Motherhood

The sober reality show has been a surprise hit for MTV, a channel that seemed one Jell-o shot away from a life-long coma, and heroines Catelynn, Maci, Farrah and Amber have graced the covers of tabloids all season long. (Maci's back with her baby daddy! The details behind Farrah's boyfriend's tragic demise! Exclusive photos from Catelynn and Tyler's tearful reunion with baby Carly!) Cynically speaking, the cast members of "Teen Mom" are nearly perfect lab specimens for a tabloid: They have youth, beauty and baby bumps. They also have exes, family drama, incarcerated parents, adorable toddlers -- and, frankly, they need money. The show has caught on not only with MTV's core teenage audience, but also with 20- and 30-something women. In an age when the American middle class is once again obsessed with perfectionism in parenting, some may be sucked in by the novelty of young mothers raising children with so few resources. Others are simply sucked in by the nonstop drama and soapiness.

These girls' high visibility upends history. Teen mothers were always shoved to the back of the frame, often literally sent away, and certainly rarely given the spotlight. And those stories that are told are incomplete: Too often, tales of teen parents start and stop when one is 16 and pregnant, and neglect to tell the story of what it's like to be 19 with a 3-year-old or 26 with a 10-year-old. "Teen Mom" goes further than most any show ever on television in documenting ordinary struggles of young parenthood.

This season alone, it showed us the ambivalence and embarrassment of Maci, a Tennessee girl from a middle-class family, as she asked her son's father, Ryan, for child support, and took us into a riveting meeting with their mediator, in which they bargained for time with their son while Maci wept. Catelynn and Tyler -- high school sweethearts from hard-drinking, hard-living parents who gave their daughter Carly up for adoption in hopes of creating a better life for her -- might represent one of the most sympathetic portrayals of birth parents ever committed to film. They're a graphic reminder that for the parents left behind, the grief doesn't end when the baby leaves the frame, even when it feels like the right decision. One of the season's most poignant moments was Tyler -- a tough teenage boy who had cried over pictures of his daughter alone in his bedroom, who had a father in jail, who kept promising his girlfriend they would be better parents to their own children someday -- sitting in a diner across from Brandon, the man who was what he most wanted to be: Carly's father. And rather than detail his own pain, Tyler, in a lovely moment of empathy, asked Brandon what he had sacrificed to be a parent.

Then there is the on-again, off-again couple Amber and Gary, who have become the id of the series, confirming the worst stereotypes about teen parents. This season we saw portly, passive-aggressive Gary toy with the idea of leaving volatile Amber for another teen mom he met in the diaper aisle at Walmart; we saw screaming fights, one of which concluded with Gary taking the sheets off the bed, another that included a car chase with the baby on board; we watched Amber moving in with her new boyfriend, fresh from work release in jail; and finally, we saw Amber, who has been taking martial arts classes, beat Gary and kick him down the stairs. But the most haunting moment came when we saw their little girl, Leah, witnessing yet another fight between her parents, and telling her mom to be quiet -- in just the same tone we've heard Amber use toward her all season long.

But if ever a documentary has been accused of distorting its subject matter, "Teen Mom" is it. The idea of tracking the experience of being a regular teen mom pretty much evaporates the second that mom is on the cover of OK! magazine. And the tabloid money does matter, in no small part, because one of the biggest arguments against teen parenting is that it creates poor families, and thus any realistic portrayal of teen parenthood must scrupulously follow the money: How much is it, and where is it coming from?

Three seasons in, it's easy to become distracted by niggling details that may or may not reflect how much impact the show has had on each family's personal finances and relationships: Why does Farrah spend so much time in the beauty shop? Why does she have a new Mac laptop? What make and model car are the girls driving? What part of town are they living in? I absolutely do not mean to imply that these girls, some of whom come from middle-class families, and all of whom support themselves to varying degrees through jobs and financial aid, are not entitled to support their families, or buy themselves hair cuts or computers. (Interestingly enough, the only mention we've seen of government assistance is when Farrah files for Social Security from her daughter's dead father, and when she receives aid for day care, due not to her income, but to her mother's domestic violence conviction). But if these families are meant to make a larger point about teen parents as a group, it profoundly matters to know not just if they are managing to survive, and eventually maybe thrive, but how. Yes, there are many different ways to succeed or fail as a teen parent, and very few have tried to ask the right questions. The answers can include school, family, jobs and good parenting. But once the options include "sell your family's story to a tabloid," you've pretty much polluted your sample.

