids makes you happier was done with Danish subjects. The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children — and happier parents.

Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free) — well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”

Perhaps, as a friend of mine suggested recently on her blog about children’s literature, these women wrote children’s literature for the same reason we read it: to face “one’s primal fears, and vicariously vanquish them. . . . One gains strength by seeing what it’s possible to overcome.” In kidlit, that is, you are offered visions both of what society is, and what it could be.

As Pamela Paul recently noted in the New York Times Book Review, adults who like to read books frequently like to read children’s books. Paul quotes Amanda Foreman, the author of the biography Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as claiming a uniqueness for children’s lit: “Y.A. authors aren’t writing about middle-aged anomie or ­disappointed people.” Well, actually, they are. It’s just that in children’s lit, those afflicted with middle age, anomie, and disappointment — think Anne’s adoptive parents, for example, or the parents of the Railway Children — are redeemed by the children in their lives.

1) Drool. Delphine is not an especially drooly tot, but place a typical excited Labrador next to a typical excited baby, and watch the elongated drippy results, usually over:

2) Balls, sticks, and chew toys. Well, humans generally refer to chew toys for babies by such euphemisms as “teething rings,” but it’s the same thing. Both babies and dogs go gaga for anything round, squishy, poke-able, and chompable; both are, of course, orally fixated, chewing away not just on food but on anything new. (Older toddlers often have little gizmos that hide snacks inside; many dogs love these toys, too.) It’s good to have many toys on hand, because neither dogs nor babies are good at maintaining

3) Attention spans. OK, so babies eventually trump dogs in developing a concept of object permanence, aka Being Able to Remember the Existence of a Toy Dropped Out of Sight. But canines and children both will quickly lose interest in a toy and need new ones to distract them. And lost toys are an everyday occurrence for both.

4) Extreme energy and extreme fatigue. Babies and dogs do a lotta running around, especially after the aforementioned balls, sticks, and chew toys. They both do a lotta playing in public parks. And then they both gotta take long naps. Because if they don’t, then they both start

5) Whimpering and then howling. Dogs usually have a lot more patience in this department, whining quietly for hours if need be before prodding and barking. Babies tend to go from happy to grumpy very, very quickly. But they sure sound similar.

The big difference between babies and dogs? By age three, babies have (finally!) outpaced dogs in communication skills, reasoning skills, and toy skills. Dogs still have them beat in the running department, though.

But by the time Delphine was closing in on her first birthday, we were starting to worry that the mellowness was masking slowness. She learned to roll over around eight months of age, and promptly used this skill to escape tummy time permanently. Crawling? Not gonna happen when your kid can easily flip from her tum onto her back and lie there, playing contentedly with a toy. Walking? Not gonna happen when your kid can’t get into a sitting position from a lying one, and doesn’t even seem interested in trying.

We reported these obvious delays — along with a slew of other oddities, such as no finger-pointing or goodbye-waving, no clear first words beyond general babble, and no real skill chewing her food or drinking from a cup — to our beloved family-care doc at Delphine’s 12-months checkup. She agreed that it sounded like D. was pretty behind, and said she’d refer us out to a pediatric developmental and rehabilitation center for further evaluations.

That was more than two months ago. What sounded like a simple directive — go to this pediatric center, get some help — has turned into hell. If we had known we’d need a translator, a guide, and a map, we’d have gone shopping for a Virgil first.

No single person seemed to be an expert in all the options. And no one seemed to remember that we were laypeople, who didn’t know what “hypotonic” meant or any of the other technical terms slinging past our heads.

Everyone — the doctors, the nurses, the evaluators from the county — put Delphine through her (admittedly slow) paces, checked off boxes, nodded solemnly, and informed us, over and over, that our child had already flunked out of life.

Which may be why nobody seems especially eager to provide therapy for Delphine. If your child, at 15 months, is already so far behind that she needs therapy, then, gosh, why bother rushing to her aid?

Well, because small children change incredibly quickly, and the sooner a young child gets therapy, the better. All the pregnancy and new-baby books hammer home this message: If your children don’t develop properly in their first few years, they’re basically screwed.

But what seems obvious to us is clear as mud to all the supposed experts we’ve seen lately.

At the earliest, Delphine might start to receive physical therapy in mid-July. If the specialists don’t cancel on us, she might get some more extensive evaluations done in mid-August.

