It was 7:41. “Honey, come on.” Sighing, in just socks, Ellie began a slow lope toward the door. I grabbed her jacket, then saw that her hair was still wet, already matted around her neck. Steeling myself, I set down the mug and the lunchbox, sprinted back upstairs, and grabbed the detangling spray, a wide-tooth comb, and a Hello Kitty headband.

Ellie saw me coming and reacted the way a death-row prisoner might to an armed guard on the day of her execution. “Nooooo!” she shrieked, and ducked underneath the table.

“Ellie,” I said, keeping my voice reasonable, “I can’t let you go to school like that.”

“But it HURTS!”

“I’ll do it as fast as I can.”

“But that will hurt MORE!”

“Ellie, I need you to come out of there.” Nothing. “I’m going to count to three, and if you’re not in your chair by the time I say ‘three’ . . .” I lowered my voice, even though Dave was gone. “No Bachelor on Monday.” Obviously, I knew that a cheesy reality dating show was not ideal viewing for a kindergartner. But the show was my guilty pleasure, and Dave usually worked late on Mondays, so rather than wrestle Ellie into bed and have her sneak into my bedroom half a dozen times with requests for glasses of water and additional spritzes of “monster spray” (Febreze, after I’d scraped the label off the container), thus risking an interruption of the most dramatic rose ceremony ever, I let her watch with me.

Moaning like a gut-shot prisoner, she dragged herself out from under the table and slowly climbed up into her chair. I squirted the strawberry-scented detangling spray, then took a deep breath and, as gently as I could, tugged the comb from her crown to the nape of her neck.

“Ow! OWWWW! STOBBIT!”

“Hold still,” I said, through gritted teeth, as Ellie squirmed and wailed and accused me of trying to kill her. “Ellie, you need to hold still.”

“But it HUUUUURTS!” she said. Tears were streaming down her face, soaking her collar. “STOBBIT! It is PAINFUL! You are MURDERING ME!”

“Ellie, if you’d stop screaming and hold still it wouldn’t hurt that much!” Sweating, breathing hard, I pulled the comb through her hair. Good enough, I decided, and used the headband to push the ringlets out of her eyes. Then I scooped her up under my arm; snatched up her jacket; half set, half tossed her into her car seat; and, finally, got her to school.

THREE

My cell phone was ringing as I pulled into the driveway. “Did you see it?” Sarah asked.

“Just the headline,” I told her. I’d been late again. Mrs. Dale, the take-no-shit teacher who was on drop-off duty that morning, had given me a tight-lipped smile as I’d made excuses over Ellie’s still-damp head.

“It’s mostly great. Seventy-five percent positive.”

My skin went cold; my heart contracted. “And the other twenty-five?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.

“Oh, you know.” She lowered her voice until she sounded like Sam the Eagle of The Muppet Show fame. “ ‘Some in journalism question the proliferation of female-centric websites, and whether the issues they cover—such as sex, dating, and the politics of marriage and motherhood—and the way that they cover them, with a particular off-brand, breezy sense of humor, are doing feminism any favors.’ ”

“ ‘Some in journalism,’ ” I repeated. “Did he quote anyone?”

Sarah gave her gruff bark of a laugh. “Ha. Good one. As far as I’m concerned, ‘some in journalism’ are his girlfriend, his mom, and a pissed-off intern who couldn’t cut it at Ladiesroom.”

I flipped open my laptop, saw that the battery had died because I’d failed to plug it in the night before, and then started hunting the living room for Dave’s. I knew that Sarah was probably right. I’d been in journalism long enough to know that anonymous quotes usually came from disgruntled underlings too chicken to sign their names to their critiques. But I was the one who’d written about—how did the Journal put it?—“the politics of marriage and motherhood,” and whatever the piece said was sure to sting.

I had started on the marriage-and-motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal read-only-by-my-friends blog called “Fifty Shades of Meh.” I’d written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our “grown-up time,” and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers: I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat,” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is, instead, the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an e-mail address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is dominant Christian Grey, and he’ll give her that computer, plus an iPad, a Beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear—Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom—Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.”

I’d put the post up at noon. By dinnertime, it had been linked to, retweeted, and read more than anything else I’d ever written. The next morning, an e-mail from someone named Sarah Lai arrived. She was launching a new website and wanted to talk to me about being a regular contributor. “I write about sex,” she told me. “Don’t be alarmed when you Google me.” So I’d Googled her and read her posts on pony play and next-generation vibrators on my way to New York City.

I’d walked into the Greek restaurant in Midtown where we’d decided to meet for lunch expecting a leather-clad vixen, a kitten with a whip, in teetering stripper heels and a latex bodysuit. Sarah Lai looked like a schoolgirl, in a white button-down shirt with a round collar tucked into a pleated gray skirt. Black tights and conservative flat black boots completed her ensemble. “I know, I know,” she’d said, laughing, when I told her she wasn’t what I expected. “What can I say? The quiet ones surprise you.” She set down the wedge of pita she was using to scoop hummus into her mouth and said, “So how’d you know your husband was The One?”

I looked at her, surprised. I’d figured she’d want to know how I got started with my blog, where I found my inspiration, which writers I admired, what other blogs I read. What I saw on her face, underneath the tough-girl pose of a cynic in the city, was unguarded curiosity . . . and hope. She was twenty-six, maybe old enough to have a serious boyfriend of her own, and wonder, as I had at her age, whether he was a keeper or just a guy who’d keep her happy through the holidays.

