It's noon on Sunday, and as usual, I'm sitting at the kitchen table having lunch with my fourteen-month-old son and his grandparents. It's our weekly ritual, one that has become indispensable to all of us: I can take a precious few moments to catch up with my parents between cutting peanut butter sandwiches and retrieving dropped sippy cups, they get to dote on Nico and see how he's changed over the past week, and he gets to entertain his adoring fans, for whom everything he does is brilliant and hysterical. But when Nico tries to feed a piece of his sandwich to his grandfather, things get weird.

See, Grandma and Grandpap are 1,200 miles away. We maintain our weekly lunch date — and our familial bond — almost exclusively online, via Skype. Grandpap leans toward the screen, wiggling his moustache for effect, mouth wide open to accept whatever slimy, half-chewed morsel of food his grandson offers. And Nico, giggling expectantly, leans in closer and closer till I have to pull the laptop back to keep him from smearing jam across the screen. It's a sweet, silly exchange between them, which, like so much time spent with a baby, is not about doing anything significant, but rather just being together in the moment. But none of us quite knows what to do when our virtual relationship runs up against such literal walls.

Nico rolls with it, of course, and moves on to smashing kiwifruit into his hair. He is part of a brave new generation, one for whom communicating in this way that once seemed so impossible, so Jetsonian, is a purely quotidian experience. Nearly everyone I know whose kids have out-of-town grandparents does some sort of online video-calling, and a recent New York Times article documented just this phenomenon. But quotidian or not, I wonder about what it means for our relationships.

We travel to be together in person whenever we can, but the very reason for the more frequent visits — my son — makes traveling much more logistically challenging, not to mention more expensive. And my parents, like so many other baby-boomer grandparents, are younger and healthier than those of previous generations; they'd love nothing more than to be involved in their grandson's life, but also like many others of their generation, they find themselves having to work later in their lives and lack the leisure time or financial security to travel often.

In some ways, these concerns seem so very . . . I don't know, twentieth century. We are all, of course, mind-bogglingly hyper-connected in this postmodern era. With web cams and an internet connection, we can in fact see our family whenever we want; Nico certainly spends more time online with his grandparents than I did face-to-face with mine. But the paradox of this intense connectivity is that it's always coupled with reminders of the actual distance between us: the limits of battery life and bandwidth are nagging indices of the miles from the Midwest to the East coast, and the inevitable technical glitches can make our online visits feel as alienating as they are enjoyable.

I recently wrote a letter to my own grandmother on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday, reminiscing about my earliest memories of her and reflecting on the pleasures of the grandparent-grandchild relationship. What struck me while writing was how physical my memories of her are, how many of them involve touch and smell and presence. Watching Nico interact with his grandparents online, it becomes clear just how challenging it is to create a relationship with a child (especially a pre-lingual child) when those elements of physicality are removed. They've risen to the challenge as admirably as anyone possibly could, honing their performance skills and developing an arsenal of visual entertainment techniques to rival any children's television host.

They're a comedic duo, with Grandpap playing the straight man in Grandma's routines: she dresses him in funny hats, tugs on his ears and nose, feeds him with a huge wooden spoon — they do whatever it takes to get a busy toddler engaged with a twelve-inch screen. And there is genuine joy in the experience, on both sides. But our visits are always tinged by a certain sadness. When we end our weekly calls, my parents' longing is almost palpable — my mother frequently signs off by saying something like, "Oh, Nico, why don't you just come over for the rest of the afternoon? We can walk to the park and swing on the swings" in a faux-cheerful voice. And I find myself missing more substantive conversations with them, especially now, since being at sea in the world of parenting has given me such a different perspective on them as people.

Having a baby made me value my family in new and unexpected ways; and after Nico was born, the miles between us and his grandparents seemed to stretch open like some yawning, indifferent beast. To be sure, Skype makes that distance feel a little less beastly. And for Nico, whose days are immersed in imaginative play, maybe navigating that distance virtually is not such a perilous undertaking. Regardless, even five years ago we could have only traversed it in that old-fashioned, embodied way to be together at holidays and for significant family events; so for now, we're all grateful for those Sunday lunches, and for lovely moments of inconsequential togetherness, virtual or not.

When it proved almost impossible to get through on the phone, I resorted to email. And when my friends' replies started trickling in, I felt inordinate relief. They reported that their kids were still going to classes as usual, and that the scenes of burning streets broadcast on television were confined to particular areas where protesters were clashing with police. "The kids are still playing soccer at the end of our alley," one friend wrote to me. "Life in our neighborhood is the same as always."

Eventually it grew easier to call, and in conversations I learned that school wasn't even in session. Some parents had their kids enrolled in summer classes, and those were being held as usual. This year, I was told, the authorities had ended the school term earlier than usual to accommodate the June 12 election. Apparently things work this way in Iran every four years when the country holds a presidential election — the term ends early so that children are safely ensconced at home by the time voters head to the polls. Why this is no one can quite explain, as until this June Iranian elections were tidy affairs. Children often went along with parents to voting stations, and the exercise felt like one enormous administrative task.

But Iran is a country where politics are fluid, and in this instance holding an election during summer school holiday seems like brilliant state planning. On week days Tehran is locked in the most heinous traffic imaginable — traffic so snarled and unrelenting that it makes rush hour in Los Angeles seem light in comparison. Extricating children from school is a daily anxiety that parents manage with the aid of taxi shuttles and long walks. For over an hour after class lets out, the streets around the city's numerous schools are flooded with young girls in maroon-colored hoods — the authorities recently relented and now allow elementary-school age girls to wear veils in colors like cream and powder blue, rather than the grim greys and olives of years past --- searching the car-jammed streets for parents or shuttles. Had the election protests erupted during the school term, it's painful to even imagine what would have transpired for kids and their terrified parents.

Summer vacation, however, has created other challenges for families with kids. Before the state began repressing demonstrations so viciously, parents who wanted to attend traded baby-sitting shifts so that they could join the marchers peacefully calling for the election results to be annulled. These absences, and the palpable sense that something was quite wrong, had kids asking questions that even adults were hard-pressed to answer. "Cheating is really bad," my cousin's 8-year-old said plaintively. "Why would the president cheat?" Another friends' daughter couldn't fathom why a government would ignore its citiziens' grievances. "If everybody is so upset, why don't they just listen?" she demanded of her mother, perplexed with the opaque answers she'd been receiving. Given Iran's history of democratic protest and violent revolt, parents could do with a volume like "Revolutionary Parenting: How to Talk to Your Kids About Political Unrest." But the country's parenting culture doesn't rely yet on books for guidance (though TV programs on children's psychology are hugely popular), and most parents look to the lessons they received as a child.

