However, this potential is limited to specialized circumstances.

Either you live in Manhattan and limit yourself to only one child, or you are a highly quotable gay man.

The New York Times’ Sunday Styles section had as its centerpiece Oct. 24 a story headlined: “We Are Family: Mom, Dad and Just Me,” in which it reported that “the single-child family is now the most-common family unit in Manhattan.” A woman about to give birth to her second baby “tearfully told her girlfriends gathered in an East Side brownstone” that she wanted assurance “she wouldn’t ‘disappear down a black hole’ as a mother of two in Manhattan.”

An “architect who lives in SoHo with his wife, Sophie, and their 5-year-old daughter, Lena,” comments that in Manhattan, one “can forget about the whole SUV thing, the whole play-date thing, the whole soccer-mom thing. Instead, you can remember the museum thing, the Central Park thing, the matinee thing, the hop-into-a-taxi thing.”

Elegant, indeed. The rest of us can make no such claims. These couples are able to maintain their urbane lifestyle without too much change.

However, parenthood has absolutely elevated the status of Dan Savage, who writes “Savage Love,” a syndicated sex-advice column. His new book is “The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Get Pregnant” (E.P. Dutton, $22.95).

An article on Savage in Salon explains: “Straight people have kids to make their lives more meaningful, says Savage, which essentially boils down to needing a hobby. Gay people need hobbies, too, he whines, and the idea of raising a family seemed more enticing to Savage and his boyfriend than the muscle, sex and Fire Island alternative or the DIY-home project, Martha Stewart, Graves tea kettle route favored by the over-30 gay population.” (DIY, for the uninformed, means do-it-yourself.)

“My little status symbol,” is how Savage described his baby for a New York Times Magazine special issue on status.

Before the adoption took place, Savage had a book deal, “but I didn’t know what the hell to write a book about.” So the adoption was timely. (Savage told Salon: “He’s going to know me. He’s my kid; he’s going to be around me all the time. I think he’ll be familiar enough with my sense of humor by the time he’s old enough to read this book or 20-year-old New York Times clippings to know that I joke.”)

You have permission to feel utterly stolid and gray. You are.

Really. All the rest of us are, no matter how pitifully we would hope the opposite.

To people of taste, adults + children + minivan equals trash.

Adults + children + SUV equals trash with pretensions.

No sexually vibrant woman would wear what is known as a “Halloween sweater” or a “Christmas sweater.”

Parents and glamour are incompatible. Glamourous parents are bad parents (Jackie Onassis excepted). See Christopher Dickey’s “Summer of Deliverance”; his father was the drunk and poet James Dickey. (“I believed — I knew — he had killed my mother.”)

See Lois Gould’s “Mommy Dressing”; her mother was the shallow designer Jo Copeland. (“The party I remember best was the one she sent me to when I was eight. My governess carefully twirled each of my five sausage curls around her finger, dressed me in puff sleeves and a bow-tied sash, and delivered me to a room full of teenage strangers playing post office. The boy who bid twelve kisses for Number 9 was mortified to find himself locked in the bathroom with me, while all his friends gathered outside, hooting with derision. I never knew whose party it was, or why I was there.

... Later, when my mother asked the usual questions, I answered yes, also as usual. It really wasn’t much harder than at any other time. Did they like your costume?”)

I consulted this newspaper’s style czar, Greg Morago, to see”what associations he might make between “style” and “parents.”

“You people have it hard,” he said sympathetically. That was all he could offer.