“On our first date, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see him again,” I told her, picturing Dave across the table at the Chinatown restaurant where we’d walked after work. “He was handsome, but really serious. He scared me a little. I thought he was a lot smarter than I was—I still think that, sometimes—and he was, you know, completely focused on his work.” We’d talked about his current project, about the mayoral candidate he admired and the three others running for the office he thought were stupid or corrupt, and then he’d told me the story that had won my heart forever, his dream of the Me So Shopping Center.

“The what?” Sarah’s expression was rapt, her eyes wide. She’d done everything but pull out a notebook to take notes.

“You’re probably too young to remember the movie Full Metal Jacket, but there’s a scene where this Vietnamese prostitute says, ‘Me so horny’? It was the title of a rap song.” I was convinced Sarah had no idea what I was talking about, but she nodded anyhow. “Dave’s big idea was to have a bunch of shops. Like, Me So Horny would be the town brothel, and Me So Hungry would be the diner, and there’d be a psychiatrist’s office called Me So Sad, and a clothing shop . . .”

“Me So Naked?” Sarah guessed.

“It was either that or Me So Cold. And the doctor’s office, Me So Sick, and the cleaning service, Me So Messy.” I was laughing as I remembered the increasingly silly ideas we’d come up with, how I’d contrived to touch Dave’s hand and wrist as I’d laughed. “And that was it. He was already losing his hair, and I could see that sometimes he’d bore me, but I thought, we’ll always have Me So. He’ll always make me laugh.”

Sarah nodded. I had the sense of clearing some invisible hurdle, passing a quiz I hadn’t known I’d taken. Sarah had moved to New York from Ohio, had gotten a job in a coffee shop and given herself a year to make it as a writer. When we met, she’d started making a decent amount of money from the ads on her blog. Her dream was to start a bigger, more comprehensive, less sex-centric site. “Fashion, food, magazines, marriage, children, all that,” she’d rattled off, before giving the waiter our order—moussaka, grilled lamb, stuffed grape leaves, and more warm pita. “I’ll write about sex, of course, but I’ll need someone to cover marriage and motherhood.” Throughout the lunch we discussed design and ad buys, ideas, headlines, and titles. By the time dessert arrived, Sarah suggested I give the column a shot and try to write a few blog posts.

“Are you sure you don’t want someone with more experience?” I’d asked. I’d never thought of myself as a writer. Dave was the writer; I was a graphics-and-images girl. But we could certainly use the extra money. And the truth was that staying at home with a baby—now a toddler—did not fulfill me the way working at the paper once had. With work, there was a sense of completion. You’d start to lay out a page, or create graphics, or embed just the right video clip in an article about the city’s failing schools, and eventually, after editing and feedback and sometimes starting over again, you’d be done. With motherhood and marriage there was no finish line, no hour or day or year when you got to say you were through. Life just went on and on, endless and formless, with no performance evaluation, no raises or feedback or two weeks’ vacation. I thought that maybe working for money again could give me back that sense of satisfaction I’d once gotten from a job well done . . . or even just done.

“How is this website going to be different from the women’s websites that are already out there?” I had asked. Sarah, who’d clearly been waiting for that question, launched into her answer, about tone and content and reader engagement. I nibbled a stuffed grape leaf and thought about how lucky I was—how without my even trying, a solution for my worries had landed, like a gift-wrapped box dropped out of a window, right in my lap.

Ladiesroom.com had launched six weeks after my interview, finding its niche in the online world—and its advertisers—faster than either of us could have expected. Four months after its launch, the site was acquired by Foley Media, a bigger company looking to expand its brand. I was working harder than I had at the Examiner, pulling my first all-nighters since college, powering through the next day on espresso and a twenty-minute nap, engaging each day with the people who commented on my posts. And now the Wall Street Journal had decided we were, in a sense, newsworthy.

“Call me when you’ve read it,” Sarah said. I made some kind of affirmative noise and then turned on Dave’s laptop and found the story. I scrolled through their recap of our success, the quotes that captured Sarah’s and my funny banter, and the claims from critics who questioned our experience and asked whether our motives were self-promotional. Beneath the words LIVING OUT LOUD, I found my photograph. “Oh, God,” I groaned. I’d worn a pink jersey dress and nude heels, and Sarah and I had posed on Sarah’s desk, in front of her floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Bryant Park. When the shot had been set up, I’d thought we looked nice. Seeing the picture now, all I could think was Before and After. Way, Way Before and After. Worst of all, the caption underneath read “SEXY MAMAS: Mom-bloggers Allison Weiss and Sarah Lai at play in Manhattan.” Never mind that I hardly looked sexy, and Sarah wasn’t a mom.

Ah, well. At least we looked reasonably professional. The photographer, who’d clearly been expecting the online version of Girls Gone Wild, had been disappointed to find ladies in business clothes, one of whom was almost forty, with nary a tattoo in sight (Sarah had a few—“just not,” as she put it, “where the judge can see them”). He had not-so-subtly pushed me toward the edge or the back of the shots, while trying to get Sarah to bend over her desk, or to stand with her hands on her knees and wave her bottom in front of her laptop—“so it’s, you know, sex and the Internet.” When she refused, and also politely turned down his offer to shoot her posing with a whip, he’d asked us to have an edible-body-paint fight (thanks but no thanks). Finally, he asked if we would at least stand side by side. “And can you kind of touch each other?”