This was in 2009. My husband, Jeff, and I were on our way to Berlin, and a toddler a few rows ahead of us was voicing dissatisfaction with his sudden corporeal confinement by making the sorts of noises Janis Joplin might have produced had she lived to accidentally stick her hand into a garbage disposal.

I rolled my eyes and returned to my US Weekly and Delta-issue merlot. “I know. What an asshole.”

John Lennon once sang of instant karma. But in my case, it took three years.

My friend Aileen, who is Filipina, got engaged while I was pregnant. When she announced that the wedding—to an outdoorsy Minnesotan she met at business school—would take place in her homeland, the terror of such a trip avec bébe did not immediately dawn on me. When we bought our tickets, of course, the baby was infinitely portable. The only accoutrements he required were a strip of black elastic that served as a table leaf for the waistband of my jeans and a thick roll of Tums.

But then he was out, squirmy and squalling and requiring approximately twice as many accessories—and even more diapers—than the Kardashian sisters go through during a weekend trip to Vegas. And we were headed to an archipelago almost 9,000 miles and 28 hours of travel from Manhattan, which is like the MTA equivalent of hopping on a weekend subway shuttle bus to Baton Rouge. The 16-hour flight to Hong Kong (followed by another, three-hour flight and a two-hour ferry ride) seemed less like a madcap National Lampoon-esque adventure and closer to a total fucking nightmare.

He could cry nonstop, a fate worse than an in-flight movie menu limited to Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls and Grumpier Old Men, which I actually experienced in 1996. He might shit uncontrollably (as of boarding time it had been three days, which I feared might land him on the no-fly list as an explosive). Fellow passengers might whisper obscenities about my child. In two languages!

“Don’t worry,” my friend Angie (who is Chinese) told me a few days before the trip. “There will be Asian babies on the plane, and Asian babies are the worst.”

I was confused. Everything I know about Asian children, I learned from Amy Chua. Wouldn’t they be too busy practicing Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit on the xylophone to fuss?

“Oh no,” Angie assured me. “Asian babies are spoiled. They’ll make yours look good by comparison.”

As it turned out, there were a number of crying Chinese babies on our planes, all of whom seemed strategically clustered around a tetchy middle-aged British woman who was slowly and visibly losing her mind. And Angie was right; our portly American infant was generally unmoved by the change in scenery and air pressure. He divided his time between eating, napping, and balancing precariously on a pad atop the junior-sized toilet as I frantically applied my limited grasp of 10th grade physics to the task of changing his diaper without actually touching anything. Tiger Mothers may get standardized test results, but Sloth Babies allow for uninterrupted in-flight viewing of Downton Abbey’s second season. So, apples and oranges, really.

The flight, it turned out, was relatively easy. Feeling at ease, approximately twenty minutes after we arrived on the island of Panglao—hair buoyed by the humidity and spirits buoyed by the $2 margaritas at the hotel bar—I decided to take a walk.

It was at this point I began to feel as if I were trying to kill my son.

We’d schlepped the stroller all the way from JFK with the New Yorker’s naive expectation that sidewalks are a universal law instead of a regional whimsy. But steering around a stream of stop light-free traffic that might best be described as “clusterfuckish” made me feel like I was playing a live version of Frogger while pushing a wheelbarrow.

Just as I started to feel like a truly deficient caretaker, a motorcycle whizzed past bearing an entire family of four, the smallest child—who couldn’t have been more than two—essentially streaming behind the bike like a windsock.

Aileen had warned me that parenting in the Philippines was much less neurotic than it is in the U.S., but still, it wasn’t easy to adjust to a country so free of fear. “I don’t think we have car seats,” she said confusedly when I asked how I was supposed to transport my baby in accordance with the latest safety laws. Back in Brooklyn, I’m a negligent mother for placing a blanket over my son while he sleeps (in January!); in Panglao, I’m smiled at while leaning out the side of a tuk tuk—a three-wheeled motorcycle rickshaw—going 25 mph with Sam strapped to my chest. “Hello beh-beh!” the women called out, waving.