Aside from the issue of who is paying for what, canny viewers may wonder just how much these families' characters and images have been shaped by producers at a painstakingly edited show. This season, Maci and Farrah have seemed the most realistic and complicated characters, while Amber and Gary have started to look downright villainous. And it may be worth asking why Catelynn and Tyler, the only couple to release their child, seem consistently the most sympathetic characters in the show. Also, one wonders if the very act of exposing their lives before a national audience might have made all concerned more likely to solve their problems in the offices of counselors, mediators and therapists, and participate in therapeutic retreats -- or to take it even further, to wonder whether many of those sessions would have happened at all without outside intervention.

Creator Morgan J. Freeman says he wants to capture these same girls and their families each year, not unlike Michael Apted's "Up" series, a landmark of documentary filmmaking, in which British schoolchildren from different social classes, born in 1964, have been filmed every seven years since the age of 7. It is a laudable goal, and 21 years after giving birth to my daughter at age 16, I would dearly love to see a series that depicts all of the different ways these stories can turn out. But putting aside the ethical dilemmas, it becomes valid to ask: What are you documenting? Has the series already passed the tipping point after which they are no longer capturing the lives of teen moms, and instead are looking at the lives of young celebrities who happen to have young children?

We saw this with "Jon and Kate Plus 8," which morphed gruesomely from a show about their family in which cameras happened to be present into a show about their family breaking up, thanks to the pressures of the cameras. The reality TV fame cycle is so well-established that one might speak of a series as having a half-life of sorts -- the amount of time it takes for the show to go from publicly documenting people's ordinary lives to documenting the private lives of public figures. In the case of "Jersey Shore," it seemed like a matter of weeks.

Each season, with "Teen Mom," it becomes more difficult to tease out the impact the show itself has had on the lives it depicts. After the episode in which Amber beat Gary aired, the producers were criticized for standing to the side during an incident of domestic violence (one also wonders if they would have done so had Gary been the one hitting Amber). But the most chilling moment was hearing Leah speak. Not merely because we could hear echoes of her mother's words in her own, but because by hearing her speak, it forced us to scroll back and replay all the earlier scenes we had witnessed thus far from her childhood, and realize that she was no longer an infant. She is a real girl, who is old enough to understand the trouble her family is in, and we are watching it. It makes me wonder if reality TV, in a way, might be creating a whole mini-soccer-team of Mary Kate and Ashleys (minus the extravagant amount of cash), children who literally begin their lives on TV and stay there throughout infancy, childhood and maybe young adulthood. The further this series goes on, the more difficult it will be to separate what it is telling us about the lives of teen mothers from what it is telling us about the lives of parents and children who live under public scrutiny.

 

Until recently, he's been shielded from that. Protected within the nest of family and close friends, Little Dude has always been considered charming, if shy; intensely bright, if overly focused. Our fourth child and our only son, my husband and I chalked up much of his quirky behavior to "boyishness." His interests, though surprising in their intensity, seemed typical in subject: "Thomas the Tank Engine," "Go Diego Go." The fact that he knew, at age 4, the name of every character in all six "Star Wars" movies evidenced to us an excellent attention span, a tremendous capacity for detail, and a budding interest in science. We did not think it signaled a disorder.

But there had always been developmental concerns. His vocabulary was enormous, but his speech was often unintelligible to most people. He mastered the use of various Wii remotes but could not take off his own shoes. He refused to toilet train. He reached sensory overload at places that delighted other children; we learned to avoid the zoo, children's museums and crowded playgrounds. Gradually, his life became more and more isolated.

