So was his 12-year-old sister, and her 12-year-old friend.

The grief of losing a mother and a sister to murder is unimaginable to me.

But it’s possible that what Tony Yarbough is going through now is even worse.

He’s in jail.

For the murders of his mother and his sister.

Tony Yarbough is innocent. A slight, soft-spoken young African-American man, Tony Yarbough was not given a fair trial. He wakes up and goes to sleep every night behind bars. Even though he committed no crime.

He’s being held in Attica Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York.

Two years ago a man named Eric Barden went to see my brother, one of New York City’s top criminal defense lawyers. My brother tried to brush him off. Barden persisted, asking him simply to review the transcripts of Tony’s trial.

As he read the transcripts, my brother, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, started getting angry:

“What I read was astounding: Tony was convicted in 1994 of murdering his mother, his 12-year-old sister and another 12-year-old girl on the slimmest of evidence, a rehearsed, contradictory statement from his 15-year-old co-defendant who had been convicted of the same murders based on a confession he gave after hours of interrogation without an adult present. No physical evidence, no motive, no murder weapon, and no investigation of a far more believable alternative theory (Tony’s mother was a drug addict and had been threatened at knifepoint the night of the murders by a junkie she had ripped off). Worst of all, Tony’s lawyers failed to pursue the fact that the physical evidence showed the murders took place hours earlier than the co-defendant claimed, when both boys had an alibi the DA did not challenge. It did not take much more than reading the transcript to see that Tony was innocent and desperately needed legal assistance. But Eric—who turned out to be Tony’s cellmate in Attica—also gave me a letter from the co-defendant to Tony’s aunt recanting his testimony and explaining how the police set the boys up.”

My brother filed a motion to set aside the verdict for Tony last summer. The DA opposed the motion, but agreed to some limited DNA testing. In the motion papers and subsequent requests, my brother asked the judge for resources—they need a private investigator, a forensic pathologist and a crime scene expert. The court has ignored those requests. The need for a private investigator is particularly acute as my brother believes the crime can be solved and that Tony is unlikely to be freed unless the real killers are caught.

What kind of justice system is this?

Why would we start a witch hunt against an 18-year-old with no prior record, no motive for murder, and no evidence against him, and put him behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit?

I’m saddened and sickened by Tony’s story.

I’m saddened and sickened by the racism and sexual orientation discrimination that persists in this country and by the way young black men are often treated as guilty when they have done nothing wrong, as if being young, black, and male is enough of a reason for the white “justice” system to put you behind bars.

More information can be found here. Bottom line: We need to get Tony Yarbough out of Attica. We need to find the real criminals who killed his family. DA, are you listening? Stop perpetuating this cruel cover up that has robbed a young man of his freedom and his life. Reopen Tony Yarbough’s case. We have a black president. This isn’t the 1950s. Everyone in America has the right to a fair trial.

Related posts:
When Your Husband is in Jail
I Go to Jail
Crime at the Co-op
A New Mom’s Story of Stealing

Since we keep our house so cold, I’m often surprised at how comfortable Leone is in her birthday suit.

The other parents didn’t flinch, even when Leone insisted on doffing the diaper. They seemed to think the baby, with her Buddha belly pooching over her legs, was as cute as I did.

In a different crowd I think the response would be different.

I was hoping readers would weigh in:

Do your kids like to be naked? Do you discourage nakedness or are you okay with letting them tromp around in the buff?

“Never,” I tell her.

I’m lying.

The gimlet my husband and I shared in a fancy Italian restaurant to try Philip Marlowe’s favorite drink was before I knew I was pregnant. But I did not mention the sip or two of red wine I have at dinner almost every night.

Every pregnant woman in America knows she’s not supposed to drink. Drinking can cause an array of problems for the fetus, from fetal alcohol syndrome to learning disabilities to birth defects that can occur in the heart, kidneys, lungs, eyes, ears, and bones. Michael Dorris’s heartbreaking memoir, The Broken Cord, about adopting a child born with fetal alcohol syndrome shows just how devastating alcohol during pregnancy can be.

