Toward the end of the first season of Weeds, an episode begins in a rather extraordinary manner: With a close-up of an Orthodox rabbi chanting a Hebrew prayer. The camera quickly moves to the gravestone, engraved with a Magen David.

The body in the grave is Judah Botwin, late husband of Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), the pot-dealing, mildly psychotic mom around whom the show revolves. She stands alongside the grave, with sons Shane and Silas, and her brother-in-law, Andy, all of them looking mildly uncomfortable in the crystalline California sunshine and inappropriately dressed for a religious ritual. Judah died-a heart attack during his morning run-sometime in the nebulous past, before the start of the show. His death sent the family into financial ruin and Nancy into her new, er, career path-so this clearly isn't his funeral, but, as any Jewish viewer instantly realizes, his unveiling. The other 98 percent of the population, well, who knows what they made of this scene, because-and here's what makes the scene and Weeds, in general, so brilliant-the writers refrain from explicating it until midway through the episode, when Nancy meets Peter Scottson, the DEA agent whom she eventually marries, at a karate tournament in which Shane is competing. Their 'meet cute' is Nancy explaining why Shane went crazy and bit Peter's son while screaming the sh'ma. "We just came from his father's unveiling," she rambles, in classic Mary-Louise Parker intonations. "Do you know what that is? It's where they unveil the gravestone. It's a Jewish thing. I know you're thinking, ‘She doesn't look Jewish.' I come from Welsh stock...I'm not Jewish. My husband. He's dead now. He was Jewish. "

Though the show is over-the-top and even cartoonish in its coverage of topics from evangelical Christianity to casual sex, when it comes to things Jewish, Weeds tends toward the subtlety, irreverence, and occasional iconoclasm of real life. Rather than over-explaining-or apologizing for-the inclusion of a not-immediately-recognizable religious ritual, Jenji Kohan and her team of smart writers allow the story to unfold as if unveilings-and, later, rabbinical school, the IDF, circumcision, Yiddish, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a host of other Jewish ideas and references-are as much a part of mainstream American life as, well, watching television. And that in and of itself-the lovely casualness with which the Botwin's Jewishness (or lack of it) is simply a part of the texture of their lives-makes Weeds unusual in the deracinated world of the cathode ray tube.

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Four years ago, when Coleman was born, I sometimes attended a mothers’ group in my neighborhood, an obscure corner of the Lower East Side tucked away beneath the Williamsburg Bridge. Like many new mothers in neighborhoods across the country, I had a rather conflicted relationship with this group. On the one hand, I was grateful, in those early days, for a place to go one afternoon per week, and for a group of women who were going through experiences similar to mine (lack of sleep, overwork, you know the drill). But though I made a couple of close friends within the group—friends with whom I’m still close and whose children have become Coleman’s friends, which is intensely wonderful for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint—I often found myself feeling alienated and alone, even as I sat in some nice person’s living room, picking at a cookie and wishing someone would magically airlift a double espresso from the coffee shop down the street. This was partly because, I suppose, I’m suspicious of groups, in general. In this group, as seems to be common, cliques quickly formed, and it sort of irritated me that these closed units of women felt the need to constantly chatter about the outings on which they’d gone together, the music classes in which they’d enrolled their kids together, the things they’d do over the weekend together, and so on, without thinking that this might, perhaps, make others feel excluded. Why go to the mothers’ group at all? Why not, I thought, just hang out together on Wednesdays between three and five, if you’re only going to talk to each other anyway? I tried to steel myself against the stupidity of it all, but couldn’t quite manage it. In other words, I felt like I’d returned to junior high, or maybe even high school (to be slightly kinder). In the years since, I’ve heard many other women complain about similar situations at their local playgrounds or whatnot, and I still can’t quite figure out what makes it so, though that knee-jerk feminist explanation has crossed my mind: That women are somehow raised to be competitive with each other. Even ostensibly liberal women who exclusively feed their kids organic baby food. The other explanation, I suppose, is that women shouldn’t, perhaps, be allowed to focus on their kids as much as do mothers of today, including myself.