When the crisis in Iran first began to unfold, I tried to hide my turbulent feelings from my two-year-old son. I dashed into the kitchen to cry, pretended I had hay fever, and anything else I could think of to explain why I was red-eyed days on end. But my son, like all children, refused to be out-witted. He stood in front of the television news, arms akimbo, demanding to know why there were fires in Iran. Though I knew a two-year-old would have no ability to absorb anything I might tell him about Iran's political reality, I decided it was worse trying to hide the truth from him.

After all, I had grown up in the early years after Iran's 1979 revolution, and vividly remember my family sitting in the kitchen late into the night, weepy or angry. This is our destiny as Iranians, I concluded, to be attached to a homeland that is still experiencing massive political upheaval. This instability meant anguish for my parents' generation, and it looked like it would mean that for mine also.

Sooner or later my son would understand that he was Iranian, and that the country of his birth differed vastly from the modern Western society where he was being raised. A place where, in the words of the critic James Wood, the day's "most arduous choice has been between 'grande' and 'tall.'" I learned that Iran was a rich but fraught nation while playing with Barbies in California. I think this knowledge helped prepare me for understanding the conflicts that grip much of the world beyond the affluent, democratic West. I gave a report in my sixth grade class in Cupertino about the Iran-Iraq War, and felt for much of my childhood that my home — though a place where people were glued to the news and wept about it — was somehow also a window onto the world.

I sat my son down with some bread-sticks and apple juice, and did the same thing my friends in Tehran were doing. I tried to explain as simply and gently as I could that sometimes people in power, just like people on the playground, behaved awfully. Because my son adores Thomas the Tank Engine, the island world of Sodor supplied a useful context for our talk. The Fat Controller, or Sir Topham Hatt, wields a kindly authority over his stable of trains; Thomas, Percy, and the other engine admire him for his justness. Presidents of countries, I explained, must be fair to their people, just as Sir Topham Hatt is fair to his trains. My son took this all in gravely, nodding. These days, however, he's mostly concerned about Iran's phone lines. Why are they broken? Is it the wires? Why don't they send a repair man to fix them?

It was 8:45 PM on a Saturday night and the babysitter was not here. I had to be onstage, telling jokes at a New York City comedy club, at 9:15. I'd already left her a voicemail in my high school Spanish.

"Hola, uh, es la mama de William. Donde?"

I would be late for my spot if I didn't leave immediately. I wrapped my one-year-old son in a blanket and ran for the car. The babysitter and I communicated via Babelfish.com. I would write an email in English and convert it to Spanish. She would do the same, in reverse. I thought we were good for sabado. Damn. Merde?

I had four fifteen-minute sets that night, at three different comedy clubs. My final set ended at about one a.m. In theory, William and I could hang out in the car between spots, but while I was onstage, I'd have to hand him to somebody. I pulled up to the club at 9:12. Five or six comedians were standing out front. Some I knew, some I didn't.

"Hey!" I shouted, flipping on the hazard lights. "Can anyone sit with the baby? I'll pay you twenty-five bucks and I'll be back in twenty minutes." A comic named Maggie slid into the back seat.

"Thanks," I said, handing her the diaper bag. "Now, try not to kidnap him."

"You're no fun," she said. Maggie rode with us for the rest of the night, pocketing about a hundred dollars, which was not much less than me.

This wasn't supposed to be my life. I wasn't going to have kids. When I got pregnant by accident, I was forty and single. But also bored. I took a "Hey, why not?" approach to motherhood. My belly became a prop that I took on the road. We had a good time, the fetus and me. Indiana, Texas, Montreal. We flew to Alaska in my fourth month and L.A. in my eighth. My last show as a non-mom was the night before I delivered. When the baby came, I lost fifteen minutes of material.

And my lifestyle.

Comedians have the best lives. I used to stay up until four a.m. and sleep until whenever. Now, most mornings I wake up like the amnesiac from Memento. I have no idea where I am, or whose child is crying. Next to my bed is a helpful Polaroid of my son, captioned with the words: "You are his mother and his diaper needs to be changed."

William's dad is also a comedian. We took the baby on the road when he was six months old. My boyfriend would do his set, then run back to the green room, where I was waiting to pass him the swaddled baton. The emcee would kill a few minutes onstage until I arrived. It worked because there were two of us.

Now the baby is older, and there's often just one of us.

The boyfriend and I usually work alternate road weeks, but recently we each booked separate gigs during the same week. Neither of us could afford to cancel. We figured it would cost less for me to take William to Michigan than for my boyfriend to take him to North Dakota. I found a sitter online. She came to the hotel at seven p.m. I debriefed her on her mission as I saw it, which was to keep my son awake for as long as possible so I could sleep in the next morning.

"He's gonna start yawning in an hour. Don't buy into it. If you cave and put him to bed, he's gonna wake up at six a.m. And that can't happen because I will be dead by Sunday. I need you to keep him talking until eleven or so."

"Like, sleep deprivation? For a two-year-old?"

From the tone of her voice, I could tell she was not completely on board.

"Of course not! That's a torture technique. Jeez. All I'm saying is, when his eyes start rolling back into his head, point out the window and yell, 'plane!' That's it. Now, if he happens to spend the next thirty minutes looking for a plane that isn't there, well, that's his choice, isn't it?"

"Uh huh."

"Five or six times over the course of the evening should do the trick. And you don't have to say 'plane' each time. 'Firetruck' works. If you really want to keep him hopping, try 'Daddy.'"

I returned to the hotel at 1 a.m. I'd done two fifty-minute shows. I was tired.

"What time did he go to bed?" I asked.

"A little before eight."

Being home is hard, in a different way. After William was born, I cut back on the road work and took a day job writing for a now-defunct website. We had health insurance and the basic bills were paid. But I was in a frustrating position as a comic.