But it turns out that some of our assumptions (and fears) about pregnancy and alcohol are culturally based.

When I was eight months pregnant my husband and I traveled to Paris. “They won’t let you on the plane,” my mother-in-law fretted. I waddled down the aisle in a red sundress. Three different stewardesses insisted I put a pillow between the seat belt and my abdomen, scolding me in clipped French when I refused. Other than that, though, the flight overseas to attend a friend’s graduation passed without incident.

François was graduating from one of France’s finest business schools. Tall, lean, and fair, François and I had met when an acute attack of appendicitis sent him to Cambridge City Hospital. Alone in a hospital room in a city whose language he could barely understand, François bore his illness stoically. I visited him every day. My concern for this stranger, the son of the brother of a colleague of my mother’s, transformed into a deep friendship that has continued for more than ten years, despite language, culture, and religious differences.

After the ceremony at Versailles, there was a celebration in Sézanne, a small walled town in Champagne, at François’s family’s ancestral home, which was built in 1610. François’s father ushered us in arms wide in welcome. Before the other guests arrived, Mr. G showed us one of the house’s many secrets—an underground wine cellar. He explained that during World War II the cellars, which formed a labyrinthine underground network of tunnels, were used to hide Jews from the Nazis.

In a dank dark corner of the cellar were two shelves each containing a handful of fine wines: one shelf for François and one for his younger brother. On one shelf, Mr. G found what he was looking for: a bottle of expensive champagne that he had bought 25 years before with the intention of opening when his infant son did something especially worth celebrating.

We toasted Francois’s graduation with that twenty-five-year-old bottle of fine wine. François’s family urged that I drink—insisting that a really good wine (“Un bon vin”) would be good for the baby. Cheap table wine might cause fetal brain damage but not un bon vin. Have another glass! What, you haven’t finished that one yet? I took modest sips. Two weeks later I gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Not long after, James and I bought an expensive wine bottled in our daughter’s birth year.

When Hesperus graduates from college we plan to open the bottle. We’ll offer the first glass to François.

Do you think it’s okay to have a sip of wine at dinner or a glass of “un bon vin” while you’re pregnant? Do you collect fine wine to share with your children when they become adults?

….To step into the authenticity of who you are when you are a closeted gay woman—a mother to three girls whom you worship—married to a man you love and respect, is a complicated web of paradoxes.

This excerpt is from Micki Grimland’s “Living The Authentic Life,” one of the many hard-hitting, poignant, confusing, and often sexy real-life stories in Candace Walsh’s new book, Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write About Leaving Men For Women, which was just published by Seal Press.

Candace Walsh is the features editor at Mothering magazine. She also edited Ask Me About My Divorce, and she writes the popular blog A La Mama.

I’m thrilled Mothering Outside the Lines is part of the book’s blog tour. Before I could even crack the cover, a friend (who left her husband several years ago after she realized she was a lesbian) snatched my copy away from me.

I asked Candace about her life, her work at Mothering, and Dear John, I Love Jane.

JM: How did you first get started at Mothering magazine?

CW: It was so serendipitous. My friend Ana June was working at Mothering in the production department, and she passed along a job opportunity back in 2005: Mothering was looking for someone to fill orders for back issues and other items in their Mothering shop. My daughter was three and my son was almost one; I wasn’t thinking I could actually work somewhere without having to put my kids in daycare, which was not an attractive idea to me at the time. However, this gig would let me bring my kids to work, and I definitely felt in alignment with Mothering’s values. It was a great opportunity, so I sent a cover letter and my resume. Peggy and I met and hit it off. She loved that I had lots of editorial experience from my years as an editor and freelance writer in Manhattan, and so she hired me. When an editorial position opened up, I was promoted.

JM: What do you like best about your job?

CW: I love reading submissions. I love to read, and I love reading about big picture Mothering topics as well as the tender, honest and powerful personal essays that come in on a daily basis. I’m also a maven—so I love reviewing products.

JM: What’s the hardest part about your job?

