It’s so tempting to get riled up by the Mommy Wars, isn’t it? The Time magazine cover story about extreme parenting, Are You Mom Enough?, featuring a beautiful mother in skinny jeans nursing her preschool-aged son, is infamous by now. It made me, along with the rest of the Internet, explode with righteous indignation. Mom enough? How dare they! This isn't a contest! But, wait ... what if it is? And I don't even own skinny jeans!

Sounds counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? When I was dealing with depression and anxiety several years ago, I couldn’t imagine throwing a kid into the mix. A baby would have upset my busy schedule of Golden Girls reruns and napping. Of course, plenty of moms suffer from mental health issues, especially post-partum. And it turns out that these women actually want to spend more time with their babies—to a detrimental degree.

I'm going on vacation tomorrow (hello, Bahamas!). I'm excited. I'm excited even though my "tankini" bathing suit from Target may make me look pregnant, and I'm excited even though I have absolutely no idea if I'll be able to go without Facebook for five days straight. In fact, there's just one catch: I'm going without Andrew.

We've been in a gigantic takeout rut for the past couple of weeks: eggplant subs, Chipotle burritos, expensive sushi that we have no business buying on a Tuesday night. Finally, over the weekend, we got the chance to go to the supermarket—I love you, Burlington Market Basket!—to stock up. Check out this ultra-easy salad-and-enchilada dinner that I made on a (gasp!) weeknight.

I have a theory about finding decent men. Basically, a good guy should be like a good purse: Stylish, well-built, and able to handle your baggage. If only finding good friends were so simple.

Sometimes you stumble upon a column, or a blog, and instantly relate to the writer. You might not know her, but you find yourself following the threads of her life just the same—feeling like you’ve just met her for drinks even though you might have only read her latest article. Can you relate? (Or do I sound like Single White Female?) Anyway, that’s how I feel about Erin Zammett Ruddy.

There’s lots of parenting stuff floating around in the world telling you how to be awesome. Cheery websites, books, glossy magazines, people who Tweet like rabid gerbils offering well-meaning (or snotty!) advice on how to be a loving, healthy, functional parent. Today I’m here to tell you how to be a crappy one. Moreover, I’m here to tell you that every once in awhile, it’s OK to be one. It’s natural. Some days, you just need to give yourself a big fat F. For furry. Like my legs.

On Saturday, I took Andrew to the Burlington Mall. Poor kid tagged along while I bolted through store after store looking for an outfit to wear to a friend's baby shower. (Note: Lord & Taylor has wider aisles than Macy's and is therefore much more hospitable to strollers.) After overpaying for a bunch of Michael Kors tunics that ended up making me look like a hot-air balloon, Andy and I retired to the food court. And that's where it happened: My toddler was approached by a modeling scout.

Guilty secret: I love Slate's Dear Prudence. If Miss Manners and The National Enquirer had a baby, it'd be Prudie. I chortle at the tawdry tales of blackmailed strippers, drunken cube-mates, and flatulent beaus. But today's question didn't make me laugh.

A new study of tenure-track professors suggests that men in academia use their paternity leave to work (finishing articles, conducting research, and so forth) while women, surprise surprise, spend their time doing the bulk of child care because we're wired that way. This study, conducted by a father-son team of professors, Steven E. Rhoads and Christopher H. Rhoads, also suggests that paternal leave be restricted so dads don't take advantage of the time and use it for things like work.

This advice is not based on science. It's rooted solely in my own hard-won experience, so take from it what you will. I am too stingy to pay lots of money for exotic makeup, too short to pull off anything fashion-forward, and usually too busy to dry my hair. At heart, I prefer pants with elastic waists and beauty that comes in a bottle from CVS. Oh, sure, I read all the magazines. I look at the pictures. I follow sartorially savvy people on Pinterest. And then I run to the GAP to search for a pair of jeans that don't make me look like a linebacker for the Patriots. If you are anything like me, read on.

When your kid is critiqued, do you take it personally? Hearing criticisms about your child is a punch to the gut. I made that kid, you think; did I make that problem?

When I had Andrew, against my better judgment, I felt like I was clinging to islands. If you read this book, or adhere to this sleep method, or buy this brand – well, hey, middle-class mom who puts her baby first, congratulations. You’ll have done all you could. Maybe your spawn will grow up to be a doctor or maybe he’ll be a serial killer, but goddamnit—you made your own purees, so you did all you were able. And with this very nice pastel blender!