Sunday-Thursday spots in New York City don't pay much, or at all. But they are the best shows to try out new material. There is no pressure to kill. And new jokes get fine-tuned for the weekend shows, which do pay. That system worked great before I had a kid. Now, I had to hire a sitter for those nights. And all of a sudden I was out $10-$50 dollars every time I did a set. I went from eight to fifteen development sets a week to about two.

My growth slowed, despite the fact that I had so much more to talk about. The problem was solved for me in January, when the day job ended. Now I'm back on the road, doing long sets where I have plenty of opportunity to sneak in new stuff. The corporate benefits are gone, but so is the stagnation.

And the boyfriend and I have settled into a groove. When we're both in NYC, we perform on alternate weeknights, or one of us will do an early set, and race home so the other can make a late set. We spring for a sitter on weekends and the occasional miercoles o domingo. My schedule's not the same as it was during the non-mom days, but is anything?

That is not a very original comparison, and I've no doubt that most men with a workshop and a rudimentary knowledge of comic books have at some time thought the same thing. It's also not an accurate analogy. If anything, my son has more in common with Superman than I do. For one, he has a Superman costume, which I do not. More importantly, he and Superman both have stepfathers, and in this scenario, I am Pa Kent, the genteel farmer who, along with his wife Martha, adopts the infant from Krypton.

I have retreated to the basement because my stepson, Gavyn, is upstairs concluding the first visit that he has had with his biological father in two years. Gavyn is nearly seven; I've been with his mother since Gavyn was three, and I left him and his father alone to say their goodbyes because it seemed like the polite thing to do. Also, I did not wish to hear him call his biological father "dad."

Prior to his father's visit, I'd never brought the matter up with him regarding how I should be addressed, although it would be disingenuous to suggest that it didn't bother me a little that he called me "Kevin." I don't even have a fatherly sounding name, like Fred or Burt. I have a name that belongs to a kid idling along the sidelines at a kickball game.

Of course, it wasn't always like this. There was a time when I delighted in being called by my first name by Gavyn. That was when I was resisting becoming a father. I never had any desire for children, nor did I ever desire to be married. Neither of these responsibilities figured into my life plan, which up until the age of thirty-two had been to do as much as possible while working as little as possible. An achievable dream for a single man with seven cats, but one day I realized I was saying things to my cats like, "Who's a sexy kitty? Mitzy's a sexy kitty, isn't she? Yes you are, yes you are." I like to think I have a good handle on when I'm approaching the edge, and I quickly assessed that I needed a girlfriend to take the edge off.

Prior to meeting Patrice, I had only dated one other woman who'd had a child. That girlfriend had been very resistant to bringing me around her daughter. She made it clear she wasn't looking for a husband or a father for her child. I met her daughter on only two occasions, and those times occurred simply because a babysitter had not been available. In many ways, I believe that relationship fizzled out because I was always kept at a certain emotional distance. If a woman was wary of having me around her child, what did that say about me?

Patrice was not at all hesitant to have me hang out with Gavyn. In retrospect, I wonder if she wasn't a bit too eager to bring him around. After all, while my apartment seemed perfectly fine to me, it should have raised a series of red flags for any rational person in charge of the well-being of a child. I have mentioned the seven cats. I should also point out the two-foot-tall bong, walls decorated with posters (which would be somewhat fine if framed, but I was past thirty and still using thumbtacks and tape), the erotic refrigerator poetry, the legions of empty beer bottles in my recycling bin, and the loaded firearm in my kitchen cabinet. I do not know why these things did not deter Patrice. She is a former Miss Teen South Carolina. She has retained her youthful good looks. She was not desperate. It remains a bit of a mystery.

Naturally, before she ever brought Gavyn to meet me, I tidied up my apartment to make it suitable for a child to visit. And also, I will admit it: I played the kid angle. I went to my folks' house and got some of my old toys and brought them down to my apartment. I went out of my way to have Gavyn like me, and also to convey to his mother that in spite of my bohemian trappings, I was a responsible adult at my core.

Plus, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of possibly being involved for the long haul with someone who had a child. It seemed a better fit for me than fathering a child of my own. I feared passing on the plague of anxiety and depression that has haunted me my whole life and which afflicts nearly all of my relatives. As I saw it, being a stepfather was very much like Obi Wan Kenobi mentoring Luke Skywalker and teaching him the ways of the Force. After all, Gavyn had a dad already — that guy could handle the father business. I would be Gavyn's cool, older buddy.

And perhaps that arrangement would have worked had Patrice and I simply dated and lived separate lives otherwise. But within two months of appearing in my world, Patrice and Gavyn settled into my apartment, Gavyn's dad moved twelve hours away, and I was suddenly thrust into a very strange position: the role of the Father Figure. I'd spent my entire life trying to master the part of the Disappointing Son (and I'd been doing a splendid job in that role, if I may say so myself). After a few more months of living together, Patrice let it be known that I needed to get serious or move along. And for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I got serious.

I literally made the decision to marry Patrice in about five minutes, got a ring that same afternoon, and proposed that night. Two things stand out about my proposal in retrospect: I am apparently quite impatient; also, I found I really couldn't let Gavyn down.

I was and I still remain in love with his mother, but I've been as deep in love with other women as I was with Patrice and I never married them. The difference was that, while my relationship with Patrice was growing, there was a second relationship taking root that was undetected by my emotional defenses. Gavyn's father had all but abandoned him, returning to his own pre-marriage utopia of surfing and fishing. He let the occasional phone call drift in so that he didn't become a total stranger, but otherwise he was out of the picture.

I wanted to take care of Gavyn and his mother. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Which is all quite laughable now. Not only was my thinking terribly chauvinistic, I believe I have already detailed the many variables in my life that made me incompatible with stability. However, Patrice's income was plenty to provide for her and Gavyn, and I made enough to keep a roof over our heads, so we were in good shape. Except that Patrice was quite forgetful about taking the pill, especially after a few glasses of wine, and within a month of our nuptials she was pregnant with twin girls. So much for playing on the edge of fatherhood; I was being pushed in the deep end.

To my credit, I have managed to swim more often than I've sunk, but the twins are two now and they are accumulating more words every day, and the word they are constantly saying to me is, of course, "Daddy." It melts my cynicism entirely when they say it. Who knew that one word could have such power?

But when my family is gathered around the dinner table, it feels as though the four people with whom I live are divided into two camps: those who know me as Daddy, and those who call me Kevin. I worry that Gavyn will feel our relationship is somehow lesser because he and the girls use different nomenclature for me, a sign that defines the levels of intimacy between us.