CW: The hardest part is doing justice to the sheer volume of submissions that do come in. I wish I could be more communicative, that I could coach writers more, but I just don’t have enough minutes to do that and also fulfill my most pressing responsibilities.

Candace Walsh at a reading of her new book, Dear John, I Love Jane

JM: How did you get the idea to compile Dear John, I Love Jane?

CW: Well, when I was freshly separated and on the path of exploring my interest in pursuing a same-sex relationship, I didn’t feel like there were a lot of resources out there for women like me. I enjoyed anthologies that existed, but they were ten to twenty years old, and didn’t really speak to my experience as much as I had hoped they would. I wondered if there were other women out there with stories like mine—but further along, and I wanted to read those stories! So I wrote up a call for submissions. The response was strong.

JM: How common is it for women in America to leave their husbands for women?!

CW: I don’t think there are any statistics at this point that I could cite. As much as I wish that nobody ever got divorced, about half of all marriages end in divorce for a multitude of valid reasons, and many women are deciding to follow up on their pull toward a same-sex relationship.

JM: What are you hoping readers will learn from Dear John, I Love Jane?

CW: I see it as a resource for women who find themselves in this unique situation. I also see it as a model for women to notice how they might be eliding their own needs and not nurturing themselves, whether that has to do with making time to be creative, or for solitude, or for spirituality, or time to pursue a hobby.

Like it or not, a significant percentage of marriages, despite the best of intentions, do end in divorce. That’s just the way it is, though it’s not what anyone would prefer. So how do you help the parents to heal, to make the best of it, and how do you support them in being there for their children while also taking good care of themselves? Would you rather have a parent who got divorced and then remained depressed and flattened for the rest of their life, or a parent who used the crisis as an opportunity to grow into a better, happier, braver, more resilient person?

Many of the women who sent stories to DJILJ had already ended their last relationships with men before they fell in love with women. Some are still married, struggling with feelings they haven’t acted on—and may not act on. Some have decided to have open relationships. (That wasn’t an option for me, but far be it for me to judge when everyone involved seems content with the arrangement.)

When people get divorced, you generally don’t probe into the reasons and then judge the heck out of them. You accept it and support your loved ones as best you can. The cliche of husbands leaving their wives for younger women is not challenged, although it is a source of eye-rolling. People get divorced due to incompatibility, stubbornness, the inability to forgive, abuse both verbal and physical, and betrayal … the list goes on. Now there’s a new category—spouses leaving each other because one of them is gay. In the past, it would have been a secret kept, or something the straight spouse deliberately overlooked. Or, the divorce would have happened, but the gay element wouldn’t have been named.

It’s not so much that people are doing a new thing—it’s that it’s being done more truthfully, because there is more acceptance of people in same-sex relationships, and the need to conceal and deceive, to pass as straight, is not as great.

I often think of contributor Sheila Smith, who spent decades standing by her man even though she noticed after marriage that she had strong attractions toward women. Her husband left her for his much-younger female grad student. She stuck with her commitment, but her ex-husband didn’t—and because he left his wife for a younger woman, people’s eyes rolled but he wasn’t exactly run out of town on a rail. It seems so poignant that she made that sacrifice, yet received those results.

JM: Does the fact that the majority of readers of Mothering are in heterosexual relationships (at least for now), and you are very open about your divorce from your husband and current relationship with a woman, present you with any unique challenges?

CW: As someone who breastfed, co-slept, had midwife-attended natural childbirths (one at the hospital, one at home), doesn’t vaccinate, and strives to cook healthy meals from local, organic food … I relate to Mothering’s values and its readers very personally. I also relate to Mothering’s heterosexual readers because I identified as heterosexual for most of my adult life, and was married to the father of my kids for seven years. I also relate to the divorced and single moms, of which there are many, and the queer mamas too, as I am now in a committed same-sex relationship. I grew up in a born-again Christian family and thought it was wrong to be gay until I was eighteen. So I relate to people who feel strongly in that direction—I used to feel the same way, and I understand the thinking behind it. It clearly doesn’t resonate for me anymore, but it’s not incomprehensible.