By week’s end, I was with the relaxed Filipino program, and I’d engaged in at least three additional behaviors that would have given my fellow Park Slope parents grand mal seizures: riding seatbelt-less in an over-capacity standing-room-only bus; peering over the edge of a sheer rock cliff; brushing my teeth with tap water.

But alas, one had to return to the Elysian Fields of the Slope, where a battle was raging on the message boards about whether to ban ice cream vendors from the playground. Perhaps feeling the neurotic vibes tightening around him—or perhaps as penance for his parents’ sin of traveling halfway around the globe and absorbing little more than watermelon mojitos, the ensuing jet lag did turn the baby into a dick.

editorial@observer.com

The moment you realize you’ve become a cliche—strolling down upper Madison Avenue in your fur and turban, say, or arranging the artisanal cheese and pluot plate at the reception for the dystopian YA novel you Kickstarter-published—is a New York rite of passage. And there on I-95, as I sent in the $35 annual fee, I knew I had crossed the paper-thin threshold that separates the merely pretentious from the parodic: I had become the consummate SAHM (stay-at-home mom).

The only impression I had prior to joining Park Slope Parents—PSP, in the cloying message board slang that substitutes “DH” for “darling husband” and “BM,” somewhat confusingly, for “breast milk” (paging Dr. Freud?)—was that it was full of assholes.

Let me explain. The first time I heard of the group was in 2006, via a Gawker account of a fight among its members. A would-be good Samaritan wrote that she’d found a “boy’s hat” on the street and wanted to return it to its owner. A fellow PSPer replied to the message, taking offense at the “hurtful” sexism inherent in the assignation of gender bias to an item of clothing, which prompted a cross-fire of heated, essay-length exchanges from dozens of members until I can only assume that the original poster was by then committed to Bellevue.

I heard about PSP again last year, from a former member whose status had been revoked after she violated the list’s privacy policy by sharing excerpts of user emails on a snarky neighborhood gossip blog. I was intrigued by her expulsion. After all, if what happened on Park Slope Parents had to stay on Park Slope Parents--if not behind closed doors, then at least within the confines of an invitation-only Yahoo! group—I figured it had to be good.

Here I should admit that before I became a Park Slope parent, I was a Park Slope kid. When I was 8, my family moved to the northwestern corner of the Slope. It was the same year that The New York Times deemed the neighborhood a “Walt Whitman ideal,” although apparently no one had informed the prostitutes who still roamed my corner after-hours. We’d relocated from Austin, Texas, and my friends from the Lone Star state erroneously thought I’d moved to the tough-as-nails Brooklyn of Do The Right Thing and Moonstruck-era Cher, of stick ball and zeppoles and gang wars. "Have you held a gun yet?" they would whisper over the phone. "Have you gotten mugged?" But when I told them I lived in Park Slope, they changed their tune. "Have you had a cappuccino?" they'd ask breathlessly. "Can you tell us what spelt is?"

In my defense, for a long time, even as an adult, I resisted the Park Slope stereotype. I went to public school—the lesser public school (no hookers in the 321 zone)! I’m not a member of the Food Co-Op, because I’m too lazy, I don’t care which country my hummus comes from and I refuse to let anyone outfitted in a neon orange vest escort me home unless they’re an EMT and I’m unconscious. I’ve always defined myself as an outsider to the twee-hugging part of the borough. (For Christ's sake, technically I live in Prospect Heights.) But in the past few months I have come face to face with the distinct possibility that I’ve finally morphed into the species of specious Brooklynite I’ve always mocked simply by making use of my uterus, and allowing a child to do the same.

The evidence against me: Within a few weeks of my son’s September arrival—after enduring an unavoidable and punishing newborn boot camp that found me, most days, slumped on the floor frantically rocking my wailing baby while playing “Ocean Waves,” an iTunes download that sounded more like a shitty cellphone recording of an industrial dryer than the sea’s soft lullaby—I emerged to join the sun-washed masses of mothers and nannies who fill Park Slope’s sidewalks, outdoor cafes and playgrounds during working hours. The eyes of my non-parent peers tended to glaze over a few minutes into my new go-to conversation starter, a detailed update on the state of my infant’s bowel movements, but with my fellow moms I was preaching to the choir. Who would have thought that an apathetic agnostic like me would discover my congregation amid the Sisterhood of the Obstructive Stroller?

