Love You Forever : A look at the hard truths of motherhood : AMERICAN MOM: Motherhood, Politics and Humble Pie, <i> By Mary Kay Blakely (Algonquin: $19.95; 291 pp.)</i>

Good advice on mothering is hard to come by in books, writes author Mary Kay Blakely, who supplies a good reason why: “This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”

Little wonder, then, that Blakely’s own memoir and meditation on motherhood comes as her two sons are leaving the nest. Offering no advice at all, “American Mom: Motherhood, Politics and Humble Pie,” simply serves up one good tale after another of the frazzling, frustrating but ultimately fulfilling life and times of a divorced, working mother. After nearly 20 years of what--for any mother-hyphen-writer--would have to be a struggle and a juggle raising sons very close in age on her own for the most part, she finds herself adjusting to a suddenly changed reality: “Now I didn’t want my grown sons, my daily buddies, to leave home; I also couldn’t wait for their ravenous appetites and deafening music to go.”

If such a clear expression of the “empty nest” syndrome might sound like something equally at home in the pages of Erma Bombeck, the author’s more complicated view is informed by the wrenching social transformations of the last few decades. Blakely’s objection to “deafening music” sounds oddly old-fashioned for someone of her generation, but these memoirs portray her as caught between a fairly conventional Catholic upbringing and unconventional idealism. Like many mothers today, Blakely spent little time as a full-time mother in the traditional sense, in her case owing to family financial difficulties and a divorce.

Her non-traditional family’s life is unique--including stages she describes as “the charmingly chaotic, physically affectionate years of our young nuclear family; the emotionally explosive and slightly radioactive period of our post-nuclear family; the surprisingly fluid and eventually peaceful transition into two long-distance single parent families”--each capped by periods of poverty and stress that finally lead her to the ultimate edge--a harrowing nine-day coma. But Blakely’s struggles and stresses--with spouse, children and other loves (such as a post-separation relationship that doesn’t last either)--relate to challenges universally faced by mothers. Her wry and witty handling of them make satisfying medicine for maternal distress.

Blakely, the author of another memoir, “Wake Me When It’s Over,” is a feminist writer whose work has appeared in many magazines, particularly women’s magazines, such as Ms. and Working Woman, where earlier versions of essays appeared that provided some of the base for this book. She does inject political commentary, relating her stories to feminist theory. But she leavens it with wit, as when she writes about celebrity moms who have the luxury of having it all without having to really put out extra: “Most of the rest of us were still laboring under the cliche: ‘A woman has to work twice as hard as any man to be considered half as good.’ That equation kept us so frazzled that hundreds of women from coast to coast thought my coma sounded like something they might want to try.” (She notes that a woman from Portland called in to ask what nine days of sleep was like.)

Blakely’s odyssey begins in her first chapter, “Maternal Bondage,” with her first hint that motherhood was going to be far more complicated than expected, the night she goes into labor while being coached in the deep-breathing techniques of natural childbirth. Expecting to be “self-anesthetized” as promised, she reports, “if my self-anesthesia took at all, it packed the power of two baby aspirin.” Next, trying to conquer the business of maternal bonding (after her husband, “having concluded his duties as a natural father--goes home to catch up on a night of lost sleep”), she waits for the magic moment when her maternal instincts are supposed to “kick in”--to no avail. It would be years, she writes, before she would comprehend that “the effortless knowledge women allegedly acquired at birth” was a “cultural invention that kept the hard work of motherhood invisible to anyone outside the field.”

On the other hand, myths about motherhood, she reflects, often contain a grain of truth. “Although ‘maternal instinct’ did not exactly describe it, I did sense a subtle but significant shift in my thinking after my sons were born. . . . I began to see the world through this triple vision of my past and our present and my sons’ future. Ever since, it has been my hunch that when a woman startles a man with her uncanny ‘female intuition,’ she is merely tapping into this uncredentialed knowledge of what the human organism will do/has done under certain circumstances. Within nanoseconds, for example, she might see beyond the angry lawyer fuming at the dinner table, making a connection with the wounded boy who lost his truck in a sandbox wager that afternoon and then popped his teammate on the head with his plastic shovel.”

Among her many stories, Blakely lovingly chronicles the transformations of her sons from boys to men--well, their efforts anyway--like the older son who turned up the collars of his jackets and practiced facial expressions. “In his school pictures that year, his lips are curled in a lopsided grimace and his eyes narrowed in an apparent effort to look like Clint Eastwood. But among the frankly cheerful smiles in the freshman year book, he looked more like a stroke patient suffering temporary paralysis. Masculinity comes hard to the baby-faced.”

Blakely’s comments are less original when dealing with the new challenges afflicting parents, such as the social problems named by USA Today as the top five: drug addiction, teen-age pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. “Ryan and Darren . . . had friends who had to be hospitalized, who disappeared into recovery programs, who had brothers in jail, who had pregnant sisters. We’d traveled a long way from their early charming inquiries (Mom, how many chews are there in a stick of gum?) to their frightening questions now: ‘Mom can you really get addicted to crack after only one try?’ ” Such glimpses don’t offer much.

A more compelling real-life tale from the front comes when her son returns home from college the week the story of the Glen-Ridge, N.J. gang rape hits ( which gang-rape? the one of the mentally-retarded young woman, with baseball bats and broom handles). The author fearfully nudges him for a reaction. “ ‘Mom!’ he fairly shouted. ‘Are you really asking if I know whether it’s wrong to rape a retarded girl with a baseball bat?’ She was; she could hardly believe it herself. . . . Because she knew, as most mothers who take the news personally do, that the integrity of every young man is under constant assault.” She writes elsewhere: “Until mothers become the sayers and makers of the culture, until we can actually live in a society where mothers and children genuinely matter, ours is an essentially powerless responsibility. Mothers carry out most of the work orders, but most of the rules governing our lives are shaped by outside influences.”

In general, the scope and scape of Blakely’s emotional terrain in “American Mom” is as wide-ranging and laced with irony as her book’s title would suggest. These quirky and very personal anecdotes are what is best about this diary of a struggling mother, which should have plenty of resonance among mothers today. It should also be required reading for that new demographic category Blakely invents: “working fathers,” the ones learning to make brownies.