“Mommy, can you ask your boss to let you come home early on my birthday next week?” my four-year-old daughter Lexi asked me last night. “I want you to have dinner with me.”

I just lost my ninth nanny. I go through nannies the way some women go through men. Nine nannies in seven years seems suspect. Some wonder if we’re secretly beating the nannies or keeping them chained inside the playroom. Why else would we have had such a spectacular run of bad luck in keeping childcare?

I will never forget Adam Walsh. The image of the sweet, smiling, gap-toothed six-year-old boy in his baseball uniform is forever emblazoned in my memory.

Last year when my son Jonah asked me to be the class mom, I responded “but I’m your mom sweetie, I don’t need to be the class mom." He was temporarily disappointed, but didn’t push the point. This year Jonah was adamant. “Mommy,” he announced at the end of August, “you will be the class mom this year…you MUST.”

There is a Jewish expression that says: “God could not be there all of the time; therefore he created mothers.”

Oy. I blame the Talmudic scholars for creating the original Super Mom and all of the meshugas that goes along with it.

It’s been more than a dozen years since I had to crank out a term paper at 2 a.m. or cram for a final exam or God forbid had to apply an utterly meaningless mathematical theorem to anything.

But weirdly, I am still haunted by homework and wake up in the middle of the night sweating that I’m about to flunk a test because I forgot to study.

I’ve always had a hunch that I am being grossly underpaid. After all, shouldn’t I be more flush given that by 9 p.m. each night I’m so wiped that my body feels like it’s been mowed down by a Mack truck and I need a triple shot of espresso just to get me moving in the morning.

I hate reality TV….well, most if it anyway. I am so over the fate of Jon and Kate. And while I confess to Idol worshiping during the final few rounds each season and enthusiastically texting my vote to support the underdog, I have little interest in keeping up with the preening, Botoxed, Married to the Mob Jersey girls on The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Because of my contempt for most of the low-culture products proliferating on the cable channels today, it’s a bit baffling that I agreed to let my six-year-old daughter Lexi get cast in a reality show.

My kids are now eight and six years old, which means they are still plenty self absorbed to believe that they are king and queen of the castle, but old enough at least I think, to start having some construct of a social conscience and a more accurate sense of the world.

I love boys....always have. There were the two Alans and a Brad, a Noah a Scott a Chris and a slew of Mikes...I wound up even marrying one. There were also the scandalous Todd and Lance. And, of course, there was the beautiful Dutch guy, Iljan, my summer camp love. It was an exquisite romance - six weeks of intense, young passion followed by a year of heartache when he went home to the Netherlands.