Yet at mother’s meetings and playgroups, over decaf lattes and pressed vegetable juices and the odd naughty noon glass of sauvignon blanc, my new clique and I chatted about sleep schedules (for the babies), kegels (for us), and up-the-back poops (hopefully for the babies, although postpartum incontinence loomed like a scatalogical specter), pausing every so often to absentmindedly free a breast from our shirts. (Incidentally, the list of people intimately familiar with my nipples—once limited to my college boyfriend, my gynecologist, and, due to an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction, my middle-school gym teacher—now included my landlord and at least a dozen area busboys). Every mom I befriended seemed to know eight others, and so on like a procreative pyramid scheme, at the apex of which presumably sat Eve, all by her lonesome, getting the side-eye at toddler yoga after word got out about Cain. And whenever I asked how two new mothers had met, the answer invariably led back to PSP. One woman assured me that it was a must for any mom worth her BPA-free playmat. “If it’s not on Park Slope Parents,” she said, “It’s like it didn’t happen.”

So I clicked. I signed. I succumbed. I opened my Gmail and waited to see what secrets my new identity might grant me access to.

Short answer: None. (In retrospect, the whole Yahoo! thing should have been a red flag. I mean, why not communicate via stone tablet or semaphore flags?) It turns out that the main perk of joining PSP is getting a frightening number of emails—hundreds a day—mostly consisting of classified ads pimping “lightly used” items such as a girls’—watch out, friend! Them’s fightin’ words!—faux-fur coat from a “pet, smoke, bedbug-free household.” By and large the exchanges are mundane. One thread that got a lot of traffic was titled “Re: Warning: Question About Baby Poop,”—no ER visit necessary, in case you were wondering.  At the end of my first week as a Park Slope Parent, my unread inbox count hovered ominously at 666.

The mark of the parenting beast close at hand, I scaled back to a daily digest.

(Photo via Getty Images)

Met: 2000

Engaged: Oct. 13, 2006

Projected Wedding Date: Oct. 19, 2007

Una LaMarche and Jeff Zorabedian, both 26, knew each other vaguely as undergraduates at Wesleyan University, the thinking person’s Brown, where she majored in film and he in theater. Ms. LaMarche cut a formidable figure around the Connecticut campus, a svelte New York City native with a shock of black curls, smoking cigarettes in a puffy jean jacket and starlet sunglasses. The handsome, brown-bearded Mr. Zorabedian, meanwhile, was given to sweater vests and self-deprecation. “I’m from suburban Massachusetts,” he said. “I can’t have pretensions of being cool.”

After graduation, they both moved to New York, where Ms. LaMarche manned the phones for Rockrose, a real-estate developer, and Mr. Zorabedian worked as a photographer and sometime actor. They both enrolled in an Argentine tango class above a natural-foods store on the Lower East Side. One day, they were the only students to show up—a happy circumstance that they celebrated with post-dancing drinks at McSorley’s.

A few days later, Mr. Zorabedian attended Ms. LaMarche’s birthday party at the Lakeside Lounge in the East Village, after which, properly sloshed, they rode the F train back to her parents’ apartment in Park Slope and he fell asleep on the couch. The following night, they headed to an anonymous Houston Street bar for yet another birthday party. This time, he convinced her to walk home. On the Manhattan Bridge, they started to tango.

“What are some of your best birthday memories?” he asked her.

“This one,” she said.

Mr. Zorabedian picked a daffodil from Brooklyn Bridge Park and returned chastely to his share, in Inwood. “We had an awkward hug goodbye,” Ms. LaMarche said.

A week later, Mr. Zorabedian invited her to see a play at the Ohio Theater in Soho, where he was working as a stagehand. She primped at Sephora in preparation, then joined him and his brother at Peculiar Pub on Bleecker Street for a game of pool after the curtain. “I have to go,” Mr. Zorabedian’s brother suddenly announced. On the street en route to Doc Holiday’s (hic!), Ms. LaMarche took out a stick of gum. “It’s my last piece,” she said.

“We could share,” Mr. Zorabedian offered.

“Um … O.K.”

