I learned this recently on a three-day business trip that took me away from my husband and almost-two-year-old. I was already weepy when they dropped me at the airport. Later, as I endured a long wait for my flight, I heard a familiar little voice. Sounded like Katie, but it couldn't be - and it wasn't. It was another little tyke about her size, zooming around and making demands on her frazzled parents. I felt a tug from somewhere inside my chest, as if that faux-Katie had set off a sensor in my Mommy Response Center requiring me to scoop her up, keep her safe, squeeze her for being so adorable.

Things got even weirder when I changed planes in Pittsburgh. During a pit stop in the ladies' room, a woman came in with a baby, maybe nine or 10 months old. Perverse as it may seem, I had to stop myself from offering to change the little darling's diaper.

I started thinking about all those parents wandering through airports, missing their young children. Why don't airports install kiosks for parents, like the ones they have for businesspeople who need to plug in their laptops? Only, with the parental area, you could change a baby or remind a toddler several times to stop putting her feet on the dining table. If you've been away from family for an extended time, you might even practice giving a time-out.

Now you know why I'm getting strange looks from my friends. In retrospect, this particular line of thinking sounds kind of ridiculous. After all, I know many parents who openly desire several days of freedom from family responsibilities, even if it entails sitting in a conference room staring at PowerPoint presentations. And it's true; by the time I got involved in my work I wasn't obsessing about Katie anymore. I remembered the other part of myself that I've been missing so much: The adult woman who wears nylons and has time to blow dry her hair and can wear earrings because the people at dinner won't be tugging on them. It was a pleasure to talk about movies involving something other than animals or trains; to eat food more complex than white stuff with red stuff on top; to stay up past 10 and enjoy another cocktail.

And yet. Even during this great group dinner that went on for nearly four hours at a lovely French bistro, I couldn't help but locate another mom and talk a little about our kids and how we manage working and raising them. I guess I'll always have this split personality. I yearn to be around adults, but I can't help but tell them about my kid. I'm hoping I can live in both worlds, but worry that I won't perform well in either. There's this big, strange gap between the Baby World and the Non-Baby World, and I haven't figured out how to straddle the two. I am comforted by the fact that so many other people are in the same, conflicted boat. That must be why we have such fiery debates about balancing our work and family. No matter how we choose to live - working full time or staying home or some combination - we're all straddling two worlds, trying to stuff two full lives into one. I guess I'm going to have to take the chance that at some point I may miss giving Katie a hug she needs and I may bore a non-baby person with a tale of her exploits.

But there's also a positive way to look at this: Instead of forgetting how to be a professional adult, I have actually retained those skills and gained some new ones - how to care for a young child. That's what was behind my yearning to watch over strange children in airports. I could hear myself thinking, "I can do that!" This is remarkable mainly because I saw myself for so many years as a non-baby person, the only one who wasn't cooing over the infant a new mom brought into the office. My attempts at babysitting as a teenager were pathetic failures - I remember one time sitting on the couch paralyzed with uncertainty as the kids were burying each other's toys in the backyard.

Now that I know how to do this, I want to do it all the time. It's probably like taking up golf or getting a new video game. I'll get over it. And I'm sure Katie hitting her terrible twos will speed things up. At some point, maybe the 14th time she puts her feet on the dining table, I'll be grabbing the phone and buying a plane ticket for somewhere, anywhere else.