Is This Mom for Real? : She may have spots of spit-up on her silk blouses, but Murphy Brown’s career-family balancing act is too good to be true, critics say. Supporters insist she’s had her share of dilemmas.

Since Murphy Brown, career woman, became Murphy Brown, single mother, she’s stumbling as Murphy Brown, national symbol of having it all.

Eight months after loudly declaring her right to single motherhood and career in a family values grudge match against Vice President Dan Quayle, the television character has her baby and her power job, too. But for some Murphy watchers, the issue is, now that she’s done right by herself, will she do right by her child?

The TV newswoman returned to the office after a six-week maternity leave. Viewers rarely see her caring for the baby; in most episodes he is dismissed as a running office joke. (“I wanted to name him after a bad habit I’ve given up, but Ernest and Julio Gallo didn’t fit on an identification bracelet.”)

Her critics see her re-entry as unrealistically simple. She’s had nanny turnover problems, had to travel out of town and even had to nurse the baby in the office, but Murphy doesn’t seem to feel guilty, anguished or exhausted.

Real-life motherhood strikes many career women like a “cold slap in the face,” said Sherman Oaks mother Laura Haynes. “You pray to God you have a nice husband, a flexible boss or a high salary or you’re really screwed.”

Haynes, 31, a married writer and self-described liberal feminist, is among those who believe the show’s writers have not only missed an opportunity to expand social awareness of such issues as day care, but worse, have “failed to prove Dan Quayle wrong.”

“The way to prove he’s wrong is to show Murphy is a great mother, not just whether she’s a mother, but what kind of a mother she is. Not whether the child is born, but what the child’s life is like.”

Murphy’s critics also include those who always disapproved of her self-centered baby-boomer ways. Columnist Harry Stein inspired a “massive reaction,” pro and con, when he wrote in TV Guide: “This is parenthood as designed by people with zero love for children. . . . Say what you will about the much-mocked Ozzie and Harriet, in their world the kids came first. In Murphy’s as in ours, they far too often come last.”

Probably no one would bother with “Murphy Brown” if its producers had not made her decision to have a child so high profile--parading single mothers on the show and including real news clips of Dan Quayle--or if their viewpoints were not taken seriously in the angry national debate over single and working mothers.

Murphy Brown’s postpartum issues may get even touchier as moderate Clinton Democrats join Quayle Republicans in increasingly laying the blame for today’s troubled youths on the doorstep of fatherless homes.

Writing in “Mandate for Change,” Bill Clinton adviser William Galston notes that while millions of women struggle against the odds to provide good homes for their children, “a large body of evidence supports the conclusion that the intact two-parent family is best suited to the task of bringing up children. . . .”

There are now 8 million to 9 million single mothers in the United States. There are 22 million working mothers. Not many resemble the affluent Murphy Brown.

With the show’s ratings up 700,000 homes over last season to 17.1 million per week, presumably a few viewers are interested in how someone with money and power copes with the life-altering, demanding and exhausting responsibility of a first baby. They might want to learn, for instance:

What kind of leave would she negotiate? Would she try to work at home? What would she do when the baby gets sick repeatedly?

Would the world suddenly look different? As a news broadcaster, would she crusade for better child care, immunization programs, family leave policies, public schools? Would she raise the consciousness or the ire of colleagues when work conflicts with family?

And what about the guilt? At work would she yearn to be home? At home would she feel the pull of work? Would she worry that her baby might confuse her with the nanny? Would she glimpse what’s ahead--school plays and teacher conferences, soccer games and piano lessons, discipline-over-the-telephone?

So far, “Murphy Brown” has not dealt with most of these issues.

But the show’s executive producers say the character was never meant to be Everywoman. “She is not a specific role model for the entire spectrum in this country,” said Steven Peterman.

Much of the criticism has come from “people who wanted to see some miraculous blossoming from her. That may be right for some women, but it may not be right for Murphy,” he said.

“We very consciously made an arc for Murphy. That arc is designed to take her over the course of 24 episodes from a woman who had no experience and no natural instincts for motherhood to a place where she would feel pretty comfortable with it.”

Five of the show’s eight writers and producers have children, and they believe “Murphy Brown” is “an accurate portrayal to the best of our ability of our own struggles to balance a demanding career the best we can,” said Peterman, who has a 16-month-old baby. “If I tell Warner Bros., ‘I need to take the next three months off to bond with him,’ Warner Bros. would say, ‘That’s terrific. We hope you enjoy the rest of your life. (The job) won’t be here.’ ”

Some episodes have focused on real-life dilemmas for power mothers. In one, an impatient, competitive Murphy tries to join a mother’s play group; in another, the child’s ear infection nearly causes her to cancel an important business trip to France. In the latter, she tells the baby, “I may not know a lot about this mother business. But one thing I’m sure of is that if I can’t be who I am, I won’t be much good to you. . . . I’ve got to go do my job.”

Research suggests she’s right about that, said Judsen Culbreth, editor-in-chief of Working Mother magazine. “What makes for happy kids is really if the mother is happy herself, if she felt what she was doing was the right thing for herself. And the kids picked up on that.

“We can’t perpetuate this image of self-sacrificing, career-sacrificing, stressed-out working mothers. . . .

“We all knew what Murphy was like. Did we expect her to transform herself dramatically and sacrifice everything she’s worked for and become a different kind of person?”

In a word, yes.

According to renowned pediatrician and author T. Barry Brazelton, “Anybody who bears a child, no matter how much help they have, experiences a rush of a new set of feelings and responsibilities.”

All working mothers feel split between home and work, he said. “With single parents, it’s even more of a split.” Those who ignore the split cannot feel good about themselves, no matter how fulfilled they are at work, he said.

Brazelton added that children of single parents are haunted by two questions: Why would one parent desert me, and will this one go too? “Unless that single parent is there to give the child a sense of how important he or she is, right from the first, they grow up with a pretty flaky self-image.”

He said single and working parents can pull it off with a lot of hard work and support. He said the “Murphy Brown” writers are missing an opportunity to send a message that “being a parent is a very big responsibility if you want to do a decent job by the child. As most mothers do.”

Perhaps Murphy Brown said it best: “I want to be a good mother. I just don’t know how.”