However, I don't believe in forcing a child to refer to anyone by a specific name unless it's a matter of manners. That seems quite a bit different than my situation. I don't want to issue a dictum that I should be called "Dad" if I haven't earned the title.

And that is what it feels like: I am not doing a good enough job, because if I were, Gavyn would call me Dad.

When Patrice comes into the workshop to tell me that Gavyn's biological father has gone, I am separating the wood screws from the machine screws. I love to separate screws because I find organization calming, but Patrice seemed to think my ongoing campaign of proper screw separation was a sign of something else:

"Are you okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be okay?"

"Because of Gavyn's visit with Frank." It's true — Gavyn's biological father has a fatherly name. But I shall spare the reader the twenty minutes of hemming and hawing about what is bothering me before Patrice elicits a confession:

"Look," I say. "I took Gavyn to school his very first day. I'm the one reading to him at night. I'm the guy who showed him how to tell the difference between deer droppings and raccoon droppings. Why does Frank get to be 'Dad'? I want to be 'Dad'. It sounds petty, but I love Gavyn to death, and I'm trying, and it seems like I get nothing."

"What are you talking about? Gavyn always calls you Dad. Have you been drinking?"

"What are you talking about? He calls me Kevin."

"When he's talking to me he refers to you as Dad. That's what he calls you when he talks to other people too. You didn't know that?"

I walk past my wife without saying anything, climb the stairs, and find Gavyn sitting in the kitchen working his way through a roll of Smarties.

"Gavyn," I say, "when you talk to other people about me, what do you call me?"

He looks at me and crunches the candy in his mouth, as though he can't quite make sense of my question, then he says matter-of-factly, "Dad."

"But why do you call me Kevin?"

He tries to suppress a smile. "Because I wanted you to notice."

I stare at him for a few seconds and then say, "Are you messing with my head?"

His smile is suddenly uncontainable. "Yep. And I won."

There is no doubt in my mind that — DNA aside — this is my son.

I distinctly remember the first time I saw a woman's boob in a baby's mouth. I was twelve. The woman was my aunt. The baby was my cousin. And the boob, pendular, big-nippled and bulging with milk, seemed like an alien appendage, closer to a turtle's shell or a camel's hump than the budding cleavage I stuffed into my training bra each morning.

One could hardly call this a watershed event, and yet I remembered it the evening my husband and I attended our first post-natal get-together, a babies-welcome gathering of our closest friends, most of whom had an infant and/or toddler of their own.

When it came time to feed, rather than excusing myself to the living room and sitting through forty minutes of boring silence like a child in a time-out, I found myself surprisingly un-squeamish about the idea of taking care of business right there amidst the homemade gnocchi and adult conversation. At first I attempted to cover up with a blanket I'd brought for the occasion, but I was never very good at this. I'm not sure if it was my lack of coordination or the baby's claustrophobia or both, but it quickly began to look and feel like a WWE Wrestling match was taking place inside my shirt.

"What's going on in there?" a friend asked in her most non-judgmental voice.

I threw the shroud on the floor. I turned a little to the side. I got comfortable, dug into my gnocchi, joined into the conversation. There were six of us at the table — three couples — people I'd known for years, but as the baby nursed contentedly in the sling, the conversation grew stilted, as though the Pope or a customs inspector or someone's persnickety grandmother had entered the room. I thought of my aunt's camel hump boob. Beside me, I could feel my husband blushing. In between sides, I decided to retire to the living room after all, forgoing a precious half-hour of the adult company I so badly craved.

In case you were wondering, I do not live in a cloistered, religious compound or Puritan enclave. Many of my friends are artists, writers, editors and students. These are people who champion gay marriage rights and teach Sabbath's Theatre to eighteen-year-old undergraduates from Kansas. And yet a single breast, my breast — humble, leaky creature that it was — had the power to derail them. It occurred to me that culturally, something strange was taking place here.

If nursing openly at a casual dinner party could create such social awkwardness, what, I wondered, would happen if nursing mothers all across the country began unlatching their brassieres at gas stations and ATMs, on subways and at podiums? What would have happened if a certain former vice-presidential candidate whose name shall not be uttered were to have nursed on the stump? Would the fabric of civilized discourse unravel? Was there something so inherently erotic about the female breast that even in open-minded, mixed-company circles it needed to be hidden?

My first inkling that something might be amiss came a few months back when a friend of mine, an industrial designer, visited Guiana for a few weeks as part of an NGO program to teach local artisans how to prepare their goods for export. Many of his students were nursing mothers and most of the classes were taught in small villages. When I asked him what the greatest element of culture shock had been, he blushed, looked down, and his girlfriend ended up answering for him: "Tits. William has never seen so many tits in his life."

Now, just to put this in perspective, my friend is a pretty sophisticated urbanite. He has an MFA from Parsons. He is a self-proclaimed metrosexual. He has posed nude for his girlfriend, a photographer. He loves babies and is looking forward to having a few. He is not the kind of guy you would peg as having many hang-ups about lactation. And yet both he and his girlfriend, an equally enlightened individual, through much nervous laughter, told us how awkward it was to be face to face, teaching these women about the color wheel while between them a baby suckled at a breast.

Pondering their discomfort and remembering my own pre-motherhood, I decided to ask an expert on the anthropology of breastfeeding if nursing women around the world — for example, in Cote D'Ivoire, where Alma Gottlieb, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, conducted extensive field work — felt the need to conceal their breasts or seclude themselves while nursing. I'd spent eighty bucks on a Hooter Hider I never used and endured more than a few hours trying to balance my infant in a public toilet stall, a grungy department store "ladies' lounge" or simply sequestered off in a corner, alone, as though I were engaged in some unsightly act of personal hygiene. Do women in Cote D'Ivoire do such things?

Gottlieb is a soft-spoken woman with a lovely laugh that rang out like a bell at this question: "That would be absurd," she explained. "The idea alone would elicit peals of laughter." In the villages of West Africa where she lived, "The rights of the breast belong to the baby. It is simply not an erotic part of the body."