At this rate, we’ll be lucky if she’s walking by age two.

Time for Delphine’s parents has also stretched out, as if we were all living on the edge of a black hole. Making a single appointment can take an entire hour on the phone, waiting on hold and getting shunted around to find the right scheduler. Questions get more and more bizarrely antiquated; today I was asked both to give my maiden name (as the answer to a medical-records security question) and whether (because my last name doesn’t match Delphine’s) I had custody of my own child.

One doctor casually ordered a blood test for Delphine, to check her lead levels. Well, you try finding a vein on a plump, squirming baby. Five hours, three nurse practitioners, and three phlebotomists later, Delphine hadn’t given up a drop of blood. The last phlebotomist actually tried to find a vein by sticking the needle into Delphine’s ankle and digging it around in a circle, hoping to strike gold. I gritted my teeth and let Delphine scream for about 15 seconds before saying, “That’s enough. We’re done here.”

Fortunately, we have playgroup. We hadn’t been in a few weeks, because first Delphine and then I got sick with a nasty respiratory infection. And then Delphine flunked all her tests. So I was sort of dreading going, plopping my child down among all the other one-year-olds who are walking and talking and signing and stealing toys and aggressively chewing all kinds of choking hazards. Would the other parents start to feel virtuous for tolerating Delphine, now the token special-needs child? And would they secretly feel relieved that, thank God, their children were normal?

But they weren’t. They know us; we’ve been seeing them nearly every week since last summer. Delphine is still the same cute, sweet kiddo she’s always been. Delays or not, that’s what we know and love.

Many American municipalities fluoridate their water. Caleb and I grew up (on opposite coasts) drinking the stuff, which means that our teeth give off that telltale sparkle, at least to discerning dentists. But fluoridated tap water doesn’t exist here in Portland. And we can’t decide if this is a good thing or not.

If you drink a certain, minimal amount of fluoride, it actually helps build strong teeth from the inside out, as it were. This is useful for children, who are obviously growing teeth. (It’s also moderately useful for slacker adults who can’t be bothered to brush and floss regularly.) But if you drink (or eat) too much fluoride as a child, you wind up with something called fluorosis, in which the enamel of your teeth is mottled and streaky-looking. And some public-health authorities think that fluoridated tap water isn’t useful at all.

Because they’re so little, babies can get too much fluoride from public water supplies, which is why friends in Seattle have tried to find water filters that will remove the stuff, at least temporarily. Meanwhile, pediatricians here in Portland routinely prescribe fluoride drops for babies, because those kiddos aren’t getting any fluoride at all. (Fluoridated toothpaste isn’t recommended for tiny tots, because of the likelihood that they’ll just eat it, and eat too much of it.)

But if you think fluoride drops are just fluoride, think again. The drops we got at our local Walgreens include the colorants D&C red #33 and FD&C yellow #6, the preservatives methylparaben and propylparaben, and the mysterious “peach flavor.”

Does the presumed benefit of taking fluoride outweigh the unknown negative possibilities of downing chemical colorants, flavor agents, and parabens? Nobody seems to know.

I asked our local hippie grocery store if they sold pure fluoride for infants. Nope, but they suggested a local compounding pharmacy to try. The pharmacy, in turn, said that they couldn’t sell fluoride without preservatives because it would go bad within two weeks. (They also said that the company that made the creepy peach-flavored sodium fluoride drops, Hi-Tech Pharmacal, was an OK company to support because it was a local company. Well, me and Michael Pollan are all in favor of buying local food, but local chemicals? Not so much. Besides, the label on the box of peach drops says that Hi-Tech is based in Amityville, New York. So there.)

Some moms here in town just don’t worry about the fluoride thing at all, skipping it entirely until it’s time for their kids to use fluoridated toothpaste. Some are giving their kids the scary drops. Others have been buying fluoridated bottled water (Babies R Us sells it) and giving it to their offspring.

Frustrated, I decided to consult a pediatric dentist. Turns out the guy offers an entirely different line of sodium fluoride for kids; his version still has methylparaben as a preservative, but none of the other unappetizing additives.

As for bottled fluoridated water, he noted that beverage companies aren’t required to list fluoride parts per million on their products. Instead, you have to contact them directly (or check their websites) to find out whether their water contains the optimum level of 1 part fluoride per million. That water from Babies R Us might have too much fluoride, or too little, but you can’t tell just by reading the label.

