You see, my daughter, Chloe, is a strict vegetarian. She's never tasted a hot dog, seen the inside of a McDonalds, or stepped within twenty feet of a supermarket deli counter. The reason is simple: twenty-two years ago, I swore off meat entirely. Call it what you will — my pledge to the animal kingdom or a fit of teenage rebellion. Either way, it felt right, and from that day on I haven't had so much as a fish stick.

So when my daughter Chloe came along, I hadn't a clue how to marinate, tenderize, heck — identify — a slab of meat. In a fit of new mother guilt, I pored over medical journals and parenting magazines in search of proof that my meatless ways would render my cherubic-faced child a protein-deprived, iron-deficient waif. But all the research pointed to the same conclusion: with the right mix of nutrients and supplements, I could raise a perfectly healthy child on a strict vegetarian diet. Even my husband, a committed carnivore, agreed to go along for the ride, sanctioning Chloe's meat-free existence on the condition that she be free to switch to the dark side if the urge arose.

Little did I realize, that dark side would arrive sooner than expected. When I informed Chloe's pre-school teacher the very first day of class that my daughter is a strict vegetarian, she snapped her gum and responded: "Oh, okay. But she can still eat chicken and fish, right?" I almost fainted.

But ill-informed teachers aren't my only adversaries. I'm also squaring off against an army of three-year-olds lugging lunchboxes chock full of Chloe contraband. What sort of chance does marinated tofu and mango-flecked quinoa stand against deep-fried chicken fingers? Since her birth, I've imagined sitting my young daughter down for a deep philosophical conversation about animal rights. But I figured I had seven or eight years to prep for The Talk. All of a sudden, Chloe's out of arm's reach and surrounded by ravenous toddlers threatening to undo years of work.

And hard work it's been. Raising a vegetarian daughter takes more than loading a diaper bag with hummus and cracker snack packs. Nursery rhymes alone are enough to render the task a full-time job. From "three blind mice getting their tails cut off by a butcher knife" to the kid who "loses his poor meatball when somebody sneezed," I've had to ad lib my way through countless sing-songs. Even Dr. Seuss seemed to have it in for me, what, with his heaping platefuls of green eggs and ham.

But censorship has been the least of my challenges. You try explaining to a Filipina babysitter that shrimp paste isn't a vegetable. I've traveled enough to know that in some parts of the world, the very concept of vegetarianism is incomprehensible. Some people simply don't have the luxury of refusing dinner entrees — not when half the population lives below the poverty line. I get it. But that cultural divide hasn't stopped me from doing things I'm not proud of, like checking Chloe's breath for wafts of hamburger when she comes home from play dates.

Sadder than treating my toddler as if she were some bleary-eyed teenager stumbling through the door after an AC/DC concert is the fact that I seem to be going it alone these days. You'd think that the medical community would show me some love with studies revealing staggering obesity rates among toddlers. Instead, I spend my days fielding e-mails from my father containing links to articles entitled, "Iron Deficiency Anemia." Even the normally stone-cold nurse at our pediatrician's office burst into gales of laughter when a routine check-up revealed that Chloe is a die-hard vegetarian — as if it were a role reserved for hemp-wearing, patchouli-loving adolescents.

Yes, raising a vegetarian toddler is tough. But why shouldn't I want my daughter eating a healthy and cruelty-free diet — even if it makes her different from her classmates? It's just that these days, fending off weird bacteria strains and schoolyard cliques seems so much simpler than battling bologna sandwiches.

Before parenthood, we globe trotted without a care. Our passports grew thick with hundreds of stamps from work and leisure travel and a two-year stint in Moscow, where I became pregnant. With the news of the pregnancy, the warnings from our seasoned-parent friends became louder.

"You'll see," our friends said. "Once you have a kid, life will change, and you won't travel anymore."

The excuses ranged from financial constraints and travel-related illnesses, to disrupting sleep schedules and the inconveniences of air travel. Gripped by their kid-fears, most parents we knew let their children dictate their lives. Rather than grounding us, our daughter's birth fueled our sense of adventure. Of course having a baby meant tweaking our lifestyle a bit, but most of the changes we made accommodated our desire to see the world, not her schedule.

