I was at the magazine rack, too cheap to buy Redbook, yet frighteningly eager to read the magazine's June cover story, ``Jennifer's Secret Passion.''

Who could resist, right? ``She opens up about making babies, Brad's beard and the tough time that tested - and strengthened their love,'' the cover line promised.

I was about to flip to the table of contents and begin hunting for the story, when I noticed Redbook's motto: ``Balancing family.work.love.time for you.''

That's when it hit me: Balance is the new thin.

And appearances to the contrary, I want to live a balanced life. I do. I want to grow organic herbs and adopt stray pets. I want to find my North Star and follow it, and fly a homemade kite on the beach and splash through puddles with my children.

I want to pack a picnic lunch and play hooky from work with my husband, and do yoga in front of my Japanese water garden, and march against hunger and for peace.

I want to earn lots of money and take exotic trips, but never be too busy for a preschool field trip.

If only I didn't have so much laundry piling up.

``Just think,'' a friend said the other day, as we talked cell-to-cell, me grocery shopping on the way home from work, she rushing to make the day-care pickup deadline, ``We used to fantasize about movie stars, and now our big dream is to organize our closets.''

Just as we once believed we could look like the models in seventeen and Glamour if we only had the right cosmetics, we're now getting sucked in by the adult version of those teen magazines, which push something just as out of reach as size four jeans: balance.

Month after month magazines such as Real Simple, Organics and Health suck me in with cover lines like ``4 Easy Steps to a Healthier Home,'' ``Find More `Me' Time' '' and ``Healthy Ways to Get Mad.''

And Oprah's a culprit, too. I was in a bookstore a while back, when her magazine called out to me: ``How to Balance Your Crazy Life.'' The story sounded great, but, alas, I didn't have time to read it. But the ``balance'' calendar that was part of the package looked promising.

Until I read it, that is. On the 21st of the month - a Monday, by the way - I was supposed to celebrate the spring equinox with a massage or reiki treatment ``to balance your energy for the warm weather ahead.'' I don't know what your Mondays are like, but the last thing one of my Mondays could accommodate would be an hour for a massage, no matter how balanced my energy became.

It's no longer enough to do it all, or have it all, you have to be relaxed at the same time. The pressure to be productive, yet Zen, has gotten almost unbearable.

Panicky that I'm too stressed out, I called a friend who seems to have everything under control, but what she said surprised me.

``I've decided it can't all be done at the same time,'' she said. ``You can't nurture your children, your career, your community and your relationship with your husband and your inner-self every single day. You have to rotate them.

``It's like a toddler's diet. They eat nothing but tortellini and ketchup for a week straight, grapes the next, and peanut butter and jelly after that. But over the course of a month, they get their nutrition.''

I'm not sure what she said next. Her mention of the toddler diet reminded me of my own toddlers, which reminded me that I'd yet to send in the check for the baby yoga class, which made me think how cute my boys would look in their little yoga outfits, which turned my mind to the inevitable laundry the activity would generate, which, of course, jogged my memory about a load I'd left in the washing machine the day before.

When I got home, I rushed to my laundry center - namely, the unfinished basement - to switch the clean clothes to the dryer, but the load wasn't finished. I'd put too much in the machine and it had become . . . unbalanced.

Maybe my Maytag was trying to tell me something.