These days, it’s Mommy dreariest

THERE are basically two kinds of books for mothers: the kind that tell you what to do and how to do it, and the kind that make you feel better if you can’t achieve perfection. Prescription and permission, you might say.

In “Mommies Who Drink,” Brett Paesel describes her disappointment with the parenting tomes she turned to for help in the “months of shapeless afternoons” of her son’s infancy. Where, she wonders, is the chapter titled “SMOKING: THE ROAD BACK TO SANITY AND A GOOD FIGURE”? Or “WHAT PARENTING EXPERTS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE SECRET BENEFITS OF COCAINE.” Surely, the exhausted mother imagines, there must be studies showing that the personalities of the most successful and happy children were formed while the parents were away in Europe.

Paesel’s musings are not as shocking as they sound, since her actual debauchery consists of Friday evening drinks with fellow moms, an occasional cigarette and a hit off of somebody’s homegrown marijuana. Mostly she’s busy caring for her toddler, nursing herself back from a miscarriage, then trying to get pregnant again, which is the surreptitious story line running through this collection of vignettes set at parties and in bars.

Women have been exploring the limits of the maternal instinct at least since the launch of Erma Bombeck’s newspaper column in 1964. (Bombeck’s sister in domestic disenchantment, Betty Friedan, published “The Feminine Mystique” a year earlier: See, ticked-off ‘60s housewives did save the world.) Collected in books with such titles as “I Lost Everything in the Postnatal Depression,” Bombeck’s columns establish her as the black-humored forerunner of every mom who has been driven to write of the tedium and disorientation of motherhood. “You become about as interesting as your blender,” she warned. “The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask if anybody’s home.”

Bombeck’s honesty paved the way for bolder revelations of motherly deficit. Anne Lamott’s 1993 “Operating Instructions,” in which she confessed to a fleeting desire to take her baby by the heels and bang him against the wall, upped the ante pretty dramatically. Today, such titles as Andrea Buchanan’s “Mother Shock,” Marrit Ingman’s “Inconsolable” and Ariel Gore and Bee Lavender’s anthology “Breeder” are being joined by a new, alcohol-laced wave of parental confession: “Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay,” “Daddy Needs a Drink” and Paesel’s “Mommies Who Drink” this year alone.

Paesel, a TV actress, bellies up to the bar with tales of Southern California-style parenting. Purse parties, plastic surgery, celebrity yoga classes, movie star sightings and a belief in the life-changing possibilities of a good haircut are among her experiences. When a defect is discovered involving her newborn son’s penis, a woman Paesel says looks like Loni Anderson arrives to examine him. “It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to be a urologist,” she writes, “but it seems especially rare that a specialist should have to choose between being a urologist and a Laker Girl.”

I like the image, but as a veteran of this genre of writing, I wish I could have conveyed to Paesel pre-publication how one’s son turns out not to like it when he learns that his infant penis has been discussed in print.

As much as Paesel loves a drink with the girls, she hates play groups, the setting in which her mommy friends sink to their most boring common denominator. She attends one such event at the home of a former actress who, on a dare, moved an egg from one chair to another with just her buttocks. How bad can it be, she thinks at first. But the afternoon’s agenda becomes: “discuss latest accomplishment of babies, pick up and reposition babies, remark on how hard it is to get anything done with babies, discuss latest accomplishment of babies, reposition babies, remark on how hard it is to get anything done with babies.” At her next toddler-oriented gathering, while everyone’s talking about how to get kids to eat vegetables, Paesel begins to suffer a kind of mental Tourette’s syndrome, her mind flooding with obscene words and images.

So much of this I feel I’ve heard before -- and perhaps there’s a reason for that. In a conversation comparing their lives to those of their mothers, Paesel’s friend Lana points out that their mood-altering solutions to the trials of domestic life are venerable ones.

“ ‘A while ago my mom was telling me about being a mother in the late sixties. She was at home full-time. She did the washing, the cleaning, all the parenting, all the getting up in the middle of the night -- no help from my dad. ... I asked her how she managed it all. You know what she said?’

“Lana reaches over to grab the beer back and downs it.

“ ‘She said, Booze and pills, Lana. Booze and pills.’ ”

It’s either a joke, or it’s a problem. For Paesel, it’s definitely a joke. What saves her isn’t drinking, it’s good friends and a sense of humor.

Marion Winik is the author of “The Lunch-Box Chronicles: Notes From the Parenting Underground.”