TO HELL WITH ALL THAT.(when mothers choose to work)

Throughout my childhood, the thirty-five-cent Cardinal edition of Dr. Spock sat on a kitchen counter beside another font of domestic good counsel, "The Settlement Cookbook." The books have fallen into my hands now, their spines mended with tape, their pages buckling with age. The two homely volumes (decommissioned and reclassified as mementos) are capable of a profound act of evocation: of my mother, certainly, but more powerfully of the qualities she embodied for me--competence, benevolence, calm authority. To be a child with a mother who possessed those two books and the cheerful willingness to follow their practical and time-honored suggestions was to live in a world that seems to me now a bygone age, as remote and unrecoverable as Camelot: a world of good meals turned out in orderly fashion, of fevers cooled without a single frantic call to the pediatrician, of clothes mended and pressed back into useful service rather than discarded to the rag heap as soon as a button pops or a sleeve unravels. If a household is a tiny state, as of course it is, then my mother was the potentate of ours--her command unchallenged--although our fealty was rarely vociferous. (If, while wandering through the kitchen, I caught sight of her cooking dinner, I would not have taken any more note of her than I did of the humming refrigerator or the shining toaster; it was her absences I noticed, but she was not often absent.) Her subjects were assured of safety, continuity, comfort of the highest order. God was in his heaven, and a rump roast was in the oven, seasoned with salt, pepper, and ginger, and basted with fat from the pan.

This was before housewifery was understood to be an inherently oppressive state, before a marriage soured was a marriage abandoned; this was in the time when thrift and economy were still the cornerstones of middle-class American life. It was a rare night that the family ate dinner at a restaurant; "convenience" foods consisted of Swanson frozen dinners, their aluminum trays saved for all eternity (for mixing up four colors of poster paint for a bored child; for catching a drip from a leaking roof). They were called TV dinners then, but in my experience they were not eaten in front of the television. They were eaten--convivially and with gusto--in the dining room of our California home, with placemats, folded napkins, glasses to the right of knives. In my childish apprehension of things, my father was happiest when he was sitting in his armchair reading a big, fat book, and my mother when she was standing at her ironing board transforming a chaotic basket of wash into a set of sleek and polished garments.

Which is why it came as such a shock when my mother suddenly pulled the plug on the whole operation. It was 1973; I was twelve. The story, as she always told it: One morning, she cooked breakfast for my father and me and sent us on our way (a scramble for lunchbox and briefcase, the daily struggle to get my hair brushed and braided, two sets of feet stumping down the front steps, and then--quiet). The morning was hers, and she had big plans for it. She filled a basin with warm, soapy water, set it on the utility ledge of the kitchen stepladder, and climbed up. Her intention was to wash down the wallpaper, of which she was rather fond (it had a cheerful blue-and-white pattern with a Dutch motif; she had hung it herself). But as she stood on the ladder, dripping sponge in hand, something happened. In one clear moment, staring at a little windmill or a tiny Dutch girl, she realized that it was no longer possible for her to go on living that particular life. I would have been just arriving at school; my father would have been getting off the bus at the bottom of Euclid Avenue, headed for the English department and his morning class. The fogs and mists that settle on the Berkeley Hills every night would have been just lifting when my mother threw the sponge back in the basin and said--out loud, to no one but herself, and apparently with finality--"To hell with it." And then she climbed off the ladder.

It must have been a bleak moment. She would have sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette with ...