The serene and sexy woman sipped a glass of water in a nursing bra, surrounded by glass windows, with bottles of breast milk dangling from her chest, nary a breast pump in sight.

With her toned abs and impossibly tiny bowl of cereal, she's become the poster mom of a popular parlor game: Name everything wrong here.

There are the obvious disconnected bottles, attached hands-free to her anatomy. But there's so much more than the technical failing in this image. There's the even more flawed subtext: Pumping is relaxing! Pumping is fun! Pumping is glamorous!

No, no, and not in the least.

There's a backlash brewing to this contrived and oppressive parenting culture. The myth of glamorous parenting is pushed in our faces by a myriad of powerful forces -- commercial ones trying to sell us things that will solve our problems, as well as social ones, which glorify the Pinterest-enabled anomalies among us.

Sara Given, 31, of Columbus, Ohio, is an unlikely crusader in this rebellion. She is an orchestra teacher for middle and high schoolers and mother of a 1-year-old daughter.

"I feel like some of the parenting culture is very high-pressure," she said.

Her release valve is humor. It often shows up in unexpected places.

What she started as a sardonic microblog has touched a nerve with parents across the world. Last month she started a Tumblr, "It's Like They Know Us," with a simple concept: Whenever Given comes across a ridiculous image marketed toward parents, she adds a caption and posts it online. The "magical pumping mother" was one of her firsts.

In her own parenting experience, Given has experienced puzzling moments when the cheerfully delusional marketing of a product bore no resemblence to her own life.

She was dumbfounded by the instructions that came with the infant carrier she bought for her baby. In the pictures, a woman operates the contraption with one hand while the baby snuggles, all smiles.

"My child acts like I'm trying to set her on fire when I'm trying to put her into it," Given said. The baby carrier never really worked out for her. "We'd make big scenes in public," she said.

Commercial images that seem so divorced from the reality of parenting make her wonder: What is going on?

She's not the only one. In a matter of weeks, she gained nearly 20,000 followers, and has done half a dozen interviews with other websites and media outlets internationally.

"I understand that (advertisers) can't show miserable people when they are trying to sell a product," she said. But some of the images are so over-the-top they drift toward absurdity.

All the furniture is white and spotless. The children are wearing clean, white clothing while being spoon-fed brightly colored baby food. On that white furniture. Older kids are happily chowing down on salads.

"It's like they picked the exact opposite of what a real family would look like," she said.

Marketers have been peddling fantasies with out-of-touch depictions of women and family life since the advent of commercials. But the ability to take down the most ridiculous among them, on a powerful platform, is relatively new.

The '50s saw the glorification of the homemaker, delighted with the appliances and tools that enhanced her domestic prowess. Through the decades, the images of mothers in media have reflected the changing societal expectations of them. So it's interesting that most of the images on Given's Tumblr depict a slim, stylish, sexy working mother in elegant surroundings with perfect children.

In a time-pressured era, when a majority of mothers work outside the home and are inundated with countless parenting blogs, gadgets and advice, it's no surprise that these pictures make us laugh.

When Given sees a picture of a fashionable woman typing on a laptop with one hand, holding a cellphone in the other hand and balancing a baby on her lap -- a baby who is also typing on the computer -- her instinct is to write what all of us are thinking while our eyes roll: "I'm getting so much work done. Toddlers are easy."

Obviously, it's not a picture. It's a parody.

A young teenager from a Michigan high school had pictures of her sexual acts, her drug habit and personal information publicly floating around the Internet a few weeks ago.

Her number of followers on social media jumped from a few thousand to more than 20,000 in a matter of days. She defended herself on Twitter after pictures of her performing a sexual act were posted on Instagram. She briefly became a viral Internet meme.

A reader alerted me to her account. When I saw the pictures of her and her friends in their bathing suits, her school easily identifiable with a quick Google search, I wondered what kind of responsibility an adult bears to a stranger's child in a situation like that.

Where were this girl's parents? Where were her friends' parents?

I was reminded of her when I watched a screening of the movie "Men, Women & Children," opening in theaters Oct. 17, a dark portrayal of how technology is affecting families and intimacy in all of our relationships. It's a movie about the ways in which we seek human connection and how our tech complicates this already rocky terrain.

I asked Jason Reitman, who directed the film and who has an 8-year-old daughter, what he thought about the scenario I confronted earlier.

"My problem isn't with the Internet," he said. "But why is this girl so in search of love that she is throwing all of this online so complete strangers will find her appealing?"

Was she in search of love, or did she think a certain type of fame would make her feel good about herself? In Reitman's movie, the characters experience just about every demon further enabled by technology: porn addiction, eating disorders, affairs, isolation, humiliation.

There are parents in the movie on each far end of the spectrum -- from a hyperviligant mom who tracks her daughter's every move online to one who exploits her daughter's sexuality to put her on a fast-track to fame.

Neither of those approaches works out well for the children involved.

"How do you teach your kids to not be broken by all these things that can shatter your confidence on the Internet?" Reitman said to me. "I just don't know what the rules are."

Generations will look back at us fumbling and trying to find our way with this pervasive digital connectivity. It's as if we are driving without air bags and seat belts right now, Reitman said. It's not as if a car, or technology, is inherently bad, he added. We just haven't worked out the safest operation of it.

Reitman raises questions that go the heart of the modern human condition: Why do we need love and attention from people we don't know? And why do we ignore it from the people who are close to us?

