They converge on a playground like sleep-deprived gangs: the breastfeeding zealots and the formula fans, the lean-in corporate moms and the stay-at-home helicopter moms, the daycare dads and the natural-birth Nazis ("drug-free pool birth," one brags, "dolphin assisted"). They're ready to rumble—until a stroller gets away and everyone gives chase. Baby is saved (sorry for the spoiler), the rivals kumbaya, and a slogan appears: "No matter what our beliefs, we're parents first." And then: "Similac," the formula maker, the only indication you haven't just watched a Saturday Night Live skit.

Earlier this year, Similac's "Sisterhood of Motherhood" commercial was unavoidable. It was the seventh-most-watched video on YouTube in January and was shared some 70,000 times on Facebook. The 2.5-minute ad has now been seen 8 million times for a total of "31 years, 266 days of watch time," as Similac's public-relations team put it to me in terms only an advertiser could appreciate. Bottom line: Similac got its money's worth.

The ad, I recently discovered, was written by native Minnesotan Jean Rhode, a veteran copywriter who got her start in Minneapolis in the early 1990s and is now a freelancer in Brooklyn, where the Motherhood ad was filmed. Her brilliantly satirical dialogue puts parental resentments on the table, the guilt-inducing contempt harbored by parents not for America's lack of paid parental leave or its disappearing support of public higher education or even for Diaper Genies that refuse to grant them the one wish you'd ask of a bucket in which you place poop-stained diapers — but each other.

Adweek hailed the commercial as "one of the most honest ads ever about parenting," admittedly a pretty low bar considering Similac itself once advertised on ash trays. Other observers suggested it would bring a hilarious end to the so-called mommy wars. Fifty years of in-fighting prompted by advertising defused by less than three minutes of more advertising.

Someone sent me the video when Pepin was born, in late January, and I watched the moms go at it the way I might watch a mongoose attack a cobra — entertaining but nothing I'd presume to find myself in the middle of. And then, much sooner than I might have expected, I was.

Actually, it began even before Pepin arrived. I quit our birth class after only half the sessions as I could feel my own resentment building. The instructors apparently meant to empower natural-birth choices by suggesting how just about everything a doctor might ask of pregnant parents was wrong — knowing that, you could make a "better" choice and avoid them. Have a home birth, use midwives, and if nothing else get a doula. In fact, if you didn't have a doula lined up to help with your labor — and only about six percent of American parents do — you might as well just leave the baby in there. (For the record, we had a doula and are glad we did.) When one father asked for ways he could help his wife through labor, saying they weren't planning to get a doula, all the instructors could think to advise him was to...get a doula.

Recently, I've been taking Fridays off to spend time with Pepin and in the fall I'll be taking two days off, a choice the lean-in crowd would condemn as not taking my career seriously. It's a charge I could laugh off, considering I've already spent more than 20 years building a career, if it weren't also 2015.

Of course, no one's actually said anything. That's why the Similac commercial seems so radical: no one in real life puts their cards on the table.

But these are all small stakes. No one else is affected by any of these choices. When someone makes a commercial in which anti-vaccination parents stroll onto the playground or Jeb Bush wanders through giving away vouchers to failed corporate-run schools, then we'll see something worth fighting aout.