In January, and with Eloise walking and talking, we accepted another overseas assignment, and our family moved to Douala, Cameroon. Visions of the three of us crisscrossing the continent in a safari jeep made me giddy with excitement. For a few months, our move to West Africa fit neatly into our plan of raising a little citizen of the world. 

Our two-year-old recited her ABCs and counted to ten in both English and French. She knew the difference between a water buffalo and a cow. And she understood that the world is larger than "Birginia," where she was born, or "Norf Carwina," and "New Orweans," where her grandparents live.

Our big world shrank pretty small this spring, however, when we hit some turbulence. The only bug we had hoped she would catch was the travel bug. So when our Cameroonian doctor stood in our bedroom and told us that Eloise had malaria, tears welled in my eyes and self-loathing thoughts ran rampant through my mind.

That first night, her fever reached 104 degrees, and in those moments that she lay writhing and moaning in my arms, I questioned every decision we had made up until that point. Maybe our friends and family were right. Maybe we shouldn't take all these risks with our daughter and just live a "normal" life, in which Disney World tops our travel wish list.

Upon hearing the news, all of our seasoned-parent friends and family responded with the same shock: "Malaria!" The naysayers were vindicated.

But after three days of mixing a green liquid medicine into her chocolate milk and bribing her with cookies to drink it, our little worm wriggled her way back onto her trampoline — malaria free. Along with her declining fever, those moments of doubts about our unconventional lifestyle faded. We understood well what could have happened, but our family had no room for kid-fears in our suitcases. Armed with our antimalarial pills, mosquito nets and bug repellent, we started planning for our next big trip to see the mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

Hiking three hours through the rainforest to see Dian Fossey's gorillas poses many problems for a toddler. (We have limits.) So we did something our friends back home would have done. We hired a baby sitter. We found her through the American Embassy in Kigali, and the next day, Brian and I trekked up to the gorillas and back again, reuniting with Eloise at the lodge by 3 p.m.

Eloise missed the big furry beasts, but they probably would have freaked her out anyway. Instead, she rode with us through the countryside, with children waving and running along side the car. She saw kids, not much older than she, playing and working on farms. She heard different languages and learned how to say a new word, "Rahwunda."

This time, I posted pictures of our travels on Facebook. Some of the images showed Eloise posing with a plaster gorilla family back at the lodge, and others showed Brian and I less than six feet from an actual silverback. As I expected, the comments rushed in. But this time, they took a different tone.

"Amazing," and "sooo cool," appeared in multiple posts from those who typically knocked our decision to show Eloise the world. Finally, it seemed, we agreed on something. The trip was "awesome," as one friend wrote, but having our little worm along for the ride made it more so — spiritual even.

I expect when Eloise grows up, she might not remember vividly the mountains of Rwanda. She may have forgotten how to speak French, and for sure, she will only know the Moroccan kisses as a classic family story told to her throughout the years. But if she has a choice between traveling to Disney or Dakar, I hope she senses that same mysterious calling we felt that first year in Fez and lets passion, not fear, guide her through her life.

All photographs by Jamie and Brian Rich

My son had to stay in the hospital, Bellevue, a few extra days, suffering from a difficult delivery and high bilirubin scores. My wife was laid up for three more days. All the family was around us, and one of the uncles, in a moment of enlightened selflessness, brought us a full meal on the second day. Something the both of us, my wife especially, desperately needed. A few days later, after time under the tanning lights, our son's jaundice had receded and we took him home. The experience was heart-warming: it felt as if all hands were on deck, and help would be close by.

After a hastily organized bris on the traditional eighth day the family went their own ways. My wife's father went back to Los Angeles. The uncles went back to their homes in the same borough as us, close enough that a phone call could have them at our apartment in minutes. But little did I know that once the baby was home, the concept of help would become more hypothesis than reality, a contentious notion that created a serious family schism.

Being first-time parents, we weren't quite sure what to expect from our relatives. But it was just an assumption that aunts and uncles would pitch in, and that in fact, they would want to pitch in: perhaps bring a meal over every once in a while, or offer to do a little house cleaning, or even babysit a few hours here and there. About this, we were dead wrong.

My mother-in-law stayed for the first three months. Her help was enormous, not only lending a hand and waking up through the night, but also sharing her experiences raising three children with us. But she couldn't stay forever and left for the West Coast after the third month.