I began to re-imagine how my nursing experience might have been different if, above and beyond feeling comfortable nursing at a dinner party, I'd been able to walk around topless all summer, or whip out my "un-eroticized" breast in the teacher's lounge of my college, or nurse in the middle of a restaurant without blanket, without cloak, without feeling like I was embarrassing, at least a little, the friends or family at my table. How ridiculous it all began to seem — so much fuss over a glandular organ as functional as any other, an organ that, after all, has a far more primal purpose than filling out a strapless dress or selling Budweiser. I imagined the women of West African villages looking at the enlightened mama cloaked in a Hooter Hider or nursing in the bathroom with that same mix of sympathy and bewilderment and condescension I catch myself using on a Muslim woman trudging through the summer heat in a black burqa. Oh, I thought, how myriad and wondrous are the ways different cultures come up with to make things inconvenient for their fairer sex.

"One last question," I said to Alma Gottlieb at the conclusion of our interview. "Did seeing what you saw in Africa embolden you when you returned to the States and became a nursing mother yourself?"

"It did," she said without hesitation. "If I hadn't lived in Africa, I'm sure I wouldn't have breastfed in public. But I knew a way of doing this that made a lot more sense. And in another part of the world, I knew people were not uptight about it. The feminist in me said women have a right to breastfeed and babies have a right to be breastfed and because we lead busy lives, we have to do it in public."

"So you breastfed everywhere?" I asked.

"Almost. I never breastfed while teaching a class or in a faculty meeting. In another life I might, but in this one, I wasn't quite that bold."

For years I hid my desire to have a baby, even from myself. I always felt that bringing a child anywhere near my family, which I typically describe as "dysfunctional at best" would be completely unfair. The men in my family all have secret lives of some sort and the women are all denial-ridden enablers. (How many empty crack vials do you need to find before you realize he's got a problem?)

Since most of my relationships had basically been reruns of my Mom and Dad's, my Aunt and Uncle's, my Grandmother and Grandfather's, I figured, quite logically, that I'd turn out much the same. Even in high school I was attracted to the perfect-on-the-outside boy (class president) who ended up being a sinister creep. This guy not only stalked me after I broke up with him, he cornered me in an empty classroom and literally threw a room full of chairs at me.

Understandably, I didn't want to bring a kid into this depressing life picture and figured it was forever out of the question.

But something weird happened in my late twenties. I met a wonderful, sweet man who was as awesome inside as he seemed outside, and I fell totally in love with him. And after four years together I started to fantasize (often!) about building my dreamhouse.

For someone who'd had long-term relationships end in tear-filled admissions like "I had sex with my sister Linda the whole time you were in Maryland" or the lovely "I can't hide it any longer: I've been prostituting myself to buy meth for the past six months," the level of positivity and forethought necessary for dreamhouse planning was a remarkable leap for me. "Dream" implied a future that was fantastic rather than nightmarish. "House" implied actual stability! In my world, that was just crazy talk.

Regardless, I started carrying around a book called Building Your Own Dreamhouse. Chapters like "How to Pour a Foundation" and "How to Chose a Contractor" welcomed me into the world of people who believed that life could be good. I actually began to imagine the idea of a love not fraught with lies or denial or underground tension. If I just found the right piece of stable land, I could build that: a safe place where the bad stuff didn't keep happening to me.

Planning my dreamhouse as a place for both my boyfriend and me was too much for me at first. I started hyperventilating the first time we went to buy curtains together. I guess the thought that I could believe in something as ultimately doomed as I assumed our relationship was overwhelmed me.

So I took it slow with my dreamhouse. At first it was just for me.

After ripping pages out of magazines and filling several notebooks with sketches, I came up with my design. The lower floor would be a kitchen, bath and living room and the top floor would be my bedroom suite. There would be a spiral staircase leading to it and a hatch at the top like on a submarine that I could close at night. I would also have fire safety ladders hidden in the window seats, so if I ever needed to escape in a hurry I could. It took me about a year to imagine my boyfriend at my dreamhouse, but eventually I did. I even added an imaginary office for him.

Shortly after that I began picturing kids hanging around outside. At first they were just neighborhood kids riding bikes that I would wave to from my dreamhouse garden. But one day I saw myself on my hands and knees digging, and there was a little girl next to me. We were making holes and I was showing her how to put the plants into them.

It is now ten years later. My boyfriend has become my husband. He held my hand as we picked out curtains and doorknobs and even chairs for the beautiful home we moved into together. And while it took some time for me to warm up to the idea of setting up house together, once I did, I became as obsessed with it as I had once been with my dreamhouse.

But instead of using ideas from magazines to design our place, I ended up using the few happy memories of domesticity I did have. I'd always loved my best friend's house. Her mom decorated it in the '60s and then just left it the same for twenty years. By the '80s, the once-bright colors had all faded to sun-washed pastels that spoke more of a busy happiness than neglect. That's what I decided to do too: decorate once and then marvel as things aged.

I also stole some ideas from the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Its simplicity always made me feel calm and seemed to reinforce all the nice things he had to say to me. (I have a feeling I am not the only person who cried harder when Fred Rogers died than when certain members of my family did). And of course, I planted a garden, just like the one my mom and I used to work in together.

Our house is a beautiful, safe place full of happiness and possibilities rather than the fear and dread I felt as a kid. Sure, my husband and I fight sometimes and sometimes I get depressed despite the pastels everywhere, but it really has become the home I always wanted. More importantly, after fourteen years I am finally convinced that I am not going to come home to find my husband shooting up with an underage hooker in our kitchen.

And that's how I, at age forty, found myself in the waiting room of a fertility clinic. The dreamhouse is built; the only thing missing now is the girl in the garden.

Everyone's talking about the murder of George Tiller, the Kansas doctor assassinated because of his work providing late-term abortions to women (and, it must be said, girls). Much of the talk, on television anyway, centers on political questions: Will the Tiller murder reignite abortion as an issue at this delicate moment, just as a new justice is being considered for the Supreme Court? Will conservative pundits bear some responsibility for their characterization of the doctor as "Tiller the killer"? Does criticizing those who demonized him amount to a call for censorship?

The questions I would ask are different: Will someone else take over Tiller's practice? How many places are left that will offer the service he did, terminating pregnancy in the second and even third trimesters? Who will take care of these mothers when they find themselves facing the worst choice ever?