I can’t really say that it presents me with challenges. Mothering is about authentic parenting, and I am a very authentic person, given that I’m not pretending to be happy in a marriage that was unsustainable, or valuing the status quo over what feeds my soul and animates my life. When a parent is living his or her own truth, while esteeming and being truly present for their children, that is a beautiful gift for a child to witness.

I can’t imagine being closeted when I have such an otherwise transparent relationship with Mothering’s readers in my blog and editorially. Who would that benefit, and how?

JM: Any parting thoughts?

CW: When we were being interviewed for Globe and Mail, Laura André, my co-editor and partner, explained that, “We didn’t want to glamorize or promote infidelity in any way. We thought of the book as a resource for women who were finding themselves in this situation. I would advise any woman about to embark on a same-sex relationship to make sure that her previous relationship was cleaned up, and to live with integrity, which means being respectful to your current or former spouse or boyfriend, as well as to one’s self.”

Readers, is this a book you’d be interested in? Have you ever been in a same-sex relationship or considered being in one? I’m eager to read your comments … On the subject of comments, a huge thank you to everyone who participated in the blog give-away last week. I’m reading all of the comments and will be announcing the winners (who will be chosen at random) this Friday. And I’ll also be filling you in soon on my poison oak disaster (my eye has been swollen shut, which is why I was off-line last week). So please check back soon!

“It’s nothing to worry about,” his teacher was quick to say into the machine. “I just wanted to let you know that your son’s been identified as a kiddo who needs extra help with reading.”

Etani, though he loves to be read to and has a prodigious vocabulary, has really been struggling with learning to read.

We’re a family of readers. James is reading Kafka’s short stories now; Athena is reading the Warrior series and the Sisters Grimm; Hesperus, who has read the Twilight series three times, plows through so many books from the library that I can’t keep up; and I’m reading Wendy Mogul’s brand new The Blessings of a B Minus, Wicked, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

But Etani has been pretty adamant he doesn’t want to ever learn to read.

James and I are trying not to panic.

Two of James’s good friends were both reluctant readers.

One has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and teaches metaphysics. The other is the director of an International Baccalaureate school.

They are both among the smartest people we know.

But I am worried. What if my son never learns to read? Last year the teacher told us he could recognize a lot of words but he lacked confidence. He gets frustrated and impatient whenever we try to teach him anything about word recognition or reading. I worry that struggling with reading is having a negative effect on his self-esteem. I worry there will be a stigma associated with being identified as a “Title One kid.”

It’s counterproductive to compare but I can’t help thinking about how James taught himself to read when he was three, how Athena could write her name before she turned two, how my brother’s son (who’s two days younger than Etani but a head taller and a grade level above him in school) is such a good reader that he’s reading the Harry Potter books to himself, how Etani’s friend Moshe (who’s just two weeks older) reads English and Hebrew with ease.

Me: Jennifer, repeat after me: Every child develops at his own pace.

Myself: But–

Me: Every child develops at his own pace. Just keep reading to him and modeling how much you love books. Your son will be fine. When he’s ready, he’ll learn to read.

Will he? Do you know any reluctant readers? Were you a reluctant reader yourself? Do you have children who are struggling with reading or other aspects of school?

“Then I really wanted a boy,” my mother laughed. The chef added a heaping portion of white spaghetti to the tofu. “And I had another boy.”

The chef flipped the tofu dish onto my plate and shot a mass of oil onto the grill. At a nearby table I heard the squeal of delighted customers. Their chef was hurling shrimp directly into their open mouths. Although there was space for ten others, the rest of our table was empty.

“Then,” my mother continued, “I REALLY wanted a boy.”

Something in the way she said this—her emphasis on the word really and her forced exuberance perhaps—made me suspect she wasn’t really telling the truth.

I looked down at the tofu and spaghetti on my plate. This restaurant had been my mother’s idea. “And I had a boy!” she exclaimed.

Okay, boys are great. I like boys. I’ve always liked boys. But does anyone really want three of the same gender in a row?