When the diagnosis was made official -- congenital encephalopathy and Asperger syndrome -- it was more relief than surprise. By then, the diagnosis had become the all-access pass for occupational therapy, speech therapy and a school that would help him get ready for kindergarten despite the fact that he didn't use a toilet yet. The diagnosis made sense within the context of our family. Many traits that go hand-in-hand with Asperger -- anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder -- are rampant in our family tree. The more I read about Asperger, the more I saw these quirks in myself. When I asked the neurologist if he sees traits through generations, he said that often the child with Asperger is simply the tallest peak in a large mountain range.

After the diagnosis, I threw myself into research. I read a myriad of books, websites and articles, all with wildly differing viewpoints: Asperger is a disability or it is an evolutionary advantage; it is painfully isolating or it is blissfully freeing. The pieces that helped me most were written by young adults who had been identified with Asperger as children. Their stories of bullies, misunderstandings and systemic educational failure drove me to tears but gave me hope that if I read them all, understood them, I could somehow safeguard my son's happiness. In the first two weeks of preschool, confused about how a class walks in line, Little Dude was shoved four separate times.

Every night, I sit in Little Dude's room while he is falling asleep. I use that time to write, and to answer his worries, and to listen to him quietly repeat multiplication facts to himself. He asks me questions, like whether bears are real, and if bears are kept in cages, whether the cages are very, very safe. It was out of the blue, then, when he asked me if I wanted to know what's in his brain. At the time, I happened to have my laptop on. I typed it verbatim.

"I have a little doorknob on a little door that has 10,000 computers in it," he said. "There are even little doors that have more. I have this control panel with two levers. You pull the lever, and then I can think of something. So that's how my brain works.

"I count the ABC's and then I try to get the letters. So that's how I know the ABC's. And now I don't forget them anymore. I go ABC, DEFG, HIJK, LMNOP, QRS, TUV, WXY and Z. Now I know my ABC's, next time won't you germ with me."

He paused. I did not want him to stop. I wanted to know everything, because I think that knowing him will let me protect him. I am wrong, of course.

"Is that how you do math?" I asked, quietly. I was afraid to move his train of thought. "Do you do math with the levers?"

He shook his head no.

"This door called the Multiplication Center is almost as close as the library in my brain. It has one computer, and then I have four, and tomorrow I will have 16. And then I have these little flaps that you flip and you color them and see if you make some multiplication, the math, the worksheets."

He continued down the hallway of his mind.

"Down in my lab I think about germs. I think about Pull-Ups and I think about 'Star Wars,' Indiana Jones, Batman. Legos are in my lab.

"And guess what else? Next over there I got the attic. That attic is full of junk. There are beach balls and stuff everywhere, a lot of things in there. And I think people have played with them.

"I have a school place. This one is kind of like my classrooms, but mine is mixed up. It is upside down, kind of. I have the school Legos, they go right there, because I have this little shelf that we can put things, but we don't put things at the bottom."

He paused again. We breathed together in the darkness, silently. People with Asperger syndrome often experience the world as stressful, convoluted, upside down. Foreign. Alien. The author Tony Attwood theorizes that this feeling of being out of place, a difficulty with social integration and success, is why so many people with Asperger are attracted to science fiction.

None of these thoughts is of interest to Little Dude, so I keep them to myself. People with autism are said to have impaired Theory of Mind, or mind blindness: the inability to see things from a perspective other than one's own. Little Dude has a degree of that; he perceives other people's emotions but has difficulty understanding their intentions or motivations. When another 4-year-old chases him in play, Little Dude cannot imagine why someone is running at him. Instead of reveling in the game, he is terrified. For my son, the ability to understand other people's minds -- what they think, and why -- seems like a magic trick.

I know that listening to him like this can't necessarily save him. But it is a relief to me that, clearly, he knows his own mind.

Joslyn Gray is the mother of four children, including one with Asperger syndrome. She writes about parenting and chaos at the blog stark. raving. mad. mommy.

My heels clicked against the marble floor as I passed offices and small clusters of lawyers waiting outside courtrooms. Everything echoes in these places -- voices bounce off walls and repeat themselves over and over again, traveling with you as you move down corridors lined with paintings of stern-faced judges and old presidents. Time feels heavy, the minutes weighted down by grief and anxiety.

