MSN.com, in some sort of demonic partnership with Good Housekeeping, has put together A Little Slideshow of Guilt and Envy for all of us moms in honor of the upcoming Mother’s Day.

Because looking at a slide of a very pregnant, very beautiful woman, who as it turns out is a mom, a wife, oh, and by the way, a hugely successful Wall Street banker, is just the thing I want to see on a day when I feel, not as if I could do it all, but rather, as if the only thing I could do is curl up in the fetal position and cry.

There are five other slides that manage to push every covetous button I have. The stay-at-home mom who looks like a model (not the sweats-wearing, thirty-pounds-overweight person I became as a SAHM). The mom who looks better at age 62 than I did at 30.

It used to be that, as long as I avoided the Working Mother magazine’s ode to the Mother of the Year, who is always some high-powered executive who teaches underprivileged kids to read when she isn’t tying herself to Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior to save the harp seals and whose kids are all honor students and receiving major awards themselves from major humanitarian agencies, I was fine. I could live in my brave little world where I was coping okay as long as you didn’t look under the couch, in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, or in my youngest son’s backpack.

It’s not safe out there for moms who work outside the home. If we manage to duck the critics who somehow think it’s their place to judge our decision to add to this nation’s gross national product and determine that we are deficient mothers, the minute we run for cover we find that our biggest supporter is putting up another ideal we can’t live up to.

And if I see one more commercial of Kelly Ripa pretending to juggle motherhood and a career, I’m gonna hurl right in Jennifer Lopez’ lap, who is reportedly putting together a reality show about balancing the same stressful proposition.

I hit the Hork Button hard here because these two and their ilk know nothing about juggling. “Juggling” in this environment means things like greeting a wakened baby who is running a 103 degree temperature, but Daddy dashes out to his car in his underwear because he doesn’t want to have to stay home with the baby, so Mommy sucks it up one more time and stays home, putting her job at risk (the job she has to have to make the mortgage payment, by the way, not the job she has so she can afford the Maserati and the housekeeper) and frantically trying to really phone it in via conference calls.

“Juggling” does not mean handing off the baby to the live-in nanny who will take the baby to the doctor, stand in line at Walgreens, and manage the suppositories, then take the baby and give him his bath and put him to bed so mom can come in and read him a story.

“Juggling” in my house is a circus act. It would make a great reality show (and its ensuing episodes: Try to Make It to The School Play AND Not Miss the Mandatory Meeting, followed by the classic Dodge Snarky Comments From Other Moms About Not Really Loving Your Children Enough To Stay Home and the ever-popular Let’s Clean Puke Off The Walls After A Ten-Hour Day at Work! Whaddaya Mean We Never Do Anything Fun?) except that it wouldn’t be funny.

But it would be real.