“Then,” my mother paused for a moment and pointed at me, “I really wanted a girl.” Her voice was full of remembering how much she wanted me to be a girl. “And I had you.”

When I was pregnant for the first time, I really wanted a healthy baby. Forget counting fingers and toes. If some of those were missing, I knew I wouldn’t care. The bigger issues worried me: mental retardation, crippling physical ailments, heart problems, cerebral palsy. Abortion was out of the question and I knew I would try to love any baby we had, but I secretly feared I would not be a good parent to a baby with special needs.

I didn’t want a boy or a girl per se, I wanted a living breathing baby. Even though I was young and healthy and strong I was terrified something would go wrong. We kept a journal to the baby (we called it Dear Chickpea) and every time I wrote an entry I worried that the baby might die before he was old enough to read about the love we felt for him.

Like some Jewish people, I was too superstitious to have a baby shower or to buy anything in advance except one tiny outfit. No crib. No changing table. No clothes.

So when I was eight and a half months pregnant and the doctor looked at my small measurements and ordered an immediate sonogram, I panicked. She mumbled something about wanting to rule out “inter-uterine growth retardation.” Then she clicked her pen closed and walked out of the room.

The sonogram confirmed that the baby was fine but my nerves were raw. Then, ten days before my due date and more than three weeks before I expected her—I was sure my firstborn would be late—I was flying home on my bicycle over jagged potholes and terrific bumps and my water broke. Twenty-two hours later my oldest daughter was born.

When it was clear that she was strong and healthy I finally had the luxury of admitting that I had been lying to myself. I had waited my whole life to have a daughter! I was so happy she was a girl! Even though I never admitted it out loud to anyone, I had really wanted a girl baby all along.

Readers, do you think the gender of your baby matters? If you have children, did you want a boy or a girl when you had your first child and beyond? If you don’t have children, do you want to have sons or daughters?

This afternoon my friend fastened the chin strap of Leone’s bicycle helmet. Though Leone fidgeted and tried to push the helmet off, she didn’t cry.

“You’re such a good baby!” my friend cooed.

Leone is amenable to change, good-natured, smiley, patient, and generally even-tempered.

For the most part, she’s been an easy baby. Still, I don’t like to think of any of her baby personality traits as “good.”

Here’s why: If being amenable to change, good-natured, smiley, and generally even-tempered means you’re a “good” baby, where does that leave babies who aren’t so easygoing?

Athena, my second born, hated being a baby.

For the first nine months of her life she nursed, slept, or … fussed.

Big Sister Athena (9 years old) carries Baby Sister Leone (9 months old)

“Jennifer,” I remember a friend at our baby group saying once, “I’ve never seen the baby do anything but cry or nurse.”

His second born, meanwhile, happily (and silently) observed the world.

But Athena wasn’t a “bad” baby. She was just uncomfortable being a baby. Or maybe she had a tummy ache. Or maybe her older sister, just 19 months her senior, secretly squeezed her too hard when we weren’t looking. Or maybe, since we were going through a hard time after she was born, she was sensitive to the people around her and our stress levels were responsible for her “colic.” Or maybe we just thought she cried a lot because we had our hands full with a baby and a regressing toddler.

Since she didn’t talk then, it’s hard to know exactly why Athena was a little cry-y when she was a baby.

What I do know is that she wasn’t a “bad” baby. She was just as “good” a baby as any other baby. But not as easy.

All five of us feel very lucky to have such a good-natured creature in our lives who has been enjoying her babyhood. But I’ve been parenting long enough to realize that how she’ll feel about being a toddler is anyone’s guess.

“Leone,” I heard Hesperus say to her the other day. “When you learn to walk I hope you’ll be nice and easy, just like Athena was. Not difficult and willful like me and Etani. Okay?”

I was downstairs playing. I cowered behind the couch in the living room, trying to make myself as small as possible, trying to disappear.

She went back upstairs with the hairbrush. I didn’t see her spank my cousin but I heard him shrieking.

