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I found my dream job, as a public defender, representing indigent defendants in federal court. His career was portable, mine was not, and, more important, my ambitions were every bit as important as his. To this day neither my mother nor I can believe our good luck.
    I loved my job. I got off on every part of it—I was a natural defender, I reveled in my battles with opposing counsel, I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of arguing before the court, a jury trial was my idea of bliss. And, especially, I loved my drug-dealing, bank-robbing, gangbanging clients. The job was difficult, frustrating, and more fun than I’d ever had in my life.
    I achieved the future my mother had struggled so mightily to ensure for me. A job I loved, and a man I loved. A man who did all the cooking and most of the housework. A man who was eager to start a family and planned to be the primary caretaker. My goals accomplished, my future assured, all I needed to do was sit back and reap the rewards.
    The sense that I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing subsided not a whit when I became pregnant, although from the beginning the baby complicated things. I remember one day running lightly up the steps to the courthouse in my little blue suit and matching suede pumps and stopping suddenly. I gulped a few times and then leaned over the railing and threw up the entire contents of my stomach into the bushes before the bemused eyes of the jurors who were enjoying a quick cigarette before the trialday began. I debated asking the judge to instruct the jury that my queasiness resulted not from any lack of faith in my client but rather from my pregnancy. Instead, I contented myself with chewing ostentatiously on a stack of saltines throughout the trial. The judge, a mother herself, helped me by calling a recess whenever she caught me looking green around the gills.
    Still, even though I was spending half my day kneeling in front of the toilet bowl and the other half adjusting my maternity pantyhose, it didn’t occur to me that a baby would interrupt the scheme my mother and I had outlined for my life. On the contrary, I shamelessly made use of my pregnancy to curry favor with judges and juries alike. I encouraged my clients to pull out my chair or take my arm as I heaved my bulk around the courtroom. The jury reacted to this solicitude just as I wanted them to. They took one look at how sweetly the tattooed, methamphetamine-addled drug dealer took care of his adorable, little pregnant lawyer, and decided that he could not possibly be as bad as the prosecutor was making him out to be.
    I worked until the very end of my pregnancy, until my feet were too bloated to fit into my pumps and my belly was so big that by the time I moved my car seat back far enough to accommodate my girth, I could no longer reach the brake pedal. When I finally went out on maternity leave, I didn’t even bother cleaning up my office. I knew it would be only a matter of a few months before I returned.
    During this period, on the rare occasions that I appeared in non-lactating public, I was invariably reminded of how important it was that I get back to work. Once, at a party, a successful female movie producer to whom I was introduced as “Michael Chabon’s wife,” as if that were the sum total of my identity, sized me up with a glance, taking in my swollen, leaking breasts, my quivering postpartumbelly, the faded black maternity dress that was still the only thing in my closet that fit. With a pitying smile, she patted me on the arm and said, “I so envy you. I wish I’d been able to just give it all up and stay home with my daughter. Lucky you!”
    Yes, lucky me, I thought. While you’re busy making a series of monster box-office hits, including the most lucrative romantic comedy of all time, I’m spending my days analyzing the frequency and consistency of infant bowel movements. While you’re totting up box-office receipts, I’m totting up ounces of pumped breast