Recently, a New York Times Magazine story featured women (read: Princeton-educated lawyers) who chose to forego paid employment in order to parent their children full-time. What's so effing newsworthy about that? Is it really so mind-boggling that some women might find the daily practice of researching how the Northern District of New Jersey Appellate Court has interpreted the word "interpretation" as it applies to automotive insurance policy exclusions to be somewhat less-than-fulfilling in a self-actualizing Maslowian sense?

No, genuinely groundbreaking news would have been a cover story on why mothers are blamed for everything in this culture, from juvenile delinquency to teen pregnancy to the way the bread rips when you spread peanut butter on it. You know the drill:

- work-at-home mothers are lazy do-nothing ho-ho-eating house cats addicted to Lucifer Dreambox primetime sit-coms, prying the lucre out of the trembling fists of their hapless brow-beaten husbands every evening with the flinty stare of a rattler sizing up a prairie mouse BUT work-out-of-the-home mothers are selfish consumer-goods-frenzied slatterns who use the excuse of "expensive day care" to shimmy up the corporate ladder and sacrifice their children's trembling saucer-eyed cookie-less selves to their pathetic narcissistic need to see their names affixed in bold typeface to the top of a paycheck; and

- breast-feeding mothers are self-righteous "there-there"-murmuring holier-than-thou La Leche groupies who perversely propel their sex-deprived husbands into the arms of surgically enhanced 22-year-old professional lap dancers BUT bottle-feeding mothers are self-absorbed cold-hearted casserole-shunning Gold's Gym groupies who perversely propel their tenderness-deprived husbands into the arms of pediatric neuroimmunologists; and

- mothers who use disposable diapers are inconsiderate planet-murderesses who evidence self-hatred by their despoiling of Mother Earth, filling the open wounds of the earth's landfills when they could just as easily compost their coffee grounds and egg shells BUT mothers who use cloth diapers are pathetic misty-eyed liberal peaceniks with smelly houses and excessive water heater demands, trouncing about with unshaven legs in a perpetual candlelight vigil dedicated to the terrorists who will not stop until we are all, each and every one of us, dead in our beds; and

- mothers who work part-time are confused malcontents who can't fully commit to an integrated identity, and mothers who have call-waiting are indecisive strumpets who yet await that call from their still-remembered ex-boyfriend, and mothers who don't have call-waiting are shrewish hysterics who browbeat their beleaguered husbands with ceaseless vicious harangues until the poor men abdicate all additional call options (including three-way calling, voicemail, and caller ID), and mothers who wear button-down shirts are psychoneurotic and confused about their sexuality, and mothers who wear skirts are asking for it.