I’m not sure how old I was, maybe four? My parents did not hit me when I was a child and I felt confused and frightened by my aunt’s rage.

Before I had children, hitting a child seemed like a cruel, cowardly, and pathetic thing to do. I’d been babysitting my whole life and I never even considered hitting a child as an option.

In graduate school I would listen to Dr. Laura as I drove North on Buford Highway in Atlanta to the center where I taught English to Korean immigrants. I knew she was wrong when she would say a swat on the tush or a smack on the hand to teach a child a lesson was okay.

Then I had children of my own.

No one–not even the bully who taunted you so badly in fourth grade that you shoved him down the stairs–can push your buttons like your own offspring. The worst, for me, was when my oldest was two. One afternoon I found her upstairs jumping in her crib instead of napping. She and her friend who I was watching for the afternoon had sneaked a bag of Pirate Booty (a crunchy pseudo healthy snack food) upstairs and strewn it like confetti around the room. I was caring for a fussy new baby, my husband left for work before dawn and came home when the girls were already in bed. My firstborn had turned from an easy baby into a defiant, willful, and stubborn toddler and we had many long hours in front of us before bedtime. I recognized that I was at a breaking point. I scolded them sternly but decided to clean the Pirate Booty up later and take the kids out for a walk. I put the baby on my back and put the two older kids in the red wagon.

In the middle of the street, with a car coming, my daughter jumped out of the wagon.

It wasn’t even then. It was after Jess came to pick up her son and my daughter continued to misbehave that, in a rage that had been simmering all afternoon, I smacked her on the tush. Her eyes rounded with surprise. She started to cry. I cried harder than she did. I felt terrible. I didn’t believe in hitting children and–too immature to deal with my emotions in an appropriate way and to discipline my daughter with love and firmness–I hit her.

There’s an article published in today’s Time.com about a new study by an assistant professor at Tulane University, Catherine A. Taylor, about the negative consequences of spanking.

The study collected data from 2,481 mothers at their child’s birth, and then again at age 1, age 3 and age 5.

The study concluded that three-year-olds who were spanked more than a few times a month were 50 percent more likely to be aggressive at age five.

This makes a lot of sense to me. If you spank your child, you are modeling aggressive behavior, physically hurting them, using your superior force against them, and showing them that the most aggressive person wins. But according to the study, a majority of Americans, especially in the southern United States, condone corporeal punishment for children.

Many of the comments at Time.com reflect the bias in favor of spanking. One I found particularly disturbing is by Luiz. He writes:

Every time there is abusive behavior, the children must suffer some kind of physical punishment that reinforces automatic reaction and the creation of the right brain synapses. A physical stimulus is necessary for that! This does not mean applying heavy, brutal spanking or beating that leave bruises or worse. This means that to love is to apply a smaller punishment that burns enough to be remembered but is much smaller than the one given the real world (in a kind of “vaccine”). Yelling or offending is REALLY a MUCH WORSE punishment than spanking, and many times is remembered forever, while a spanking is usually forgotten in hours!

I think Luiz is wrong. And I’m saddened that so many parents wrote in to say things like, “we were spanked as kids and we spank our kids and it’s fine.”

This new study adds to a growing body of evidence that it’s not okay to hit your children.

I honestly understand the urge to spank in a way that I never did before I had children. But I still think it’s wrong and potentially very damaging. It’s hard for me to understand how people can defend physically hurting a child or think that it does not have long lasting negative consequences on a child’s self-esteem.

It’s been over 30 years but I still remember the fear I felt watching my aunt take that hairbrush upstairs to spank my cousin.

Click here for Tulane University’s press release about the study and here for a PDF of a Power Point presentation by the study’s main author.

What do you think? Is Luiz right and you need to punish your children’s bad behavior by inflicting a small amount of physical pain? Is it ever okay to spank your kids? Are you concerned about your children growing up to be overly aggressive? What are some effective ways you use to discipline your children? Join the discussion in the comment section below.

The babies smiled at each other.

“How much does she weigh?” The mom asked me.