I found my client sitting on one of the church pews that line the walls. In a country careful to separate state and religious matters, I've always found it amusing that pews make up most of the public seating in courthouses. I suppose the government didn't want churches to have a monopoly on uncomfortable furniture. My client smiled and stood when he saw me. Tall and lanky, he has the ruddy, windblown complexion of someone who spends most of his time outdoors. He'd worn dark blue Dockers and a plain white dress shirt -- sharp creases neatly pressed along the sleeves -- but there wasn't much he could do about the mop of unruly curls. We shook hands and sat down, and I flipped open my leather satchel as I glanced down the hallway to look for his ex-wife.

"Is she here?" I asked quietly.

"Not yet," He watched me pull out his file and a pen. "What will happen if she doesn't show?"

I sighed. "I wish I could say for sure. It depends on the magistrate. Hopefully we'll at least get the support payments stopped."

He'd never had much money and certainly not enough to hire a lawyer when his wife had left him six years earlier. So he'd handled the divorce himself, stumbling through the process and ending up with shared parenting -- something that probably wouldn't have happened otherwise. A good lawyer would have been able to argue that his wife abandoned the baby. As it was, he'd been paying child support for six years, and his ex had never even seen the child. But she'd been careful to keep her address updated, and the support checks had been faithfully delivered. Money for a mother who couldn't be bothered to mother.

Oh yes, I was primed to hate her.

We waited for a while, making small talk and discussing the likely outcome of the hearing. After a minute, he stood and pulled his wallet from his back pocket, then carefully removed a small photo from the clear plastic sleeve, his hands rough and cracked along the knuckles from working construction. "That's Molly," he said proudly as I took it. "She's not smiling because she lost both front teeth and she's embarrassed." He sat back and watched me look at his treasure, as if he hoped I would like it and worried I might not find it beautiful.

But she was beautiful, his little girl, and I told him so. With small, delicate features and curls the same sandy blond as her dad's, she held the promise of achieving real beauty one day. Her glittery, bright pink Hello Kitty T-shirt was just the sort of thing photographers recommend not wearing for personal portraits and something a man would put on his daughter for picture day, happy to accommodate her and not realizing the white cartoon kitten would draw the eye more readily than the solemn little face with its close-mouthed smile.

"You've done a good job with her," I told him as I handed back the picture. It couldn't have been easy, a man alone with a small daughter. I knew from looking over his financial history that, at times, he'd worked two jobs so he could afford a day care closer to his main job site.

Like most areas of law, custody disputes are rarely black and white. Most of the time, they're a whole lot of gray. Each side is angry and bitter and willing to throw their children in front of the judge like two women fighting over a baby before Solomon. My mom liked to build her case around pictures. I was 5 when she lost custody, and each weekend she would unpack my clothes and order me to stand still while she held them up to my shoulders and shook her head. "Two sizes too big. Jesus Christ." She'd hold up her Polaroid while I stood across the room in my pink Michael Jackson jacket with multiple zippered pockets, sleeves unrolled to hang by my knees, and order, "No, don't smile. It's not that kind of picture."

Most custody disputes are gray, but this one was a clear, bright white. For once, I was firmly on the side of good. And I felt a rush of indignation laced with adrenaline as the bailiff called our names and we walked into the courtroom. This was going to be easy. I had to win this one.

I'd been talking for about 10 minutes when the door swung open behind me and I turned to see the bailiff escorting a small blond woman into the courtroom, her flip-flops snapping as she walked to the table opposite the one where I stood with my client sitting next to me.

He sucked in a breath and leaned toward me. "That's -- "

I put a hand on his arm. "I know."

She was nervous. She had nothing with her except a small purse that she sat on the table, then picked back up to move it to the floor by her feet. Her natural hair color was lighter than her daughter's but dyed black underneath. Her face would have been pretty if she hadn't ruined it. The pockmarks of long-term drug use clustered around her mouth and her eyes were tired inside their rings of black eyeliner. When she looked at me, I noticed they were the same chocolate brown as her daughter's.