My wife and I took the reins and things went as well as they could have as we developed our own patterns of parenting. After about six months, we realized that there was a scarcity of calls from the uncles and aunts: even the grandfather back in Los Angeles seemed over it all. Neither a "How is everythin?" call was received, nor were even the simplest of text messages sent. We began to feel hurt from what we perceived as a void of caring from my wife's immediate relatives. We would hear about these two couples having brunches together and wonder, why couldn't we be invited? We're totally morning people now! We would be invited for dinner, but because of the challenging schedules of a young baby, attending these was next-to-impossible. Turning down these invitations was perceived from their perspective as a slight, but they couldn't possibly understand the physical and psychological exhaustion we were going through.

This was the beginning of our estrangement from the uncles and aunts — four people who lived ridiculously close to us.

We cycled through a myriad of feelings. We were afraid to call to ask for help for fear of rejectio or that we would come across as too demanding. We also thought — though this was unspoken — that perhaps asking for too much help would be seen as a sign of weakness. As if we were saying, no, we can't raise this child on our own: we need help.

So we created a mantra: we don't need the help, but we would like it. And then the vortex of miscommunication hit, and over the next few months, accusations from both sides of the aisle flew back and forth, which boiled down to two prescient points: from our side, "You never offer to help," and from theirs, "If you don't ask for help, you don't deserve it."

The lack of reaching out forced my wife to reconsider her formerly close relationship (even friendship) with her brothers. Could this be the end of her tight bond with them? Had they grown disinterested now that she had a baby? Were their once-common interests diverging? As the tensions rose, the rift culminated into an all-out war of words about us being paranoid and lacking in perspective versus them having seemingly forgotten all about us. As if, poof, we had simply disappeared, fallen off the planet. At least that's how it felt.

Then finally during a sit-down between my wife and one of the uncles, our worst fears and paranoid feelings came true. The words "It's true, we never think about you anymore. Now we just think about the baby," came out of the uncle's mouth. There it was, the painful truth. We were no longer of any importance. As much as it hurt, we had known it all along. We weren't crazy, after all.

We had to ask ourselves, what did we expect from these people? Assumptions that had been made — that living close to uncles and aunts would offer us a respite, that they would help out on weekends, give us a few hours to ourselves to just go to brunch, or see a film, or just to sleep — were not being met.

We realized these people had their own lives, working long hours during the week. Their weekend hours are also precious. I discovered that parents can really become the worst kind of navel-gazers, looking inward with nary a glance outside the windows of our apartment. Sure, the phone calls and babysitting offers had not arrived, but maybe we were just looking at things from the prism of our new life. There are other worlds out there. We just couldn't see them.

After more than a year, family members with cooler heads — namely, my wife's mother — intervened. My wife and I admitted that, yes, we hadn't put in too many calls for help. Our relatives admitted that they could have put more of an effort into first contact.

I'm happy to report that we now receive unsolicited, regular babysitting calls. The relationships are on an even keel; one of the uncles even bought us a spa treatment and offered to take care of our boy while we went off to be steamed, massaged, and therapized.

If I had to do it all over again, I would know to ask for favors from the outset: We don't have much time to cook: do you think you could bring something over? What are you doing Saturday afternoon? How about we buy you lunch and you babysit for the afternoon? Asking for help is not a sin — and now that both couples are (yes) expecting, we'll all need a little more of it.

For the first five years my husband and I were together, we shared a common interest in the most obscure horror movies we could find — Dario Argento, Ruggero Deodato, Gaspar Noe, Takashi Miike.?We challenged one another, ordering movies like Cannibal Holocaust from Canada because it was hard to get in the states just to see if we could stomach it.?(We could.)

Together, we would curl up on the couch, some disturbing horror fare before us, pop some popcorn and descend into madness.?We were probably the only people who looked forward to watching the decidedly B-grade Black Christmas (an abysmally bad movie) the day it came out, just one month before our daughter was born.

My friends would lament our bad taste in movies, mock our desire to see House of 1000 Corpses while they went to see Merchant Ivory Productions, but it was our taste.?Our shared sickness was powered by the same insanity that made us both skydive, bungee jump and enjoy fast cars.?We dug the adrenaline.?Unless a movie made me dig my fingers into my husband's arm and involuntarily cover my eyes, then it was not doing its job.?