“I don’t know,” I began. “We don’t–”

“She’s so tiny,” she interrupted.

“Tiny?”

“Well, maybe she just looks puny compared to MY baby,” she said. “He weighs fifteen pounds!”

Of all the adjectives I would use to describe Leone, “puny” isn’t one of them. She’s like a sumo wrestler with so many chins you can’t see her neck. She has chubby thighs and a Buddha belly. I don’t get it. Was it because she had a boy that this mom was sure her son was bigger than my daughter? The most bizarre part is that we weighed Leone at the Y a few weeks ago and she was fifteen pounds then so she probably actually weighs more now than the other mom’s baby.

“First time mom?” My friend Victoria, whose kids are 10 and 7, asked on the phone when I told her about it later that day. Etani was in the tub while Leone sat on my lap and watched him splash around. Athena was drawing, Hesperus at gymnastics.

“Uh huh.”

“That explains it!” Victoria cried. “You say–and think–all sorts of crazy things when you’re a new mom! You know that as well as anybody.”

I remember coming out of a restaurant with Hesperus in Atlanta when she was just a few weeks old and bumping into a new mom with a baby around the same age. We started comparing height and length and percentiles, as breathless and oblivious to anything but our own babies as teenagers in love, and as fierce in our comparison as if we were talking dick size not head circumference. My dad rolled his eyes and moved away from us. With ten years of hindsight, I realize now that my dad must have been embarrassed by the meaninglessness of our conversation.

I’ve been at this long enough that the puny remark shouldn’t have got my hackles up. But it did. I thrust Leone into the other mom’s arms.

“Here,” I said. “Hold her. She’s pretty hefty.”

Leone immediately started to fuss. Athena took her. She quieted right down in her sister’s arms.

Why do you think new moms act competitive with each other? Have you ever inadvertently insulted another mom’s baby? How do you respond when people you barely know say hurtful things? Should I have responded differently? I’m really looking forward to reading your thoughts in the comment section below.

Athena, 3; Etani, 8 months; Hesperus, 5

The vast majority of Americans still only have two children but there is a small subset of the population creating such large families that one Women’s Health writer suggests the craze for more children stems from an addiction to being pregnant. She argues that women become pregnant because they like being treated like rock stars and being in the limelight and she dubs women like me with more than two children “bumpaholics.”

(I don’t know about you but my experience being pregnant in America has not involved red carpet treatment strewn with rose petals and last time I checked having stretch marks, morning sickness, leg cramps, hemorrhoids, insomnia, and a myriad of other pregnancy side effects did not equate to achieving celebrity status, but a rant against the arguments in this unsubstantiated article—which was written by a writer I respect and consider a friend—is off the topic of today’s post).

Etani 3; Hesperus, 6; Athena 5

My kids: Why can’t we drive Mommy? We don’t want to walk/take the bus/bike today.

Me: Because we homo sapiens are going to pollute ourselves out of existence like the cyanobacteria! The polar ice caps are melting and polar bears are drowning and WE ARE NOT DRIVING NO MATTER WHAT!

A recent study by researchers at Oregon State University suggests that the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to have fewer children (or no children at all).

I worry about overpopulation.

I worry because I want my children to feel special and loved and cared for, and I want to be the best parent I can be for each of them, and my time feels pretty divided already (especially when everyone’s talking at once at dinner), and I wonder what will happen when I have to turn my attention to caring for a newborn.

I worry because, like so many others, our finances are not nearly as robust (read: we’re broke and money is a big concern) in this down economy as they should be to have a big family and I read things in magazines like “you should have six months of savings no matter what.” We don’t have six days of savings.

My son Etani, who just turned six, asks for another hug at bedtime. He smells warm and salty when I kiss that soft place on his neck a hundred times. “Goodnight Pineapple,” he whispers patting my stomach. “I love you.”

There are lots of legitimate arguments against having even one child. Our new baby isn’t here yet but already I know that our lives will be much richer and more meaningful when he or she is in it.

Etani, 6; Athena, 8; Hesperus, 10