Hello! Thanks to those of you who emailed words of encouragement about my bout with norovirus. Thankfully, I've emerged from the abyss, healthy and maybe a couple of pounds lighter. In fact, I'm thinking about food again: specifically, how to get kids to eat it. I came across a reassuring, easily scannable how-to guide that makes a lot of sense.

Oh, unhappy day: Norovirus is on the rise here in Massachusetts, and I think that my abode has been afflicted. (For those of you unfamiliar with norovirus, it's an intense stomach bug that makes you pray for the sweet release of death while curled helplessly around your toilet like a drunken spring breaker.) Andy was hit first, then me, then Brian. Andy is now better, but we're not. When both parents are sick, what's a family to do? It's easy to feel neglectful. Right now our house could star in an episode of Hoarders.

So I returned to my painful old lover, yoga, over the weekend. It had been three years, and my jeans told me that it was time. Getting in shape was one of my new year's resolutions, and this seemed like just the way to ease into a healthier lifestyle. So I enrolled in an introductory six-week class at my neighborhood yoga spot, Black Crow. The class is geared toward people who want to start slow. Initially, I contemplated just dropping in on a "regular" class, but I'd tried that before and was extremely intimidated, which meant that I went once and never returned. I live in fear of yoga classes where everyone resembles lithe pretzels and I look like the Incredible Hulk, panting for air in an ill-fitting tank top. So an intro class it was.

Did any of you see the study that came out earlier this week about how babies learn to talk? They don’t learn to speak simply by hearing sounds. It turns out that they—just like George Bush—prefer to read lips.

I have plenty of adult resolutions, too ... lose 10 pounds, actually go to the gym (or, uh, sign up for a gym), read more books and play less Words With Friends. But I also have a separate little spiral-bound notebook filled with parenting resolutions and ideas. I'm trying to make them simple enough to actually stick (I think it's a bit too late to teach Andy baby sign-language, sadly). I came up with 10, and hopefully I'll actually do 'em. Wish me luck. And happy new year!! Remember, if your kids are acting up, champagne tastes just as elegant in a sippy cup.

Yesterday one of the most e-mailed stories on Boston.com was a treasured column from parenting writer Barbara Meltz, who shared discipline strategies from pre-school teachers. Not everyone is cut out to be a teacher. These super-humans possess endless patience, a boundless well of empathy, an enviable resistance to germs, and perhaps a closet yen for alcohol. (I’m kidding about that last one.)

Recently Pfizer has been the target of lawsuits from parents claiming that Zoloft caused birth defects. Not long ago, the Globe did a piece examining the (small but scary) links between anti-depressants and autism. It’s a subject close to my heart and even closer to my brain. Since 2006, I’ve taken Zoloft to control my anxiety. In 2009, I stopped taking it to get pregnant. I had to decide which was more important: My own mental health, or the potential safety of my unborn baby.

Lately a lot has been written in the local—OK, universal—blogosphere about over-parenting. Call it what you want: Helicopter parenting. Tiger mothering. Stroller warring. Downright insanity. It’s nothing new; parents have hovered and pecked and asked “is that too big in the crotch?” in department store dressing rooms since the dawn of time.

Want to do something relaxing for yourself around the holidays? Babysit a friend’s kid for the night. No, I’m serious.

Thank you, Beth Teitell, for pulling the lid off an issue that is close to my heart: loading the dishwasher. You see, I’m an American Studies major. A “creative type.” The sort of person who doesn’t think dishwasher-loading should be a game of Tetris.

My friend Amy’s baby shower was yesterday. The host requested that Amy’s friends bring a favorite book for the baby—and no other gifts. Relief! I wanted to buy something that I knew she’d want and need, but sometimes it’s tough, even when parents register. If you’re anything like me, you wait ‘til the last minute, everything from the registry’s taken, and the only things left are $2 plastic nipples and a rogue lampshade. So I consulted party-hardened friends and came up with what I hope is a helpful guide to purchasing gifts for showers and kids’ parties. Please feel free to chime in with your own suggestions.

I just finished Joan Didion's Blue Nights. The book is about the drawn-out death of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, at the age of 39 after a battery of arcane physical problems that included a cerebral hemorrhage and pancreatitis. Articles written in the run-up to the book’s release have suggested that Quintana was also weakened by alcohol and mental-health problems, but one thing is for certain: She died very young.