If that young girl on Twitter had been the daughter of someone I know, I would have approached her parents and suggested that they check out her social media accounts because I was worried about her. She may be experimenting with some of the same risky behavior that many other adolescents experience, but she is leaving a permanent trail behind.

Her brain in its mid-teenage years has not yet developed to process actions and consequences the way it will at 25. And while she appears to be reveling in the attention and seeking more of it, I still worry about her emotional and physical safety.

If I had seen her lost on a street corner, would I have stopped to ask if she was OK? I probably would have. Wouldn't we want someone to let us know if one of our kids was in trouble?

I thought about this and picked up the phone to call the principal at her school. I left a message identifying who I was, said I was worried about the social media account of one of his students, and left her name. I suggested he might want to contact her parents.

Did I overstep?

I don't know.

Later that afternoon, there was a local news report in that town that the police were investigating sexual pictures that had been posted of a student at the school.

I checked in on her account a few days later. She had not posted anything for six days, but she was back.

She describes herself online with a Britney Spears lyric: "I'm Mrs. Most Likely To Get On TV For Strippin' On The Streets."

Ten black mothers sat on the stage in an auditorium and looked into a diverse crowd of women in the audience. They were about to share something personal and hurtful with this room full of mostly strangers.

They were going to talk about something they didn't normally share with their white friends or colleagues.

It was about to get real in that room.

In the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager fatally shot by a white Ferguson, Missouri police officer, conversations about race in the St. Louis area have been loaded.

Christi Griffin, the president of The Ethics Project, wanted this to be different. She wanted to invite mothers of other races to hear directly from black mothers the reality of raising a black son in America. She wanted them to hear the words they each had said to their own sons, in different variations over the years, but all with the same message: Stay alive. Come home alive.

She wanted mothers who had never felt the fear, every single time their son walked outside or drove a car, that he could possibly be killed to hear what that felt like.

Griffin's son, now grown, had never gotten in trouble nor given her any trouble growing up. But when her son was 14 years old, the family moved into an all-white neighborhood. She took him to the police department to introduce him to the staff. She wanted the officers to know that he belonged there, that he lived there.

When he turned 16, it was time for another talk. Every single time he got into his car to drive, she made him take his license out of his wallet and his insurance card out of the glove compartment.

"I did not want him reaching for anything in the car."

He graduated from college with a degree in physics.

Marlowe Thomas-Tulloch said that when she noticed her grandson was getting bigger and taller, she laid bare a truth to him: Son, if the police stop you, I need for you to be humble. But I need more than that. I need for you to be prepared to be humiliated.

If they tell you take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out. Be ready to turn your pockets out. If they tell you to sit down, be prepared to lie down.

You only walk in the street with one boy at a time, she told him.

"What?" her grandson said. In his 17-year-old mind, he hadn't done anything wrong and nothing was going to happen to him.

"If it's three or more, you're a mob," she said. "That's how they will see you."

She started to cry.

"Listen to me," she begged. "Hear me."

Finally, she felt him feel her fear.

If they ask you who you are, name your family.

Yes, sir and no, sir. If they are in your face, even if they are wrong, humble yourself and submit yourself to the moment.

"I'm serious," she said. "Because I love you."

She told him she would rather pick him up from the police station than identify his body at a morgue.

When her grandson left to go home, she called her daughter to tell her about the conversation. Her daughter asked her what she had said, because her son came home upset, with tears in his eyes.

"I hope I said enough to save his life," Thomas-Tulloch said. "I'd rather go down giving him everything I got."

The mothers talked about the times their sons had been stopped in their own neighborhoods because "they fit the description." They shared the times their sons had come home full of rage and hurt for being stopped and questioned for no reason. And they told the other mothers how often they told their sons to simply swallow the injustice of the moment. Because they wanted them alive, above all.

Amy Hunter, director of racial justice at the YWCA in metro St. Louis, said it's taken her 10 years to be able to share this story about her son without crying. She didn't want her white friends to see her cry when she told it. She didn't want to look weak.

Her four children are now older, but when one of her sons was 12, he decided to walk home from the Delmar Loop in University City where he had met some friends.

He saw a police officer circling him, and he knew. He was wearing Sperrys, a tucked-in polo shirt, a belt. He was 12, and he knew, but he was scared.

He lived five houses away, and he hadn't done anything wrong.

"I knew you were home," he said to his mom when he finally made it home after being frisked. "I knew I was about to get stopped, and I thought about running home to you."

His mother froze.

"I forgot to tell him," she said. "I forgot to tell him: Don't run. Don't run or they'll shoot you."

Her 12-year-old cried when he told her what had happened and asked if he was stopped because he was black.

"Probably, yeah," she said.

"I just want to know, how long will this last?" he asked her.

That's when she started to cry.

"For the rest of your life," she said.

It doesn't matter about your college degree, the car you drive, the street you live on, she told the moms in the audience. It's not going to shield your child like a Superman cape. She admitted that it was difficult to share these painful moments.

Just one of the mothers on the stage asked a single question of the audience. Assata Henderson, who has raised three children, all college graduates, said she called her sons to ask them what they remembered about "the talk" she had given them about how to survive as a black man.

"Mama, you talked all the time," they said to her.

It made her wonder, she said. She said she wasn't pointing any fingers, but it made her wonder about the conversations the other mothers were having with their sons, who grow up to be police officers, judges and CEOs.

"You're the mothers," she said to the crowd. "What are the conversations you are having with the police officers who harass our children?"