So now Delphine drinks a little water, lightly fluoridated with the pediatric dentist’s drops, every day. I am still queasy about it, but I am also tired of trying to weigh so many unknowns. After all, Delphine still nurses at least four times a day, which means she’s presumably imbibing flame retardants along with everything else in my body.

Which chemical load is worse for my daughter’s future fertility: the parabens in the fluoride, the PDBEs in the breastmilk, or the hundreds of unknown chemicals drifting around our house and neighborhood?

Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the lead that’s presumably in our pre-1970s house, or the radon wafting up from our basement, or . . . I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before. The Worrywart Watchlist, signing off for now.

My mother, of course, spends more time at her job teaching preschool than doing laundry. And my father, for all the time sucked down by his basement den of an office, spends a few days each week grandparenting my niece, giving her his tireless, undivided attention for hours at a time.

That said, it remains true that my father has had an office of his own for more than two decades, while my mother had to make do with a desk in their bedroom. This spring, however, they finally finished redoing the rest of the house, and now my mom has an office of her own. Except, of course, for when the grandbabies visit; then her office becomes a joint study/nursery. Win some, lose some.

Around the time of that first remodel, I read the Virginia Woolf classic A Room of One’s Own. At the time, I found it both inspiring and frustrating. Claim your own space! the book seemed to declare. But how? I asked. For it’s only easy to claim your own space if you have everything Woolf had but (at least in my memory) failed to mention: enough rooms to spare one for an office, and enough servants to take care of things like laundry. (And cooking, and cleaning, and parenting . . . ) In other words, money.

The television show “Mad Men” has been accused of glamorizing alcohol abuse and blatant sexism. Hardly. What it glamorizes is the look of the early 1960s — the furniture, the clothes, the enormous cars. It’s harshly critical of the midcentury attitude toward gender roles and expectations: the wife who is expected to feel fulfilled by parenting and housework, the husband who is expected to dress conservatively and bring home the greasy bacon. The Betty and Don Drapers, as it were.

Watching it now, nearly half a century after the era it depicts, it’s easy to feel smug about how much more enlightened we are these days. Now women can do whatever they want! And men are so much more sensitive!

Except that the show’s situations still come up today. Dads are still trapped at the office. (We have a friend who just became a dad, and took no paternity leave because his law firm simply didn’t offer it.) Moms are still trapped at home — or if they do pursue careers, they find themselves either forking over their entire paycheck to daycare and babysitters, or struggling to work part-time while the baby’s asleep.

My grandparents, who were raising kids of their own in the Mad Men era, didn’t live the lives of the so-called 1950s ideal. Yes, they had two kids and pets and little small-town houses with lawns. But they all worked outside the home. My father’s parents ran a radio station together. My mother’s father was a sporting-goods salesman, and my mother’s mother was a social worker. (And she still cooked them all a hot breakfast every morning.)

My own mom went back to teaching part-time when I was six months old. I went back to work part-time, working from home, when Delphine was just a few weeks old. Most of the moms in our playgroup also work part-time, either from home or in situations (such as a dad with a flexible schedule or a generous workplace) with free babycare.

As the authors of the popular baby book And Baby Makes Three point out, the idea of “the second shift” — of moms working a full day at work and then another full day at home, cooking and cleaning and all that — was bogus from the get-go. Dads have always done more work than they got credit for.

For Mother’s Day this year, Caleb’s present to me was to take care of Delphine for four hours straight. I went outside and did heavy labor in the garden. When I came in, I noted Caleb’s slightly dazed look, focused on the middle distance while Delphine quietly played at his feet.

“You have the babysitter glazed-over expression,” I commented.

“Well, you know what it’s like,” he answered. “You can’t do anything else, so you feel trapped.”

Last summer, I decided to paint half of our kitchen cabinets, to pep up the room a bit. I picked blue, because I thought it would contrast well with the cabinets’ dull-but-warm brown. (And because warm colors, like reds, oranges, and yellows, are used by food companies for a reason: They make you feel hungrier than you actually are.) It took me several weeks to paint just eight cabinet doors; caring for a baby, working, and dealing with post-partum health woes can really slow you down. But after we finally put the doors back up, we decided they looked very chic.