I was ready for her. When was the last time you saw your daughter? Six years. You've never seen her? No. Have you called her? No, I haven't. Do you know her phone number? No. So you haven't seen her since she was a baby? No. What school does she go to? I don't know. You don't know the name of her school? That's what I just said. Are you working? Yes, I'm a bartender. How long have you been at your current job? Six months. And before that? Before that, what? Before that, where did you work? I was unemployed. For how long? Two years. Before that, what did you do? I did some bartending. Why haven't you tried to see your daughter? I just couldn't.

"You couldn't what?" I demanded. "What couldn't you do? Pick up the phone?"

She looked down at her hands, which she'd folded together and placed on top of jeans-clad thighs. "I couldn't let her see ..." She shook her head. "I'm not ..." When she looked up at me, the brown eyes were soft behind her tears. She waved a hand, gesturing to herself. "I'm not able to do it," she blurted. "I'm not good or anything. It's the least I can do for her. I'll sign whatever."

The magistrate stopped me then, but I would have stopped anyway. I didn't have a judgment entry, so I sat down and wrote one out by hand. She'd waive all her rights to her daughter if my client would waive his right to receive child support.

My husband once told me, "You let things bother you too much."

"What do you mean?" I'd asked. We were folding clothes, something we do nearly every night. With three kids, laundry is an industrial chore, and we dump multiple loads on our bed and fold together while we watch trashy television and talk about the day.

He gave me a look over the mound of towels and onesies. "You let these cases get to you. You'll burn out," he warned.

I folded the pink T-shirt I was holding and placed it on top of my daughter's stack. Roughly 90 percent of her clothing is pink, so her pile isn't hard to find. I thought about the pink Michael Jackson jacket and pictured my mother marking Polaroids with exhibit numbers. "I won't burn out."

The promise of tears on the witness stand was the only time the woman came close to crying. She didn't cry when she signed the judgment entry. And she didn't cry when the magistrate asked her if she understood the agreement. She said yes, she understood and agreed to everything, and she picked up her purse and walked away, leaving behind the one gift she could give her daughter: freedom from a future of pain.

In the hallway, my client's voice bounced happily from one wall to the other. "I can't believe it! This is going to make my life so much easier, you have no idea." He grinned. "Christmas is going to be fun."

His joy was infectious, and I couldn't help smiling back at him. We parted with a handshake amid the echoes of the courthouse, and I made my way to the entrance. As I walked underneath the paintings, I felt my smile die by inches, sliding off my face as if it had never been. The revolving door whooshed with a rush of sharp fall air, and I made my way down the courthouse steps and into the street, feeling like the moment deserved some kind of musical accompaniment. Something bittersweet with strings that moves quickly and bruises the soul. But there wasn't any music and the only sounds that followed my walk were cars passing through the city and the footsteps of people rushing to get out of the cold.

When I walked in the door to my house, my daughter hurried to the top of the stairs like she always does and yelled, "Mommy!" with the unbridled glee exclusive to toddlers. I dropped my bag and got down on my knees to hug her.

My husband emerged from the kitchen with the baby on one hip and smiled at me. "Did you win?"

I nuzzled my cheek against my daughter's. "No."

I've never been what you could call "sporty" or "in shape." I did once overhear my brother describing me to someone as having "an athletic build," but that was just a polite Midwestern way of saying "kind of fat" -- you know, athletic like a rugby player, not athletic like a marathoner. I do not and never have gone to the gym, worked out or owned any shorts made out of lycra, jackets made out of Gortex, or socks made out of anything that wicks. I hate sneakers that look like insects.

When it comes to anything other than typing or turning the pages of a book, my hand-eye coordination leaves something to be desired. And if someone is watching me or telling me exactly how I'm supposed to move my body, I seize up with a sensation that's a cross between performance anxiety and that feeling you get in dreams where someone is chasing you and no matter how hard you try to run, your legs will not cooperate. Panic, I think it's called. Run, run you tell your legs, but they do not run. Left alone, I can throw a dart pretty well, but start coaching me on how to do it better and suddenly I'm hitting the bartender in the eye and at least two people in the bar are crying.

As a drunken outdoor sports enthusiast proclaimed at a party when I told him, no, I don't ski or snowboard or surf: "Oh! You must be one of those readers!"