Sometimes, while I was scooting around the hardwood floor of a shiny new apartment, trying to make sure Coleman didn’t inadvertently reset some stranger’s Tivo, I felt like a secret agent, a spy, sent to report back to HQ about the foibles of modern parenting. All around me, women would be talking about sleep training, and eliminating petroleum products (goodbye, A&D ointment), and spacing out vaccines, and the sugar content of YoBaby, and which nannies ignored their kids in the park (much pity was reserved for the parents of said kids), and a million other things that I basically didn’t think about at all. And in a way, I was a spy: I was (am) a writer. At that point, I was working frenetically on my novel—whenever Coleman slept, at the weekend, etc.—while doing some writing for magazines, as I’d done for years, and editing features for an online magazine called Nextbook (more on this in a moment). But somehow my work life seemed unreal and strange to many of the other mothers I met. One woman, when I explained that Nextbook allowed me to work at home, said, “Oh, so basically you get paid to be a stay-at-home mom. That’s nice.” Er, no.

The reason I bring all this up is because perhaps the strangest thing I encountered at the meetings of that group—stranger even allowing a baby to cry in his crib for an extended period of time in order to learn how to fall asleep on his own, stranger than the habit of writing down the contents of every single one of a baby’s diapers (!)—was an insistence that having a baby eliminated a woman’s ability to read. “I haven’t read a book since I had So-and-so,” the women, or many of them, constantly said. “I pick something up and then I just fall asleep.” One woman said she could make it through the whole paper each morning—which I found, and still find, deeply impressive, since I tend to fade out around the “Business” section—but couldn’t commit to actual books, because her time was so interrupted. Whenever I mentioned a book I’d read—generally as part of a conversation with a college friend of mine who’d moved to the neighborhood—someone was, apparently, legally bound to good-naturedly call out, “How can you read? I just can’t read anymore.” That’s weird, I thought, the first time it happened. And then it kept happening.

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Over the course of this blog, I’ve documented, all too well, my penchant for overcommitment. But while I fully admit that, yes, most of the hectic pace of my life is my own fault—no, I didn’t really need to agree to go to my building’s composting meeting this week—at the same time I sometimes wonder if I wasn’t, perhaps, born under some sort of wonky, frantic-making star. For instance: Was it my fault that the workers sanding the floor of our apartment somehow sent large enough vibrations into the second bedroom of our neighbors’ apartment, allegedly jostling their wall-mounted case of three-hundred-plus Mets bobble head dolls, causing three of said dolls to fall out of the case and break, and leading our neighbor to repeatedly harass us about this the day after we brought Pearl home from the hospital, demanding we pay for the smashed dolls, even going so far as to hand us a faux-official-style invoice? And did I somehow cause Coleman to come home from school, that same day, with a raging case of pink eye that kept him home from school and bouncing off the walls for the three following days, as we tried in vein to get him to stop sticking his pink-eye-infected hands in his new sister’s tiny face? And, in fact, I certainly did everything to prevent myself from coming down with my own case of it, which I then passed on to Pearl and back to Coleman, who passed it back to me, and so on and so forth until we, as a family, had gone through four bottles of antibiotic eye drops, and I, as an individual, had tossed out five tubes of mascara? No, none of this pointless agita could be blamed on me. No. But such things happen to me pretty frequently. And so it was that last week—six days after the book’s release, the night of the baby-inflected reading at McNally-Jackson documented in my last post—I began to develop a strange feeling in my throat and an overwhelming thirst. I thought—or hoped—that these sensations were simply do to exhaustion (since I was, indeed, very tired), but, of course, I awoke the next morning to find that I was sick, truly sick, in the way that I tend to get sick: a heavy, chesty, sinusy cold.

The trouble is that when you have kids, you can’t really get sick. Or, well, you can—in the last six months alone I’ve lost had strep throat and full-on, completely-lose-your-voice laryngitis (twice)—but you can’t stay in bed, sipping tea with honey and lemon while watching bad TV. So maybe it would be more accurate to say you can’t really get better. Four-year-olds understand, intellectually, that you’re sick, but they still want you to play with them. And if they can be convinced to lie down with you, they generally cannot be convinced to be quiet enough to actually allow you to sleep, or, at least, not for more than five minutes. This time, though, I was so completely worn out that I actually fell asleep—truly, deeply asleep—while Coleman jumped around beside me and Pearl squirmed on my chest.

I had no choice but to rally, though, as the readings continued on: The Barnes and Noble in Park Slope, where the very nice manager is named Peaches (really!), and readings take place in the New Age section, leaving writers (me) subject to meanderings of shoppers seeking books on astrology, which was only slightly less distracting than the fact that as I read my nose became more and more plugged, and I idiotically hadn’t remembered to bring tissues up to the podium with me.

