It should be easier to know the price of something so costly.

But in a war, numbers are contentious -- politicized and hard to pin down.

We live in a country that has been engaged in long-term, recent wars. The day-to-day reality of that impacts a sliver of people who have served or are serving overseas and their families. Do the rest of us have any idea how much it has cost us in blood and treasure?

There have been 6,805 American servicemen and women who have died during military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Faces of the Fallen tracker by the Washington Post.

The death toll among Iraqis and Afghanis is much harder to know.

There have been at least 120,000, and maybe more than 137,000, Iraqi civilians killed by violence during the war, according to British-based Iraq Body Count. Including enemy combatants brings the death toll to 188,000.

The most recent peer-reviewed and comprehensive study, however, places the total Iraqi death toll much higher -- at 500,000, of which 60 percent were violent deaths and 40 percent were war-related, avoidable, indirect deaths, such as patients who died for lack of treatment in hospitals overwhelmed with war casualities.

In Afghanistan, there have been between 18,000 and 20,000 civilian deaths attributed to the war.

Our country's involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has cost taxpayers more than $4 trillion and could reach up to $6 trillion in the long run, according to a Harvard study published last year.

These numbers are staggering and outside what we can truly comprehend.

Still, we have a responsibility as citizens, not only of this country but of the world, to consider these costs and ask ourselves if the outcomes have been worth the price.

When I force myself to confront this question, I lose track of numbers. I go back to 2006, the year I returned to work after the birth of my son.

I covered four local military deaths that year.

I remember the family of Marine Lance Cpl. Jonathan Kyle Price, from a small town in southern Illinois, talking about how he was supposed to return in a month and marry his pregnant fiancee. He was killed in Iraq that January. He was 19.

My younger brother was 19 that year, too.

Two months later, I covered the funeral of Army Sgt. Amanda Nicole Pinson. I remember the Toby Keith song "American Solider" played during her service, and the older veteran who stood with his hand over his heart as the cars in her funeral procession headed to the cemetery. She was 21.

That summer, I witnessed the funeral and burial of Marine Cpl. Riley Baker. There were a thousand mourners at his service and a seven-mile funeral procession. He was 22.

I watched a mother's face when she was handed an American flag folded into a triangle and the way she clutched it to her chest.

Right before Christmas, I wrote about Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew W. Clark. He had thought about his mother when he filled out his emergency contact form before leaving for Iraq. He wrote that he wanted his priest present if his mother had to hear bad news, so his priest accompanied three Marines when they visited her. Clark was 22.

These four would have been young when the Twin Towers fell on Sept. 11. They came of age in a time when our country had been attacked, and they wanted to do what they could to defend it.

As a young new mother, I sobbed through each service and burial I attended that year. I thought about their lives and the broken hearts of their families.

Our pain is like the pain of any other parent in the world.

There's the other cost of war.

The cost that has nothing to do with numbers.

I think I may have caught this bug as a child.

I discovered escapism in stories.

My wanderlust, back then, would be largely limited to the pages of a book and my imagination. But as soon as I was able and had any means at all, I began traveling.

I have been seduced by beaches, by mountains, by the vibrancy of a city; by mosques, by basilicas, by street art and Van Gogh. I have dropped into countries not knowing the language or another soul, but compelled to experience things I had only known in abstraction. I hate wasting daylight in a new place, so I've slept in trains and buses heading overnight to the next stop.

I recognize that a tribe of wanderers exists among us. We find it hard to resist the impulse to move, despite deep roots. The heft of our passports matters more than the size of our homes.

Travel is rarely relaxing for me. There's a discomfort to unfamiliar surroundings, to getting lost, to making plans and constantly adjusting them. In that discomfort, that break from familiarity and routine, is a chance to feel more fully alive. When I've stumbled across something that forces me to stop and take notice, I step into the shoes of my children. I embrace that feeling of wonder.

I married someone with this same sensibility. We have wanted to show our children the vastness of everything outside their circles. It may be one of the best gifts parents can impart: Give them a sense of how big the world is and plant the desire for them to explore it.

My parents were not able to take us on fancy vacations as children. But they bought us lots of books, took us to the library and told us countless stories of their own childhoods far away. It nourished that desire to see as much of the world as possible.