A month or so before my due date I finally talked to my husband -- who happens to be an emergency room doctor -- about some of my childbirthing fears. He reminded me of my willingness to get an epidural and reassured me he would not under any circumstances park himself south of the border. "I'll need you up near my face, being supportive," I said. What I meant, of course, was, "There's no way in hell I'm adding 'fear that you'll never have sex with me again if you witness a human head emerging from my lady parts' to my list of birthing concerns."

Emergency medicine practitioner that he is, my husband values efficiency, practicality and even-keeledness above all else. (Why he married a creative writer with a tendency toward inconsolable crying jags, I still have not figured out.) I told him that, among other things, I was nervous he would get annoyed when, in hour 36 of labor, I demanded a different flavor of popsicle or a softer roll of toilet paper or a different husband or whatever. "Don't worry," he said. "I know it's not going to go quickly or easily. You're kind of a black-cloud patient."

Apparently during training there are residents for whom everything seems to go right -- "white cloud" residents -- and "black cloud" residents for whom everything seems to go wrong. "You know, a patient they're taking care of who seems totally fine suddenly dies or something," he cheerfully explained.

I protested that barely anything had gone wrong with my pregnancy. Aside from debilitating nausea and excruciatingly painful varicose veins in unmentionable places, everything was fine. I hadn't even complained that much -- for a pregnant lady. "So many things [pant, pant]," I huffed as we walked up a teeny tiny incline, "that could have gone wrong haven't! [pant, pant] I'm just sensitive. [pant, pant] And I do not [pant, pant] have a black cloud [pant, pant] over [pant, pant] my [pant, pant] head!"

We then turned into the alley behind our house, and I proceeded to slip on some loose gravel and fall on my knee so hard I was pretty sure I broke it and probably the baby, too. For weeks my knee continued to kill me, both when I was using it and when it was resting. It especially hurt when I sat down or stood up and even more especially when I sat down or stood up from a low seat, such as, say, a toilet. And yes, the rumors you've heard are true: Pregnant women do have to pee extremely often.

By the time I felt my first labor pangs I had decided that 12 to 36 hours of labor would be nothing compared to six weeks -- or 1,008 hours -- of knee pain.

After I labored valiantly at the hospital without medication for, oh, about 13 minutes, an anesthesiologist was called in to administer an epidural. Dr. Wright the anesthesiologist began to regale us with tales from his recent golf vacation. I was clutching my husband's arm while the anesthesiologist examined my spine to see exactly where to stick the giant needle and wouldn't you know, Dr. Wright stopped talking about himself and said, "Wow. You must be a runner -- or some kind of athlete!" Maybe I was going to be able to handle this birthing thing just fine.

In the end, giving birth wasn't so much like running a marathon as going on a mildly strenuous 45-minute walk surrounded by people telling you you're doing a great job. Compared to 20 weeks of nausea, 10 weeks of varicose veins, and 1,008 hours of knee pain, childbirth was a piece of cake with chocolate frosting and a really cute baby on top.

Epidurals do wear off eventually, however. A few days after I was safely tucked at home with my healthy and intact baby and the pain in my nether-regions had subsided, my knee pain resumed in earnest. I consulted my regular doctor (instead of my husband who kept saying from his six-years-older-than-me vantage point, "Yeah. Getting older sucks.") My doctor recommended physical therapy, which I tried not to take as punishment for having been so clumsy as to fall on my knee in the first place. The idea of spending an afternoon in a room lined with Pilates balls and free weights freaked me out almost as much as the idea of shooting a baby out my vagina.

My physical therapist turned out to be a nice enough person, a mother herself who wore lemon-colored jeans rather than the requisite track pants and agreed that pregnancy really does take a toll on our bodies -- I don't just have a weak character, as my husband implies with his eyebrows each time I complain.

She had me walk around the room a few times, from the treadmill to the stationary bike and back, so she could analyze my gait. Increasingly uncomfortable at being watched and assessed, I joked that I felt like America's Next Top Model. Either my comment wasn't funny or the physical therapist didn't believe laughter had a place at the gym. Instead of smiling she laid me down on a table and told me to "engage" my "core."