Then we kicked back with a round of “Mad Men.” And I realized that the blue I had picked out at the paint shop was the same tint slapped on the doors of the television show’s fictional advertising agency, Sterling Cooper.

Don Draper Blue, we dubbed it.

So welcome to my office. It has better lighting (barely) than my mom’s laundry room. It doesn’t have my degrees on the wall. But it’s where I spend most of my time. A room of my own? Sort of.

Radical in the sense that getting off the corporate treadmill, saying no to the big American bucks, and choosing to take the slow lane are radical, at least by current go-go standards. Not so radical, however, is the model offered for emulation: mom quits day job, stays home to raise her kids. So maybe an apron is more comfy than pantyhose, but work is still work. And guess what? Nobody pays you to stay home with the kids.

Granted, the new book Cole was writing about — the one called Radical Homemaking, natch — includes profiles of radical-homemaking men. But Cole only profiled three Portland moms, no dads. None of these moms — two writers and a landscape architect — came from what you would call corporate-ladder backgrounds, so their choices to “go radical” aren’t exactly that. And all of them have husbands who bring home the regular-paycheck bacon.

Here’s what the article really missed: All of these “radical homemakers” are busy trying to turn their thriftiness, their clever craftsy homemaking skills, into new careers. In other words, they’re mompreneurs. They’re not just housewives; they’re housewives trying to get people to pay them money to write and talk about being housewives. (Cole’s interviewees are a freelance writer who frequently writes about herself and her lifestyle choices, a cooking teacher who teaches other people how to live the way she does, and a manager of a farmers’ market.) In other words, they’re meta-moms.

Not that toiling housewives should go unsung, of course. But to pretend that a) what they’re doing is different from housewifery, and that b) they’re not trying to turn old-fashioned housewifery into a new kind of paid career, is, well, a neat bit of legerdemain.

It’s not much different from what Newsweek books writer Jennie Yabroff did in her recent lambaste of food memoirs. Like Cole, Yabroff started out well, swinging punches against traditional ideas of gender roles and satisfactions, taking down female memoirists for equating food with love and male memoirists for equating food with sex. But then Yabroff held up a lone memoir as a model for the New Woman to emulate: Dalia Jurgensen’s Spiced.

Spiced, in Yabroff’s estimation, is a genre-busting book because it’s by a female chef (a rare bird indeed) that acknowledges the macho world of chefdom without succumbing to weepy feminine sentimentality. But Yabroff ignores the invisible line in the professional-cooking world: the one dotted between chefs (generally male) and pastry chefs (often female, including Jurgensen). Is that line sugary or salty? Yabroff is too busy applauding Jurgensen for being a female chef (not like those poseur amateurs Ruth Reichl and Kim Severson) to notice that Jurgensen is still making female choices in her career.

Now, a buncha stay-at-home dads wielding chef’s knives and clogs and bonding with their kids while prepping dinner? That’s radical.

First published in the early 1990s, the book — now a classic of the memoir/parenting/spiritual-journey subgenres — is nothing more than a journal kept by Lamott during her son’s first year. (These days, of course, she would’ve kept a blog.) I laughed at a few passages — the cat’s disgust with the new baby, or the inevitable adult comparisons of the oblivious tot to, say, a drug addict (loving the playground swing waaaay too much) or a dog (a drooling St. Bernard). The book alternated between caustic humor and tearful poignancy. I could see why my dad enjoyed it. And then I forgot about it.

Until, of course, I found myself having a baby at about the same age Lamott did, and decided it would be worth a second look. Yes, the book is still funny, and still weepy. But this time around, I found myself first nodding in agreement with the book, and then shaking my head in disbelief.

Here’s the line that made me nod:

One of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one’s secret insanity and brokenness and rage.

Well, this wasn’t news to me — I suspect that everyone has these problems, whether or not they have children. What was new was the sense of validation this passage suggested, a big OK to all those parents who are still whiplashed every day by the emotions, good and bad, of raising kids.

Second, her stated minimum-necessary income, per month, is $2,500. Well, our little family has twice as many adults as hers, and we do just fine — 21 years later, remember — on less income per person. Perhaps we’ve just become inured to wage stagnation, along with everybody else in the dwindling middle class. (Keep in mind, too, that Lamott pays her daily babysitter seven bucks an hour. We have friends who still pay their sitter seven bucks an hour.)