The story has additional gravitas because Didion’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly as well. He had a fatal heart attack after returning home from visiting his only daughter in the hospital. Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking chronicled her emotions—meticulously, deliberately—in the year following his death. The book stopped just short of addressing the subsequent death of Quintana.

This book does that. Sort of.

It seems morally wrong, inept and cruel, to critique an elegy. Mourning should be immune. But Didion is a public figure who wrote a book about her child, and her thoughts aren’t private—even as she remains frustratingly detached reflecting upon her daughter’s life.

I always found Didion’s writing a bit smug and above-it-all, but I also loved the fact that she existed. She lived a life that would make any writer swoon: Working for Vogue in the 1960s, glamorous screenwriting assignments, essays that took her to foreign lands, drinks on the lawless edge of Malibu, surrounded by beautiful people doing beautiful things, discussing ideas and movies and books over strong cocktails framed by the Pacific.

I appreciated her talent—and I idolized the life that she embodied. She was like her brother-in-law, Dominick Dunne, another guilty pleasure. But her name-dropping was rooted in something loftier than social climbing because she’d so long dwelled in the pantheon of Writers Beyond Fault, like Susan Sontag and Joyce Carol Oates and Pauline Kael. But Dunne’s name-dropping was endearing, too, because he imparted the gleeful sense that he couldn’t believe he’d landed the invite. For Didion, it seems that having just the right friends a phone call away was as expected as the Sunday New York Times delivered by a doorman. She was a cool customer, as she acknowledged in Magical Thinking. She is not an easily sympathetic figure. She is not especially endearing.

So I shouldn’t have expected a mess. Didion is not known for emoting. Her restrained cadences keep the reader at an arm’s length. We see Quintana in well-crafted snapshots: adopted at birth, worrying about nightmares, frolicking in the Malibu surf, feasting in fancy hotels, kneeling on her wedding day in red-soled Christian Louboutins. But we never learn what drove her demons. There is no dialogue. There is no climax. There is no breakdown. There is no pity. There is only the fleeting sense that closure is somewhere around the corner.

I shut the book feeling as if I’d read an X-ray, not a memoir. She didn’t cry; she composed. Each sentence was stitched as delicately as a surgery. I wanted more.

Why did I want more? Because, I believe, lurking deep within the heart of any parent is the fear that their child will die. I wondered how I’d feel if Andrew died. How could I not? I imagined a fleshy toddler with tubes snaking in and out of his veins. Just the thought made my throat tighten. Did I want Joan Didion to cry too? I guess I did.

But. As much as I didn’t care for Didion’s remote emoting, it made me think. Why do we expect parents to behave messily—outrageously—fiercely—when it comes to their own children? Maybe because so much parenting writing, or any writing today, really, depends upon the extreme. So many exclamation points, must-dos, shortcuts. “Ten Moms to Avoid on the Playground!” “Is Your Child Driving You Crazy?” “Make A Nutritious Dinner in 15 Minutes Flat!” But having a child and protecting that child and, if worse comes to worst, mourning that child, is the one instance in which you can behave outrageously. It’s one instance where exclamation points and tears and urgency are expected. Devotion is beyond reproach. Unconditional love for a child, whatever form that love takes, is part of the human condition. It is not cheap; it is primal.

Yet Joan Didion’s career, spanning more than 40 years, thrived in a period long before TMZ and Twitter and instant emotional access and its accompanying worst-case voyeurism; a time when long-form essays defined eras while also creating them. She has always enjoyed the luxury of understatement, and at 75, why should she modify her style to comply to the modern culture of grief?

If today’s culture of grief is a gaping wound, Didion’s culture of grief is a slow, stinging bleed. Subtle pain is not for 30-second sound bites and 140-word characters. Real life is loneliness at 3 in the morning; real life is the chilly loss of fall to winter; real life is walking into an empty apartment at sunset and shutting the door.

And herein lies Didion’s frustrating genius. I closed the book feeling empty. Only later did I realize that there is no language for death. It is a void. Didion mourned not understanding her daughter. I mourned for her not letting us understand her, either.

So I began to wonder if I would ever truly understand my own son, or if someday Andrew’s childhood would also fade into stitched together memories—snapshots of a wedding, a sunny day, the sole of a shoe. I mourned for Andrew, even as he slept in the next room.

She had produced the desired effect.