Choice isn't just a euphemism for abortion, and it's not a political term of art either. The women who went to Dr. Tiller weren't seeking to abort pregnancies they hadn't chosen in the first place; they went to him because of wanted pregnancies that had gone terribly wrong, because they and their wished-for children got stuck with the worst luck ever — because they found themselves in situations they never, ever would have chosen. I know because I could have been one of them.

I hadn't expected to be pregnant again. Our son was only eighteen months old, and at forty I wasn't sure I was all that fertile. But my period was late and as I remembered our kid-free weekend getaway a few weeks earlier, I immediately used the last in an old boxful of pregnancy tests, left over from our days of trying to conceive our son. When it came up positive I was shocked, then thrilled — then worried, since it was an oldish test, possibly expired. My husband was out of town so I dragged the toddler off to the drugstore to buy some newer tests — these, too, showed the pale blue crosses. I called my husband's cellphone. Out with friends, he shared the news right away; they all drank to our great good fortune.

Because we'd had a miscarriage before conceiving the toddler, and because of my age, I got an early ultrasound at eight weeks. I took the pictures — the baby looked like a child's drawing of a teddy bear, circles etched in white, floating in a dark sack — when I traveled to my hometown for my father's retirement party. After I returned, around eleven weeks pregnant, we heard the baby's galloping heartbeat via the Doppler listening device.

"Nice strong heartbeat," the doctor said. "You can relax now." I started to take her advice. I thought, having had a miscarriage before our son, that I had already been through the worst my reproductive life had to offer, and was now getting to the good stuff. I was wrong.

A week later we had another ultrasound, this one to look at the baby's nuchal fold measurement, an early sign, sometimes, of heightened risk for Down syndrome. Ultrasound rooms are dark and cool and quiet places. While the technician guided her wand on my tummy and looked at her monitor, my husband and I looked the other way, into a monitor set up just for us. The baby bubbled into view, yielding some obvious features — skull, spine — while others looked mysterious and hard to read, etchings in a language I don't know. The easy thing to remember is that dark is fluid and white is tissue. At twelve weeks, the baby is just around two inches long.

The room got quieter as soon as the technician pushed and angled her wand to see the baby's neck and spine. What should have been a tiny line of darkness looked like a deflated balloon stretching from the baby's neck down its back to its rump. I simultaneously noticed that it looked wrong and immediately deleted the thought from my mind, asking instead about the profile, the legs, the hands. My husband asked if we could have a picture. The technician said sure, but didn't save or print one. She removed the wand from my belly, wiped up the sticky blue jelly, and told us the doctor would be in soon.

As soon as she left the room, I began to cry.

A doctor we hadn't yet met entered, measured in silence for what seemed like years, then crossed his arms and sighed. He told us that instead of the two millimeters they expect to see, our baby's nuchal translucency measured 76 millimeters, off their charts. He suspected Trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder that kills most affected children before birth, and the remainder a few days or weeks after. The rare child who survives more than a few months with Trisomy 18 will be profoundly mentally retarded and painfully physically disabled. Virtually none survive more than a year or two. We immediately scheduled another test to confirm the diagnosis, but the doctor pointed out that even if this baby didn't have a chromosomal disorder — a vanishingly small possibility — it almost certainly had other major physical problems.

"We can't do anything for these kids," the doctor said, "but the best we can do is tell you early." What he said violated the carefully drawn terms of the abortion debate — to call the fetus a kid even as you make plans for termination — but he was right on both counts.

Nobody can prepare you for how quickly things change. That morning I had been thinking about beds. Specifically, I was strategizing the family sleeping arrangements like a particularly complex word problem in math class: If we moved the toddler into a big boy bed sometime just before the new baby came, then we would not have to buy or borrow a new crib. But how to time it? Move too soon, and we might destroy our toddler's good sleep habits, do it too late and we'd risk intense sibling rivalry as he saw a new baby move into his beloved crib. Would we move the two into a shared bedroom, and when? I looked forward to converting our current guest room into a nursery for two, and re-inventing the toddler's room as a smaller guest room.

A few hours later I was planning for a procedure you don't have at my age unless there's something terribly, terribly wrong. We agreed we would almost certainly terminate the pregnancy, we would say goodbye to this very much wanted, very much loved child.

Over the next day I learned a lot of things I'd never known before. How when you cry very hard while lying on your side you can actually feel the tear make its way from one eye across the bridge of your nose into the other eye, pushing a new tear out of that one. How much hope you can pack into two inches. How 76 millimeters — it's tiny, such a small measurement — can blow your heart open.

When I told friends what had happened, they cried with me. One sent me a link to a website where women wrote of similar bad ultrasounds and horrible options. While some of these women chose to carry to term, gestating and delivering babies born to die, or born already dead, most didn't. The pain they faced was nearly matched by the logistical obstacles in their way. Most of them only learned of their babies' serious problems at a second-trimester ultrasound, far too late to terminate in most places — not by law, but because the doctors and facilities simply do not exist. This is why there's a section of the website devoted to "Kansas Stories."

Because I grew up in Kansas, yet had never heard of Dr. Tiller, I clicked out of curiosity (even wondering, for a second, if chromosomal abnormalities could be more common in Kansas). Story after story described anguished journeys to Wichita, rushing through throngs of protestors only to emerge in a place of kindness and succor.

Reading their stories, I realized I was almost lucky; I live in a state where insurers cover the nuchal fold test, I was old enough that it was recommended. If my situation had been different, I might have found out about this baby's condition when they did, at the 20-week ultrasound — after feeling the baby move, after weeks in maternity clothes, in the midst of shopping for cribs and bibs.

I didn't have to go to Kansas. A week later, after cornfirming the diagnosis, I terminated this pregnancy at the hospital where my son was born. For the actual procedure, I was completely sedated. It was the first good sleep I'd had since that hushed ultrasound room.

Friends, who mean well, sometimes refer to what happened as a miscarriage. I know they're trying to spare me the label "abortion." I know they're trying to be kind; they're trying to absolve me of the implications of choice. But as much as I appreciate and depend on their kindness, I disagree with them. First, because I've had a miscarriage before, and this was different. When you miscarry your body is taking you on a ride your heart and mind rebel against; when you terminate a wanted pregnancy, it's your mind against both heart and body. You do what you have to do — what the doctors caring for you tell you is right and what you know is best for you and for the baby — but your uterus keeps growing, the placenta keeps pumping your blood and nutrients into that tiny body, and there's no way your heart can ever be ready to say goodbye.