Third, her waiting-by-the-phone tactic actually pays off: the phone rings and an editor offers her a book column at twice her restaurant rate, or $2,000 a month. Was it God, or the fact that she was already a well-known author? Either way, now she’s making $3,000 a month, or $1,500 per article. Nice work, as they say, if you can get it.

What killed me, though, was the fact that Lamott — a foul-mouthed, Republican-bashing, gay-loving, in-your-face militant feminist — didn’t even negotiate. The phone rang, and she simply said Gosh, thanks, yes, I’m so grateful. Not, “Oh, two thousand dollars is a little low, could you bump it up by a thou?” Wage stagnation, indeed. This is how feminism dies, I guess.

So which planet was Lamott living on? The planet of speaking truth to power, of ripping open the pretty packages we wrap around parenthood? Or the planet of warm fuzzies and happy endings, in which writers suffer a lot but don’t really have to work very hard, babies drive you crazy for three months and then turn into precocious little angels, and friends get cancer but hey, God is cool?

She had all the important stuff: loving guests, a pretty party dress, cards and presents, and chocolate cake (the cake I grew up eating at every family birthday, the cake my sister loved so much she made a movie about it in college) with a lone orange candle on top.

This last was a bit of a challenge, since we couldn’t find the box of well-used fluorescent candles for a while. “How hard can it be?” asked Caleb. “She only needs one.”

Next year, maybe we’ll add in balloons.

Alone.

As Gross wrote in the article, “One week with this baby was more physically challenging than hiking across Montana and more psychologically draining than . . . anything I’ve ever done.”

We liked this article in part because it focused on San Francisco’s Mission District, a neighborhood near and dear to our former Bay Area-residing hearts. (He eats at Udupi Palace and El Farolito! Aww.) But as parents to a kid only one month younger than Sasha, what really got our attention was all the cool Sasha Travel Paraphernalia: the inflatable ducky tub, the Italian cloth gizmo Gross wraps around his seated kid as an impromptu high chair, and the pop-open travel crib from KidCo.

We also noticed several things bound to strike fear into any anxious first-time parent’s heart: Sasha, at 13 months, is an experienced walker. Delphine, at 12 months, isn’t even crawling. (She does pretty well with scooting, rolling, and folding herself over forwards, but walking ain’t on her radar yet.) Sasha, despite complaining one night in San Francisco about spinach and scarfing it up the next night, eats pretty much whatever grown-up food her dad gives her, including spicy noodles and greasy burritos. Delphine, despite all our efforts to give her chewy bits of cheese and meatballs, is still at the mush-and-nursing stage. (Of course, like all kids, she will happily chomp on sugary Cheerios. But that’s not really food, is it?)

Sasha is also a New York City kiddo, which means — at least in the video her dad shot of her — that she wears lots of stylish neutral-colored duds, making it hard to tell whether she’s a boy or a girl. Delphine wears blue, but also a lotta pink. (When you have a wardrobe of hand-me-downs, you wear what fits.) Even so, her blue outfits (despite the presence of, say, flowers and/or ruffles) have been known to confuse strangers on the street. Gross doesn’t mention what the local Mission parents thought of his kid in her blacks, browns, and grays. Of course, Sasha didn’t care either way.

Gross also notes, in his blog post about the trip, that the experience left him awed of single parents:

All of which gave me a newfound respect for the millions of single moms and dads who do what I did every single day, not because they’re on vacation but because they have no other option, and who embrace frugality not as a clever means to travel but because it’s the only way to survive.

Incidentally, Gross also has an article in the current issue of Saveur magazine, about trying to get his Taiwanese in-laws to teach him how to cook Taiwanese food. Self-deprecatingly, he tries to stick up for himself and his unconventional choices in life:

It’s been more than ten years since I met Jean Liu, the only daughter of Mei-Mei and her husband, Kan-Nan Liu, but I’ve never quite found my place in her family. At first, the reasons seemed obvious. I’m not Taiwanese, and I speak only a little Mandarin, the official language of Taiwan, and hardly a word of Taiwanese (the dialect of the descendants of the Chinese who arrived on this island 400 years ago). Also, I am not a doctor. Jean’s mother is a general practitioner, and her father is a brain surgeon. A brain surgeon! I’m a writer, which in the Liu family cosmology ranks well below doctor, computer-chip designer (Jean’s brother’s job), and even artist — but above day laborer.

And, occasionally, single parent.