Teresa Strasser

If Alicia Silverstone wants to "pre-masticate" solid foods for her baby boy, I want to know about it. January Jones eating her own placenta? Let me have it. Not her placenta, I mean, but the story about it. I will ingest that raw, cooked or ground and desiccated...

At the House of Pies, the waitresses are old and the fish is probably not young. It's the type of diner where one might see, as I did last week, a transgender homeless man in a full admiral's uniform eating key lime pie.

The House of Pies...

It wasn't that I failed to bond with my child, which was my biggest fear, but that I was so bonded.

The depth of this bond terrified me because, while biology had given me a strong drive to love and protect my son, my past had given me no idea...

I've always had an irrational and bitter resentment toward good sleepers. You know who you are. You probably don't mean to brag, but you guys always do. You always do.

"I could sleep ANYWHERE," you say, casually. And, "I'm a mess without my ten hours of sleep."...

I have the penmanship of a pre-pubescent juvenile delinquent incarcerated for setting his family on fire.

This may be one of the reasons "thank you" notes terrify me, because nothing -- from the handwriting, to the stationary, to the salutation, to the content -- will be right. You will wonder...

Let's just say your crappy childhood was a few acres of dry foliage, just there, not lush, but not dangerous. Having a child is the casually flicked, still burning Camel Light of a half-drunken hobo that sets it ablaze. Call all the helicopters you want, this fire won't be contained...

It's addicting, strange and wildly popular, thriving in the dark underbelly of YouTube, where fanatics make their own videos, which are seen by literally millions of people.
I'm talking about garbage truck videos, amateur garbage truck videos.

In the vast world of things that were not on my radar...

There's a social contract when it comes to birthday parties for kids. You can't just be a recurring guest, enjoying the bouncy houses, gift bags and balloon animals arranged and paid for by other parents.

No, you have to reciprocate. Like it or not, there's a kid pro quo.

Other...

"Desitin in my cuticles" is not the first line of a poignant country song, but I keep thinking it should be.

No. Desitin in my cuticles is what concerns me when I'm asked the question I get at least once a day: "Are you having another one?"

Really, this should...

I'll never forget asking my therapist the following question when I found out I was pregnant: "Who am I going to be?"

"You," she answered. "With a kid."

That was comforting that day, on that couch, staring at those Matisse prints, being that person who was terrified...

Maybe because I grew up in the heart of San Francisco, I've always liked the expression "street smart." It's not "gated community smart" or even "farm smart."

You want to know how to get from the Golden Gate Bridge to Twin Peaks using public transportation? I can...

When people talk about their "crazy" families, it really brings out my competitive nature.

Unless one uncle shot himself in the head and one aunt suffocated herself with a plastic bag per the instructions in a paperback version of "Final Exit," your people just aren't that...

Like forensics, mom profiling is not a perfect science, but I can narrow things down.

Because moms, I know you. In four seconds, I can accurately assess almost everything about you like a crime scene investigator knows which direction the pistol was pointed from the bloodstain pattern on the wall....

Parental shame is a two-way street, and my kid is already pedaling down it -- in the pink tricycle he insisted we buy him.

Will I embarrass my son? Sure. That's a given. But that dude is going to shame me, too.

Enough worrying about all I...

On Facebook, "ladies' night out" never ends with you getting cornered by a former Arizona State sorority girl who is two mojitos past dullard. On Facebook, the valet doesn't lose your dirty Honda for twenty minutes while you calculate how much sleep you'll get if there's no traffic on the...

Step aside, infamous Indonesian smoking baby, there's a new gross-you-out and get-you-incensed Internet sensation in town. It's the obese Chinese toddler!

Perhaps you have seen photos of Lu Hao, a 132-pound, 3-year-old who eats three bowls of rice at a time and refuses to walk to...

My new favorite writer: Edgar Allan ME. That's Charlie Sheen's latest nom de plume, in case you're some kind of troll.

Sure, Sheen's blazing self-confidence is probably the result of hypomania, but there's a reason it's so compelling. It's a word, it's a catchphrase, it's a movement, it's...

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy and Los Angeles Press Club Award winner. She is also the author of Exploiting My Baby: A Memoir of Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Even someone like me who isn't particularly good with babies, who looks at them and says things like, "Hey, buddy. Look...