"Once while we were setting up an exterior scene she was over on the grass under a tree with all of her kids," recalls Beauty screenwriter Alan Ball. "She took off her high heels, put on her tennis shoes and played tag with them. She was having so much fun, she was completely unaware of this movie company 200 feet away. I thought, 'Gee, I wish my mom had done this.' "

Still, as Tabitha Soren has discovered, motherhood is not always splendor in the grass. A Manhattan-based reporter for MTV, she made her name interviewing Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat before she turned 30. But after marrying Michael Lewis, now 41, author of the bestselling Next: The Future Just Happened, and giving birth to daughter Quinn in 1999, she decided to abandon the glam life and relocate to "family-friendly Berkeley," says Soren, now 34 and eight months pregnant with baby No. 2. But even there, the couple have been taken aback by what Lewis calls the "status collapse" caused by Soren's decision to be a full-time parent. "At dinner parties people are a lot less interested in what she is doing now," says Lewis. "I'm surprised it hasn't dealt Tabitha more of a blow."

Maybe that's because part of her understands the desire to flee at the first mention of sing-alongs -- which is why Soren takes time off every Saturday to go to photography class. "I can only play with Legos for so long," she says. "Our society gives a lot of lip service to the idea of motherhood being so good," she adds. "But at the end of the day, people still say to me, 'Besides taking care of Quinn, what else do you do?' America is much more about money, ambition and status. I have been all those things. I am just not those things right now."

Written by: KAREN S. SCHNEIDER
Reported by: ROBYN FLANS, JULIE JORDAN and VICKI SHEFF-CAHAN in Los Angeles, KC BAKER and CAROLINE HOWARD in New York City, BEVERLY KEEL in Nashville, LINDA MARX and DON SIDER in West Palm Beach, LAURA MORICE in Charlotte, KEITH RAETHER in Hailey and ELLIN STEIN in London