I felt the all-too familiar uneasiness begin to rise. "You know," I stalled. "I've never really known what people mean when they say that. I mean, it's not like I'm an apple, so ..."

The physical therapist suggested I tighten my stomach muscles as if I were "about to receive a blow to the belly." Which was, you know, a super helpful metaphor because it's something I clearly have experience with. I may be a reader, but I'm scrappy in the ring! I reiterated my uncertainties, but she waved my words away. "Never mind," she said. "I think your abs have shut down. You're going to have to stop cheating with your glutes, and we're really going to have to work on your quads, which are just not strong enough at all, are they?"

At the word "glutes" my eyes began to mist over and by "quads" I was crying in earnest. "Sorry," I sniffled, as the physical therapist handed me a Kleenex. I wanted to explain my tears, explain how in athletic situations I feel inadequate and panicky like a mute foreigner being asked directions to the nearest hospital by someone with a visible gunshot wound. But it came out as, "I'm not ... all ... sporty!"

The physical therapist appeared not to take offense. She changed the topic to what I'm sure she thought was safer ground, telling me that my sneakers were "street shoes" and did not provide adequate support. She sent me off to buy new ones from an establishment named Super Jock 'n Jill.

I took one look at its wall of horrible insect-like "performance" sneakers and felt tears again spring to my eyes. "I'm kind of picky about aesthetics," I told the 18-year-old Super Jock salesclerk, hoping he'd nod knowingly and pull a pair of supportive and attractive shoes off a high back shelf. Instead he stared at me blankly and asked if I wanted to try the Asics.

"Do you have anything not made out of mesh?" I tried again, going for the specific rather than the general. "I don't like the feeling of air on my toes when I'm walking outside and it's not summer and I'm not barefoot," I said.

"Wuh?" The salesclerk squinted his eyes like our exchange was beginning to hurt his head.

Before I started to cry for real, I shoved my feet back into my hopelessly unsupportive street shoes and said, "I'm sorry -- I'm a reader," and hobbled out the door.

That tells us that it isn't as simple as blaming low-risk moms who are simply "too posh to push" -- which we've long suspected here at Broadsheet -- but it doesn't give us someone or something that we can blame. (That's a bummer, seeing as the blame game is so much fun, right?) We do know, however, that past research has suggested that doctors have lowered their medical risk threshold for C-sections. Why, you might ask? Well, not only do cesareans cost much less than vaginal birth after C-section (aka VBAC) -- thanks to guidelines requiring that hospitals have surgical and anesthesia teams on stand-by for such cases -- but they also can help protect doctors and hospitals against lawsuits. Also, as we've reported in the past, cesareans make private hospitals more money. A recent Associated Press piece on a study predicting the continuing rise of the cesarean rate reports that "explaining the increase in C-sections is no simple matter":

The study found a variety of reasons, some related, including heavier moms and babies, women giving birth later in life, an increase the number of twins and multiple births, and evidence that doctors may be opting for a cesarean if women encounter difficulties in the early stages of labor.

There is still plenty of room for speculation and finger-pointing -- but now we're at least down one culprit and one mommy-shaming pseudo-trend.

She reasserts her definition of birth rape as an instance during labor "when an instrument or hand is inserted into a woman's vagina without permission, after which the woman feels violated." Birth rape believers don't think doctors should have free reign to do with women's bodies as they choose -- and that is one thing that we fundamentally agree on. I too object to "the paternalism of the 'lie back and let the doctor do his job, now there's a good girl' mentality.'" But doctors can hardly be expected to get verbal permission before each and every action they take. Certainly, I would say in most cases that it is a violation for a doctor to act against a patient's explicit wishes or to continue doing something once a patient has explicitly asked them to stop (unfortunately, it's also extremely common). Even in such scenarios, though, I just don't see the argument for using the word "rape."

Reed sees herself as battling those who argue against "'allowing' women to use this term," but I hardly see it as an issue of allowing women to use the term "birth rape." This is a debate about appropriate word choice, not about actual censorship -- and, again, what is gained from employing such a fraught term?