He held it between his teeth Lady and the Tramp–style and they slipped into a kiss. Midway through, he tossed out the gum and pulled her into a phone box. “It was very romantic,” Ms. LaMarche said—and apparently uncharacteristic. “I’m very expressive, and Jeff is more the strong, silent type.”

After three months of dating, suffering the slings and arrows of freelance fortune, Mr. Zorabedian returned to his hometown in Massachusetts. This lasted until New Year’s Day. “I’m coming to New York,” he told her.

“Where are you staying?”

“Um, your house?”

For three months, he shared her room, adding his collection of historic novels to her stack of women’s magazines. “My nightstand soared in IQ points,” Ms. LaMarche said. Later, she became distribution coordinator for Black Book, Mr. Zorabedian got a job as a salesman at the tourist-filled B&H Photo on Ninth Avenue, and the couple moved on up to a spacious two-bedroom in Prospect Heights.

One night, a bit squiffy on wine after a party at her parents’ place, Mr. Zorabedian fell to one knee.

“Marry me,” he declared.

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Ms. LaMarche said, trying to dislodge herself from her coat.

“Marry me.”

“I’m a bit tipsy, so I’m going to give you an out on this one. Are you sure you want to be asking me? Are you sure?”

“Marry me.”

And so she will, at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Though she doesn’t yet have a ring, Ms. LaMarche has rented seasons one and two of the WE show Bridezillas. “As sort of primer of what not to do,” she said.

Joe Cacciola and Jennie Price

Met: Dec. 6, 2004

Engaged: Feb. 28, 2006

Projected Wedding Date: May 5, 2007

Joe Cacciola, 39, a dark-haired electric bassist with an old-school Brooklyn accent and a pierced left ear, plans to marry the busty, brunette and bubbly Jennie Price, 34, an office manager for Broad Street, a corporate-events firm, at the Prospect Park Boathouse. The event will be catered by Moveable Feast, whose clients have included Conan O’Brien and Paul Auster. The groom-to-be proposed at Tavern on Dean (ah, Brooklyn wit!) with a European-cut diamond in an Art Deco–style octagonal platinum setting that belonged to Ms. Price’s late mother.

They met after Mr. Cacciola auditioned for the rock band Cosmic Jug, whose lead singer, Ms. Price’s soon-to-be brother-in-law, immediately thought: He’s perfect for Jennie.

The sister concurred, and a setup was arranged at the Lemon, a now-defunct Chelsea club where the band had a gig. Ms. Price wore a new pair of skinny black jeans and a pink sash for the occasion. After the show, she noticed a handsome guy looking her up and down. “I was like, ‘Who the hell is this guy, and what is he doing?’” she said in her cute little-girl voice.

It was Mr. Cacciola, who by the end of the night was feeding her fried calamari at the table with a bandmate, who took a while to get the hint that they wanted to be left alone. When he finally vamoosed, they broke into laughter. “It was pretty instant,” Ms. Price said. “I could tell he liked me, and it was really nice.”

The two of them headed to Tracey J’s Watering Hole, where she made him do a shot of Jaeger and asked: “You want to kiss me, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Cacciola admitted.

For their second date, he lured her to his Sunset Heights lair for a dinner of baby lamb chops, cannellini beans and avocado salad. “Italian boys cook,” Mr. Cacciola informed the Love Beat.

“I remember thinking, Oh my God, he’s going to marry me!” Ms. Price said. “I knew this was that guy that was going to be nice to me.”

Before she left for a long-scheduled trip to Taiwan, she invited him over to her two-bedroom apartment in Prospect Heights. “I was getting the perfect vibe,” she said. “He was totally in love with me and I was totally in love with him, but he wasn’t saying it. I was like, ‘Oh my God, he’s driving me crazy.’”

“You know you feel it,” she told him. “I’m not going to be the first to say it.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I feel it. I love you.”

Three months after she got back, he moved in, merging his Eames-inspired furniture with her collection of salt and pepper shakers.

A week earlier, Ms. Price had met his mother for the first time. “I don’t want to tell you what to do,” Mama Cacciola said. “Living together’s O.K., but … maybe you should think about marrying her.”