And second, because this was a choice. When you have children, literally from the moment you realize you're pregnant till the day they go off to college, your days are filled with choices — about birth plans, breastfeeding, diaper types, potty training, preschool curricula, sports and activities, clothing and Internet use, dating and driving, and on and on. But when your pregnancy takes the kind of turn mine did, all your mothering boils down to one choice — and I chose to spare my child the suffering of a brief, painful life. Of all the million and one things I wished I could be doing for this child, the only act of love circumstances allowed me to perform was this one. The women who went to Dr. Tiller made the same choice, under even more excruciating circumstances. Now that he's gone, who will help women like them?

But then she came three weeks early.

I had gone in for a routine early morning OB appointment. Pretty soon, I found myself in a cab speeding to the hospital after my doctor determined that my water had broken and had probably been leaking for the past week. At the time, my thoughts were more on figuring out how to contact my sleeping boyfriend, whose phone I knew was turned off, than they were on dealing with all my unfinished business.

Thanks to a friend who had our keys, my boyfriend was roused and made it to the hospital before our baby did. And despite the urgency I had felt during my appointment, things didn't move so speedily once there and we had plenty of time to kill. So in between watching bad TV and sneaking snacks, we perused the cord blood brochures lining the nurse's station.

They looked a lot like the ones I had spent the last nine months ignoring in my doctor's office. On the cover was a cute little tot with her T-shirt pulled up to reveal a cute little bellybutton. The promise of umbilical cord stem cells and amazing predictions for their use in curing everything from blood disorders to leukemia served as text. Rounding this out was a section dedicated to testimonials from parents of sick kids who were deeply grateful that they had banked.

Once I bothered to look at it, the pitch was pretty effective. Suddenly, the $2,000 collection fee and $250 a year storage cost didn't seem so outrageous. I mean, this was our daughter's future health we were talking about!

So we went for it.

A few months later I asked a midwife friend for her thoughts on cord blood banking. She scoffed, telling me that the reality of any child ever actually being cured of a disease due to her own cord blood was pretty miniscule. She hadn't banked blood for either of her daughters and slept just fine at night. She also gently mentioned that some people viewed private banking as uncharitable and instead opted to donate cord blood to a public registry. This, she explained, was not only free, but was done for the greater good. Publicly banked blood could be used to treat medical conditions in anyone who was a match. Oh.

Now with my second baby due in a month, and despite the fact that my boyfriend is still on the fence about the issue, I am not inclined to bank privately again. Not only is the cost prohibitive, but the motives of these banks seem more driven by profit than science. Subsequent research alerted me to some things I hadn't realized the first time around.

For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't support the practice of private cord blood banking and challenges the claims that doing so is a form of biological insurance. Calling the private storage of cord blood "unwise," they explain that people can almost never be treated by their own cord blood, because those stem cells would likely be affected by the very condition you were hoping to cure!

On the flip side, a little more poking around the internet did teach me that the cord blood we stored for our daughter might not be totally worthless. There is a 25% chance that siblings will be a perfect match for each others's cells. This means that the blood I banked for my older child might actually be beneficial for my younger one. I guess that's less creepy than people who specifically have a baby in the hopes that its bone marrow could be used to treat a sick older sibling, yet it still seems weird.

A recent conversation with my father almost made me reconsider private banking. He was nervous when I mentioned that I was probably going to skip out on banking for the upcoming baby and put scary thoughts in my head. These weren't about the medical risks I could avoid. Rather they were about the resentment and sibling rivalry I was already creating between the still gestating fetus and his big sister.

Still, it's seeming more and more likely that if we bank again, we'll go the public route. Of course, doing that requires a bit of planning. Finding a place to store blood privately turns out to be a lot more straightforward than tracking down a legitimate public bank and making sure the hospital where you're delivering does cord blood collection at all. And in the grand scheme of things, researching this falls behind figuring out when I should go on maternity leave, locating a mohel who won't balk at my kids' non-Jewish dad, and coming up with a name for this upcoming baby.

Maybe one day cord blood banking will be a routine part of the post-birth experience. But since it currently isn't, we'll just try to do what makes the most sense in the moment.

Of course, both the idea of using my daughter's blood for my next child, and the issue of banking blood just to be fair, might be moot. When my boyfriend and I started to talk about this the other night, he reminded me of something I'd forgotten. At some point in the last year we got a letter from the cord blood folks. The credit card we put the storage fee payments on had expired.

"Did you ever give them a new one?" he asked.

"Nope. You?" I said.

"Nope," he told me.

So maybe our decision has already been made for us.

Some of the autistic children are quite high functioning, but many are completely non-verbal, incontinent, and seemingly able to do little else than flap their hands or spin in endless circles. I think of those children every time I read the latest in the recent flurry of attempts to re-imagine autism as anything less than devastating, and wish the proponents of these theories could spend some time on the NBU. Maybe then they would realize how naïve and dangerous their efforts to minimize this epidemic actually are.

It might seem easy to dismiss the extreme examples, those blowhards who reduce afflicted children to undisciplined "brats," as Michael Savage called them last July, or "junior morons," according to Denis Leary in his book Why We Suck: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid. And I do trust that most people will hesitate to take Denis Leary's advice on . . . just about anything. But the fact remains that an autistic child throwing a tantrum in a grocery store doesn't look much different from a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum in a grocery store, and I can certainly imagine how comments such as Leary's and Savage's might reinforce the secret suspicions of those who have seen autistic children only during their most fraught and hysterical moments.

Harder to reject out of hand are those who mask their self-indulgent opinions as intellectual discourse, such as Owen Thomas's post, "Autism, the Disease of the Internet Era," which was featured on Gawker in January. Thomas re-conceptualizes autism as a metaphor for our alienated, internet-obsessed age, asking, "Are we all perhaps a bit autistic? Is the Internet turning us into robots, unable to express our emotions without mechanical help? . . . Needing to type ':-)' to communicate our pleasure may give the tiniest hint of what the disease may be like."

Suffice it to say: no, it doesn't.

