THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 23, 1994 TAG: 9410250510
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH, SPECIAL TO HRW
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
FULL-TIME mother, working mother, divorced mother, poor mother, almost remarried mother, long-distance mother, deliberately single mother.
Mary Kay Blakely has been all of those mothers to two now-grown boys. Her beautifully written memoir, ``American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie'' (Algonquin Books, $19.95), captures the private joys and pains of mothering. And it brilliantly illuminates America's odd public attitude of simultaneous mother worship and mother disdain.
Blakely, author of the critically acclaimed ``Wake Me When It's Over,'' became a mom in the mid-1970s, when ``enthusiasm among our friends. . . for all things natural approached an almost religious fervor.'' Assured by her Lamaze instructor that her body would ``self-anesthetize'' during labor, Blakely discovered that ``if my self-anesthesia took at all, it packed the power of two baby aspirin.''
The pain was soon forgotten in the ``general amnesty a newborn is granted after birth. . . although none of us could know how the strands of biology, culture, and fate would spin out of control in the years ahead.''
Blakely's status as a wife and mother embodies experiences common to the late 20th-century American woman. Her nuclear-family coziness shattered when her husband became unemployed in a bad economy, and the marriage fractured under the strain.
Blakely assumed primary responsibility - financial and custodial - for her sons during much of their youth. Bearing out the grim statistics about single mothers and poverty, she was near penury most of the time.
Even after Blakely and the boys moved in with her boyfriend, who earned a steady income, money remained tight. Her childless boyfriend and her noncustodial ex-husband each wondered why he should have to support the youngsters.
``Depending on which point of view I accepted, the answers shifted. . . It led me to consider a question of kindness. How could men who genuinely love women watch us labor. . . year after year, and not volunteer to ease our load, whatever the circumstances that got us here?''
The question of society's attitude toward mothers arises again as Blakely muses over the issues presented when a teenager watches the sex and violence-ridden MTV, ``the channel that regularly celebrates arrested male development.''
``Imagine how much fun motherhood could be if the culture actually reinforced the values we're obliged to teach,'' she writes. ``Then, the mother's job would be to say yes, yes, yes, instead of no, no, no.''
Despite these discouraging observations, Blakely clearly loves motherhood. Golden moments of pleasure dapple her narrative. Mothers and nonmothers alike will smile over anecdotes such as the one in which her second-grader comes home from school ``with the shuffle of an eighty year-old man.''
`` `What's the matter, Darren?' I asked him. He looked up solemnly, seemingly weighted down with an unspeakable tragedy.
`` `You can't call me that anymore, Mom,' he announced heavily. `They took my name in the hall today.'
``He was convinced he couldn't use his name until he'd made things right with the teacher's aide,'' who had taken down names of children in an unruly line.
``It was a week before the aide came back and cleared up the misunderstanding. In the meantime, we had to call him `Rocky.' ''
Blakely recounts even the most dreaded of stages, adolescence, with intelligence and affection. She recollects an incident involving one of her sons, then in his early teens:
The ``time lag between physical and mental development naturally caused some incongruous scenes. I remember his deep, low laugh erupting from the living room one afternoon - the still-startling baritone of the coming man.
`` `What are you watching?' I asked, as he grinned into the TV.
`` `Porky Pig,' he said, then smiled sheepishly and laughed at himself. At 14, in a body growing to Rambo proportions, he was still amused by Porky Pig.''
Blakely has accomplished a very difficult feat - a book that both warms the heart and provokes thought on one of today's most debated topics - the family. You don't have to be a mom, or a dad, to love ``American Mom.'' You just need to be human. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of public
relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. by CNB