And then we had children.

I knew things had changed soon after we brought her home when I perused our DVD collection and was more interested in watching Jennifer Aniston bat her eyes and act ditzy than Sheri Moon Zombie dancing sultrily to "Rocky Mountain Way" in The Devil's Rejects.?

It got worse. Breastfeeding allowed plenty of time for watching television and movies, but instead of watching complicated or disturbing shows like X-Files or 24, I started DVR-ing thirty-minute sitcoms like Hope and Faith.?Even worse??I was laughing along with the laugh track, relating to the clich?d situations the main characters found themselves encountering and trying to convince my husband that it was actually "Kind of dirty -- like, sometimes Kelly Ripa says things that could totally be taken two ways.?Isn't that funny, honey?"

My husband refused to watch Hope and Faith, but was roped into TLC's A Baby Story a couple times. "This is the worst show I have ever seen," he groaned beside me as I nursed our infant daughter.

"But look how sweet they all are," I explained through my tears (oh yes, there were tears for TLC in those early months), hoping that he would also be moved by this version of our own baby story, minus all the blood and slime and goop that made it real.?

And so when he asked, "Why do I want to watch this when I just watched the real thing?" I had no answer.

My husband was sure I had lost my mind, or at least my edge.?He started pushing the issue, bringing home bootleg copies of current horror fare, suggesting we watch Hostel again — anything to reawaken my love of torture porn.?But it was not for me, I told him, something that was confirmed one night while our infant daughter slept in the basinett upstairs and we settled in to watch one of Showtime's Masters of Horror — Takashi Miike's Imprint.?It was torture porn at its finest — fingernails, needles and pain.?I had to turn it off.

A few weeks later, I tried a Texas Chainsaw remake, figuring Imprint (which had actually not even aired on HBO due to its disturbing content) might have been a fluke.?But it happened again.?My tolerance for extreme gore had shifted.?Rob was right.?I had gone soft.

Maybe it was the hormones, the daily doses of oxytocin I was receiving via breastfeeding, that made me crave comedies with Sandra Bullock and warm-hearted romps with loveable beagles while my husband still needed the hard stuff.

Suddenly the world was all fuzzy in soft focus and anything bad happening to anyone — not just children — could happen to my child, if not now then someday.?In sixteen years she could easily be the buxom teenager running away from the ax-wielding killer.?She could one day run out of gas on a country road and ask the wrong person for a tow.?She — and I and we — were vulnerable in this world and I did not need my movies telling me just how.

It was more than that, too.?At their heart, most mainstream horror movies are misogynistic, or at least contain a whole lot of T and A.?There is usually a fine line between pornography and the most graphic horror movie, and the desire to watch both comes from the same base instinct. Before I was happy to indulge in those voyeuristic fantasies, to allow myself to get titillated by someone else's peril, but after the baby, I knew what T and A was really all about.?It was hard to watch the sweet young thing, her nubile breasts jiggling (prior to impalement or some equally hideous death) when my own were being used to feed my infant. My body was suddenly more than just a collection of parts that filled out a sweater and added spice to a violent movie.?Now it served a purpose that was so beautiful and sweet it felt perverted to enjoy it in any other way.

But I was still myself, my husband reminded me. I may have lost the stomach for the gore temporarily, but who would I be without loving the darker side of life??Even if my exploration of it was only through watching B-grade horror, it was still a quirk that was all mine.?I had always loved violence in movies and strip clubs and adrenaline.?Perhaps it makes me a female chauvinist pig, but it was my own.?Without it, I worried I was just another Stepford wife, smiling blandly and cooking non-bloody pot roast.?

It was a box set of Six Feet Under that pulled me from the brink of a future filled with cheesy reruns and dulled down comedy.?

A friend gave me all five seasons to watch during my marathon nursing sessions and as it turned out, watching a show whose main theme was that death comes for us all sooner or later was the perfect antidote to my new mom schmaltz-fest.?The Fisher family, with all of their neuroses and imperfections, reminded me that life is complicated and interesting. It is neither anesthetized like a half-hour baby story or sadistic and cruel like Irreversible.?And death is like birth, natural and expected and, sometimes, even beautiful.?