Thomas supports his philosophical musings with a claim very popular amongst the autism nay-sayers: "The consensus seems to be that we're seeing more autism cases because we're more primed to look for its symptoms. In other words, we see autism everywhere because we want to." The idea that the astronomical rise in autism cases over the past decade has more to do with perception — with increased awareness, or allegedly expanded diagnostic criteria — than a legitimate increase in the number of affected children is echoed in David Safir's editorial, "Hype Around Autism," which appeared in 2007 in USA Today. Dr. Safir suggests, "In the 1990s the definition of autism began to change to include many children with a milder collection of symptoms . . . it is not helpful to artificially create an 'epidemic' by changing definitions."

Thankfully, a new study by U.C. Davis should put this issue to rest. As reported in January by Scientific American, The LA Times, Web MD and many other sources, scientists have determined that changes in diagnostic criteria cannot account for the astronomical rise in autism cases in California. The study concluded that, "Of the 600-to-700 percent increase in autism reported in California between 1990 and 2000, fewer than 10% were due to the inclusion of milder cases."

But the most troubling denials of autism come from a fragment of the autistic community itself: the neurodiversity movement. Profiled in several prominent publications, including Wired, The Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine, this group believes that autism is not a handicap, but just a different way of thinking — a philosophy that unintentionally legitimizes Leary, Thomas, Safir, Savage, and every other person who sets out to minimize the threat of autism. Because if some autistic individuals and their families don't believe that autism is a disability, then why should anyone else? And if autism isn't a disability, then why should the public extend any more patience or flexibility or empathy towards those with autism than towards those without?

As the parent of an autistic child, the inclusive tenets of neurodiversity are enormously seductive. Who doesn't want to believe her child is perfect the way he is, as Kerry Cohen argues in her essay "What's Wrong With This Picture?: My Autistic Son Doesn't Need To Be Fixed," which appeared in March here on Babble? But the central belief of the movement crumbles under logical scrutiny: if we could pick and choose attributes for our children the way we order custom cars from the dealership, would anyone even consider the autism option? Of course not. Because brown and blue are just different eye colors; curly and straight are just different styles of hair; but autism and typical development are not just different states of being. I can't imagine any parent choosing the frustrations, limitations, and struggles of autism — not for themselves and certainly not for their children. Autism, to put it bluntly, is worse.

As I mentioned, many of the proponents of neurodiversity have mild forms of autism or Asperger's Syndrome, and I in no way mean to diminish their pride in their accomplishments or their rejection of the disability label — for themselves. But by allowing this group to become the face of the "autism rights movement" (another word for neurodiversity), they are grossly misrepresenting the autism population. Dr. Wachtel estimates that "less than five percent" of diagnosed autistics have the linguistic and cognitive skills to participate in this movement. "Most are not going to grow up to be Temple Grandin," she adds, referring to the famous autistic author and doctorate in animal science. On the contrary, Dr. Wachtel believes the average autistic will never go to college or live independently, and instead will struggle his entire life with the communication and social deficits that define the disorder — which makes sense to me, given Jonah's level of functioning. Although his score on the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) places him just on the mild side of "moderate," a recent assessment concluded his expressive language is equivalent to that of a two-year-old. He has no interest in his peers or siblings, and our house is a virtual firetrap because we had to install tamper-proof locks on every door and window to keep Jonah from escaping down to the busy road at the base of our driveway. Still, I thank God every day, because I know it could be so much worse.

There is one thing, however, which has been shown to dramatically improve the outlook for autistic children — early intervention. Some studies have shown that more than half of autistic preschoolers enrolled in early intervention programs are mainstreamed by kindergarten. Other studies have attributed significant increases in I.Q. and verbal skills to early intervention.

This is where neurodiversity is most dangerous — in the idea that early intervention should be eschewed as a rejection of our children's differences. Cohen laments, "Our society has latched on to this . . . idea that we have to do something, and we have to do it fast. Organizations push for earlier and earlier detection. Pediatricians have been given new guidelines for screening children as young as twelve months for developmental delays. The suggestion is clear: A child with delays is unacceptable."

But there's an enormous difference between unconditional acceptance and unconditional love, one that has been completely overlooked by the neurodiversity movement. I love Jonah just as much and just as unconditionally as I love my four typically developing kids. But I would argue that no parents accept their kids unconditionally, typical or not. From the moment of conception, we play classical music in utero in an attempt to make our babies smarter, and the efforts escalate from there: Baby Einstein videos, language immersion playgroups, flash cards — and that's not including the countless ways we socially teach our kids to share, take turns, speak politely and behave appropriately and responsibly. All children come into this world needing an education, some more structured and intensive than others, and denying an autistic child the therapy he needs under the guise of unconditional acceptance only hurts him. After all, isn't our goal as parents the same for all our kids, no matter what issues they may have — to help them reach their potential, and to maximize the number of options they will have as adults? I don't care if Jonah lives at home his entire life — as long as it's because that's his preference, not because he has no other choices.

But, in all likelihood, Jonah's only other choice will be a residential facility, and that will end up being a decision his father and I will have to make, not him. Because autism is not a discipline problem. It's not a media circus, or a metaphor, or its very own culture. Autism is a disability. It is an epidemic. And it is everyone's problem. Even if your own children aren't on the autism spectrum, consider the risks to the children not yet born you will love over the course of your life: nieces and nephews, grandchildren. Right now, one out of 150 children is diagnosed with autism — for boys, who comprise 80% of the autistic population, the risk jumps to one in ninety. In other words, given relatively stable demographic and educational patterns, a boy born tomorrow is three times more likely to be diagnosed with autism than he is to attend an Ivy League university. An athletic scholarship is less likely to lie in this boy's future than the desperate cycle of interventions and therapies, medications and educational placements that make up life for the millions of families supporting autistic children. And the lifetime cost of caring for those children ranges from $3.5 to $5 million per child.

But I'm optimistic that, by the time my children are old enough to have kids of their own, it won't be such a crapshoot. As Irva Hertz-Piccotto, one of the authors of the U.C. Davis study, concluded, "It's time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California . . . research should shift from genetics, to the host of chemicals and infectious microbes in the environment that are likely at the root of changes in the neurodevelopment of California's children." This is as loud a call to action as I've heard from the scientific community in the eight years since Jonah was diagnosed. I can only hope that, now, the vitriol directed against parents who express concerns about potential environmental triggers — yes, including vaccines — will cease, and people will begin to recognize that, as we fight against the rising tide of autism that, as Dr. Piccotto notes, "shows no sign of abating," there is no room for us versus them. There must be only us.