Shortly after I started college, I went to the doctor complaining of overwhelming and unrelenting fatigue. All the tests she ran came back normal and she told me my tiredness was "just life" and that I needed to "sleep more."

Eavesdrop on any conversation between two moms or visit any online parenting forum and you're likely to hear references to a mysterious woman. She's called That Mom, and she is an ode to failure. We're all guilty of judging her. "Did you hear That Mom yelling at her kids in the store today?" "I can't believe That Mom didn't stop her kid from throwing sand at the park earlier." "I'm glad I'm not That Mom who lets her kids watch so much TV."

Recently, I posed a question to the members of an online forum I belong to. "You have ten minutes to get dinner on the table. What do you make?" Overwhelmingly, the answers were things like hot dogs or macaroni and cheese or canned soup. Things, in other words, that are quick but not necessarily healthy.

During a discussion with an online friend of mine, she mentioned that she gave her stroller away because she never used it. She lives in a neighborhood with no sidewalks and they have a large yard. They live far enough away from the stores they frequent that they have to drive, so her two kids ride in the carts or walk. And during their infrequent trips to the mall, she always ended up forgetting the stroller and renting one from the mall.

Last fall, my son potty trained and we switched the baby from formula to cow's milk within a couple of weeks. My husband breathed a sigh of relief and commented that by ditching both the diapers and the formula, we were saving a lot of money.