With more than 1 million confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect each year, we need the Spocks, Bettelheims and Brazeltons to study families and how to strengthen them, Blakely concedes. But in her witty and piercing new memoir, American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie (291 pages. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $19.95), Blakely takes on theorists whose edicts leave little room for common sense. She also attacks the ““family-value evangelists,’’ who, even after 30 years of social change, still expect Donna Reed perfection.
““Think about pioneer women: the question of survival didn’t give them the luxury of fretting about every stage of development,’’ Blakely says. ““It was when child rearing became women’s sole occupation that the anxiety level began to rise. So did the guilt.’’ From ““Portnoy’s Complaint’’ to ““The Cinderella Complex,’’ Blakely notes, it’s Mom who’s warned, It’s All Your Fault.
She should know. Growing up in Chicago, Blakely, 46, remembers the ““experts’’ blaming her mother for her brother Frank’s mental illness. Doctor after doctor grilled Kay Blake-ly about ““overmothering’’ and ““maternal rejection.’’ Kay was haunted by self-doubt, replaying incidents like the night when doctors wrapped Frank’s head in bandages to flatten his baby ears; he wailed, but, on doctors’ orders, she resisted the urge to soothe him. ““Everywhere this woman went with her severely-ill son, the suspicion was that she must be a bad mother.’’ Only the matrons in the mental wards told Kay the truth: she neither caused her son’s schizophrenia and manic depression, nor could she have prevented it.
Which is how, in an era of spankers, Mary Kay Blakely became a spoiler. By the time the women’s movement was gathering strength, Blakely had found support in a new breed of experts, like feminist poet Adrienne Rich and psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein, who challenged the status quo. ““Rather than giving me rules, they gave me a new way of thinking.’’ Indeed, when Blakely got divorced in 1982, hers was a free-form edict that ““had the teeth of a newborn baby – all gums – and left us mutually dependent on each other’s goodwill.’’ The judge who signed the decree marveled, ““I hope to hell it works for you.’’ It did – most of the time – and so did Blakely’s decision to let one son, then the other, live with their father for a few years. What infuriated outsiders was not that she allowed the switch, but that she enjoyed it.
For all her feminist passion, though, Blakely labored to be the Perfect Mom. She tried to juggle two adolescent sons, an ex-husband and a beau who was never sure where he fit into the mix. In between, she longed to create perfect cookies and perfect prose. It took a nine-day, stress-induced coma in 1984 – chronicled in Blakely’s powerful first book, ““Wake Me When It’s Over’’ – to convince her postnuclear family that no one can meet that ideal, that it’s good enough to be a Good-Enough Mother.
Or is it? For all the talk of shared parenting, why does corporate America do so little to accommodate mothers trying to balance family and work? And why are mothers – especially single mothers – blamed for every social ill? ““We’re a split-mind culture. We love kids, but 99 percent of our policies move in the opposite direction.’’ Blakely doesn’t claim to have any answers, just a mother’s optimism that inevitably we’ll realize that being a good-enough mother doesn’t make you an imperfect one.