Sixty-three hours of good television saved me from a life of cheese.?While it's true that I may never want to see a woman treated like a piece of meat again, I also don't need all my entertainment served lukewarm.?I had a baby, not a lobotomy.

It is now a couple years later and although I have never renewed my once-vigorous love of all things blood and gore, I am also not rushing out to see the latest romantic comedy or watching bad sitcoms on cable television.?I do turn off the news when something particularly heinous relating to children or abuse comes on, but I went to see Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 opening weekend, just like old times, and barely flinched.?

As the little girl in Poltergeist (the '80s horror flick that awakened my love of the macabre) once said, "I'm back."?Changed, yes. But still me.?Bring on the chainsaws.

And as soon as I became a mother, I desperately wanted to make sure my son would grow up with Christmas carols and Easter egg hunts. I started going to church, well, religiously. People who knew me, including relatives, were shocked. But I wanted to create a religious foundation for my family. I wanted my son to be baptized and to have some sense of belonging to something larger than himself and our family. We joined a wonderful Presbyterian church in Manhattan.

And yet, it hasn't been as easy as I thought it would be to avoid feeling conflicted sometimes, particularly when it concerns secular considerations, including social, political and racial issues.

I'm a black mom who happens to be half-white, so when the Trinity Church scandal was erupting, I found myself thinking a lot about the political basis of African-American church history. Trinity Church, like so many evangelical megachurches throughout the country, had a superstar pastor, packed services, fantastic gospel singing and ministries that provided essential and admirable support services to the poor, sick, hungry, homeless and downtrodden.

African-American churches have been political gathering spots stretching back to the days of the slave trade. Many pastors and ministers urge their congregations to strive to understand the causes and dynamics of power, money, politics, imperialism and racism. And all of that was great, it just wasn't for me. I didn't grow up attending that kind of church, and I didn't enjoy contentious religious-political debates every week (at church or at the obligatory post-church brunch), plus the worship style was totally different from what I like. I crave sedate, peaceful worship.

One recent Sunday, I struck up a conversation with an amiable African woman on the subway. She was from the same country as my mother and so, predictably, invited me to her church. "I belong to a church already," I explained. She looked even more concerned when I told her the name and location, a wealthy white area. "Do you really like it there?" she asked as if I were a wounded bird. "Do they accept you?"

On the flip side, whenever some white, non-religious acquaintances learn I attend church, I can feel them pause. Are they wondering if I am secretly in league with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ready with razor-sharp race-based observations about the divide between the haves and have-nots and their chances at entry into the kingdom of God? But I don't talk to angels every night about how Doomsday is near. I'm just a regular person.

Even a few seemingly open-minded members of my own church have expressed wonder that we're there. One well-meaning woman approached me one day when I was brand new to the church.

"I think it's lovely that your little one comes here to church," she told me. Then her expression turned solemn as she looked over at my son, who has a Muslim name and a Middle-Eastern appearance. "Get in as much as you can," she implored me, "before he goes back to his father's religion."

Which brings me to my son's father. He doesn't have any hands-on religious parenting responsibilities right now, as he's not living in the country. My husband's pretty liberal, but I expect he will want to talk about religion with our son soon. We both agree that it would be great to have the family participate in some special breaking-the-fast Eid dinners during the month of Ramadan. After all, who doesn't enjoy sharing a special tasty meal and good company? But my son's father told me he also wants our child to fast during the holiest month in Islam. Even drinking water is forbidden for children of fasting age, and depending on who you ask, obligatory fasting starts as young as age seven.

"Are you going to fast every day?" I ask my son's father. He dodges the question, saying something about how mothers from "all religions" like to fast with their children. Hmmm, I don't recall getting that memo. Clearly our family has more than a few things we need to iron out.

In the years to come, I'm hoping my son and I will have some good conversations about religion and culture and society and politics. I expect there may be some frustrating conversations as well. For now, we're hardly at the point of discussing the Sunni-Shia divide in the Muslim world or analyzing the Black Liberation Theology Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Recently, though, my son asked me, "Who is that man?" and he pointed at an image of the disciples surrounding Jesus. It was all beautifully etched onto the stained glass windows of our church.

"Who do you think he is?" I asked my son. And he just smiled back at me, a beautiful smile, as if he suddenly knew the answer.