But the most distracting thing—hold tight, for here things take a serious turn—was the fact that I was not alone in my illness. On Sunday, I’d received a note from my mother, saying she wasn’t feeling well, that she’d had all our cousins over on Saturday for a delayed Seder and that by the time they left, she’d been so wiped out that she’d had to get in bed. My mother, who is 78, generally has more energy than do I, so it was clear that something was very wrong. “Go to the doctor tomorrow,” I wrote back, “and please call as soon as you know what’s going on.” She insisted that she was fine, though, that no doctor was needed. Argh, I screamed, inwardly, and left a message for my sister, who pretty much never answers her phone. She manages a restaurant in Brooklyn and it's usually too loud to talk, so she lets everything go to voicemail, then returns calls on Mondays, when the restaurant is closed. My sister is a eighteen years older than me. She’s also a nurse, by training. For these reasons, my mother sometimes takes her counsel on health matters more seriously than she does mine, which makes sense, seeing as my knowledge of medicine is largely cribbed from articles in the “Science Times” and the occasional episode of ER. Or my sister.

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Last summer, when I told my agent that I was pregnant, she honestly offered her heartiest congratulations - she's a warm, generous person - but I could see a flicker of anxiety cross her pale, pretty face. "So you're due when?" she asked, slicing open a delicate square of ravioli with her fork.

We were having lunch in the garden of an Italian restaurant near Gramercy Park - the sort of place at which your average person only dines when on expense account - and I had already plowed my way through my own too-small bowl of pasta, my first-trimester hunger having stubbornly hung around through the first weeks of the second trimester. "December," I told her. "The beginning of December." She arranged her features into something resembling composure. "And the book's out in April," she said. "That'll be fine." Clearly, she was comforting herself as much as me. "Coleman was an easy baby, right?" I nodded. This was true. Coleman rarely cried and slept pretty well, which is pretty much what people mean when they say a baby is "easy." But he was still a baby and, thus, required almost constant attention. (Like most babies.) He was also huge, which meant that he needed to eat pretty much around the clock. Most of my memories of his first months involve sitting in a chair nursing him or racing around various parts of Manhattan or Brooklyn frantically trying to find a place, any place, to sit down and nurse him. (Note to new moms: The Gap and its sister stores will let you nurse in their fitting rooms, no questions asked. You don't even need to pretend to be trying something on.) "This one will be easy, too," my agent said. "Yes," I told her, and I truly did believe this to be so. According to my mother, who sometimes takes a rather romantic view of the past, all babies in our family are easy. Besides, easy or not, this baby would be four months old by the time my novel, A Fortunate Age, came out, which was pretty much old enough to be left with my husband or sister for a couple of hours, if I needed to do a reading or suchlike. We'd left Coleman with a sitter-or, okay, a pair of very close friends--for the first time when he was just shy of five months old. With our second, we'd be more carefree and cavalier, or at least less nervous, right?

Four-odd months later, in December, when Pearl was born, a parade of friends came to visit and, as I've written about elsewhere, anxiously asked about the novel - when was it coming out again? - after they'd finished cooing over the baby and presenting her with organic onesies and miniature cashmere hoodies. "April," I told them, and watched their faces melt into that odd mixture of concern and anxiety, and, in one case, a bit of Schadenfreude. "It'll be fine," they told me, as my agent had back in July. "It has to be," I told them, "since Pearl isn't going anywhere." And I did truly believe this to be so. Sensibility-wise, I tend not to worry about things until I'm deeply mired in them, which is to say, I tend to think that things will just work themselves out. (And when they don't, well, okay, I sometimes completely freak out.) This is basically how I feel about having kids, in general. For years, I listened to friends say things like, "I just don't feel like I'm ready to have a baby," and nodded sympathetically, but the truth is that I don't think anybody is ever ready to have a baby, an event that, no matter how cool you are, kind of eradicates your life as you knew it. You just have to make the decision, know that nothing can prepare you for what's to come, and hold steady as the walls come tumbling down.