When I decided to study abroad in college, I created a program for myself in Cairo. I had never been in the Middle East. I did not know anyone in Egypt, nor did I speak Arabic. But I was fascinated by the culture and history of the region. When you live in a foreign place for months, you learn how to hail a cab and not get ripped off by the cabbie. You get sick and figure out how to see a doctor. You eat and drink where the locals eat and drink. You become a little less foreign.

You discover what homesickness feels like in the core of your being.

And you gain an innate sense of independence.

The realization that I could survive in a strange land, on my own as a young adult, may be one of the most powerful and lasting lessons of that journey.

So often with our children, we return to the same places. We want them to develop close bonds with their grandparents and relatives who live in different states. We want them to experience the cliched but genuine magic of Disney, the tranquility of water and sand, the thrill of snowfall. We want to show them the monuments that are the fabric of this country's history, and the richness of art and culture in its museums. They should see firsthand the difference between a desert dusk and a sun setting among skyscrapers.

Staying close to home is like reading the same line of poetry over and over.

Places can change us profoundly.

I am a different person for having drifted down the Nile in a felucca, cheered at a soccer match in Argentina, shopped in the street markets in Karachi and bargained at the Grand Bazaar in Turkey. I know the places that will tug at me to return: Paris, Lake Louise, Brazil. And the places I long to see one day: the Taj Mahal, Cordoba, the glittering blue waves in the Maldives.

Whether or not I make it to all the places that capture my imagination, the thought of one day traveling to them makes me hopeful. For my children, I hope the journey takes them far.

And brings them back.

The most pernicious lie I believed about motherhood was a lie of omission.

No one told me that having ambitious career goals while raising children required significant help. By help, I mean any or some combination of: a stay-at-home spouse, accessible and helpful relatives, reliable childcare, a housecleaner or cook.

It was a mystery to me how everyone else managed to keep a clean house, their families fed healthy meals, and themselves maintained while still advancing at work and having time for a social life.

I'm sure there will always be the 1 percent of superwomen among us who pull this off without hired help or extraordinary support systems. But I'm talking about the 99 percent -- the rest of us. We're human: Our minds can only carry so many to-do items at one time. (That would be around seven, research shows.) Our bodies have a minimum requirement for sleep.

I learned this after years of wondering why I was so tired, so rushed and always feeling so behind: The ones who are "leaning in" full-tilt have someone else putting away a lot of laundry and preparing a fair number of meals. Even the ones who can barely afford it, outsource it. If it's a choice between a pricey summer camp for the children or a weekly cleaning service, pick the maid!

No working mother shared this advice so explicitly with me until recently. It's not just a matter of choosing peace of mind or an extra few hours of rest for yourself. Paid help at home can make the critical difference of getting by at work or getting ahead.

Brigid Schulte exposes a few of these truths in her recent book, "Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time." The research bears out these facts: More mothers today work outside the home, spend more time taking care of their children, do a greater percentage of household chores than their spouses and have less time for themselves than in years past.

One of the time-use researchers Schulte interviewed remarked: "Employed mothers talking about sleep is like a hungry man talking about food."

Now that, right there, is truth.

"You can't add work and do more child care without getting enormously time-stressed. You can't have it all unless other things shift in other people's behavior -- unless men actually reduce their working hours and increase their time doing housework and child care, unless cultures change and we're prepared to give social support to parents," says Lyn Craig, a sociologist and time-use researcher from Australia, in Schulte's book.

As a product of a working-class childhood, the idea of needing another person to keep my home as clean as I would like it or relying on prepared meals to feed my family seemed indulgent and lazy. I had watched my mother, raising six children, manage to run a functioning household.

I never saw her sit still. I never saw her take a nap in the afternoon, or sit down to simply watch a television show or read a book. The woman was (and is, to this day) always in motion. From her, I inherited the notion that the best mothers are continuously working.

It is an impossible standard to set for myself, as she didn't work outside the home when we were young. We didn't have multiple activities to which she drove us. The work was no less time consuming, but she had prioritized what was most important and sacrificed the rest.

My youngest sister, a powerhouse attorney with a baby and another on the way, still has ambitious career goals she hopes to achieve. I texted her recently: "You need a full-time nanny, who you can teach to cook, plus keep Mom on standby. Also, up your maid's hours. This is the best career advice I can give you."

I'm done with the lies.