This was what I was prepared to do regarding the whole baby-and-book thing. But as the publication date approached-coincidentally, it happened to be Pearl's four-month birthday-my resolve became a bit shaky. The problem, I suppose, was less simply Pearl's existence and more that there was also Coleman, who was doing his own bit of freaking out about this new baby sister who, like him before her, was basically on perma-feed (she'd clocked in at nine pounds, six ounces, so she was even bigger than her brother at birth, a fact I've been hesitant to share with him lest it instill some sort of inferiority complex), keeping me locked in our tattered glider for the majority of the day and way too much of the night. And there was our less-than-ideal living situation, with all four of us in a studio, while our apartment was renovated. All of which somehow contrived to prohibit me from doing anything at all. When getting myself a glass of water seemed like a challenge--Coleman would scream and throw himself on me the minute I started toward the kitchenette, then stick his grimy hands in the glass once I'd returned to his side-it seemed impossible to do the million publicity-ish things one is supposed to do when publishing a novel, things that are not quite my forte even on a good day.
Despite this, the novel proceeded on its march to publication, and my publicist proceeded to book me a bunch of readings in the city. With each new date, I felt a little thrill-I would be reading at KGB, where I'd seen favorite writers read over the years, and at two of my favorite bookstores-but as the calendar began to fill with events, I began to worry. Pearl was, as expected, an easy baby. Even easier than her brother. She started sleeping through the night at eight weeks. She smiled all the time. But because, again, of our weird living situation, she wasn't really on a sleeping schedule. How could she be, when the minute I got her to sleep, a wild-haired four-year-old jumped on her screaming, "I'm a leopard seal and Pearl's a BABY PENGUIN." (You guessed right. Leopard seals eat baby penguins. These are the sorts of things he learns at his hippie preschool.) If you have a baby, you know what I'm about to say: Because she wasn't (and isn't) on any sort of schedule-as Cole had been at that age-there was no way we could leave her with a sitter, for she might wake at any time and need to eat. And to eat, she needed me, since like her brother she'd refused the bottle. Evan and I, in the two minutes we had alone each day, had hushed conversations about what to do, but we couldn't come up with an answer. Meanwhile, I frantically lined up sitters-once again, if you have a baby, you know the difficulty of finding sitters for six nights in the space of two weeks - knowing, at the very least, we couldn't bring Coleman with us. Not unless I wanted top be accompanied by a floor show.

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One of the biggest--and strangest--choices a writer has to make in the months preceding the publication a book is whether or not to read your reviews. If you're not a writer, this probably sounds insane. Why wouldn't you read the reviews? And I'll confess that before my own book was slated for release, I never gave the matter a moment's thought, despite having written more than my share of criticism. Then came the day, in early November, when my editor called and said, nervously, "I have some advance reviews. I don't know if you want to see them." Sweat immediately began to prick my underarms. "Are they good?" I asked. "Two are," she told me, hesitating. "The third, well, the person just didn't get it. It's snarky and mean." I was teased and bullied enough as a child to know that I couldn't stomach snarky and mean. I probably couldn't even stomach a misspelling of my admittedly complicated name. No, I told her, I didn't want to see them. Neither the good ones nor the bad ones. "I think that's wise," she said, and I smiled. I was wise! I was enlightened. I would maintain my faith in my own work-a novel on which I'd spent five years working, making ample sacrifices along the way-without a thought of the critics.

What I didn't bargain for was the fact that these days, in the age of the Interweb, everyone is a critic. A week or two later, my editor called again, ecstatic. The novel had been chosen for one of Barnes and Noble's book clubs, something called "First Look," in which readers receive galleys of new novels a few months before they come out, then discuss the books in an online message board. "This is really, really great," she told me. "Simon and Schuster, as a company, has only had one other book chosen for it." The catch: The author participates in the discussion for nearly a month, answering reader's questions. In my case, I'd be logging on in January, when my as-yet-unborn baby would be about a month old. "That sounds really fun," I told her. And, in a way, it did. Sort of.

January came quickly and found us ensconced in our studio, which had no phone line, which meant we had no DSL. Luckily, we were able to piggyback on a neighboring school with an incredibly powerful, inexplicably-not-password-protected wi fi signal. A week or two before I was due to start answering readers' questions, Evan excitedly told me that readers were already posting. A few days later, he was a little less excited. "My advice for you," he said, "is to not take any of this personally. Some of these people are clearly cranks. And some just aren't used to reading literary fiction." "But some are smart," I said. "Right?" "Yes," he admitted. "Some are smart."

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