In the last couple of months a tatty old copy of an Erma Bombeck book found its way to the radiator of my bathroom, joining deadly serious reports I can only take in small doses.

Writing between 1965 and 1996, Bombeck was a popular, prolific novelist and humorist known mainly for her syndicated columns on ordinary, suburban domestic life.

I first pulled the book off the shelf because I liked its naughty title, Motherhood, the Second Oldest Profession. After a bit, though, I started to think that if motherhood were a paid profession, it might be more in the limelight as a subject of general interest.

I kept dipping into the book, even as it made me uncomfortable. I thought perhaps its 1950s tone was bugging me. Actually, it was published in 1983, so Bombeck’s women all juggle kids and work as we do now. And her exaggerated portraits of family life rang true enough to make me laugh out loud.

I finally figured out that I’d been rattled by how bald and bold she was about discussing parents. Then I began to admire the book’s gossipy political incorrectness. She describes right out loud the sorts of parenting messes that we still see today.

Bombeck’s not interested in “parenting” in the antiseptic, expert sense of the word, but in actual parents, knocking around, doing their best in the everyday world of kids. She writes as though parents and domestic life totally matter. And they do. Everyone had parents. And parents, more than anyone, form the social fabric of society, good and bad. In her day, only 25 years ago, mothering and children were topics of such universal interest, this particular book was a bestseller for almost a year. Most of her books were bestsellers. Can you imagine? Now motherhood seems either boring as all get-out or just not relevant to anything.

My friends in education and social services discuss parenting all the time, but in a we-them mode. “We” the professionals discuss “them,” the problematic parents. We aren’t really in the same landscape together.

Bombeck’s is a world of sticky surfaces, competitive grandmothers and houses so dominated by boys, “you could tell by just looking at the outside that inside all the toilet seats are up.” It’s a sweet landscape, filled with flaws. Its pantheon of characters commit classic mistakes.

But she’s superb at blaming the parenting, not the parents. With comically painful insight, she sees the bad decisions, the explosions of anger, the spoiling, the trying-to-keep-the-peace-at-all-costs. And she sees the circumstances, sometimes woefully unsupportive, that drive parents to do hurtful things. Without apology, Bombeck attributes how kids turn out to the quality of their mothering. We see ourselves in her landscape with the buffer of humor. We admit mothering matters.

Her story about Brooke, in particular, seemed pertinent. Brooke is vocal about how badly others raise their children. She sneers at her sister whose chaotic house was “like a giant playpen” burbling with five kids. Brooke runs her finger across her sister’s furniture before deigning to sit. Of Brooke and her husband, Bombeck says, “Like every stick of furniture in their white and chrome townhouse, their two-seater sportscar, their his-and-her careers, and their club membership, their baby was planned.” They would not let the baby dominate their lives, nor would they ever stoop to plastic.

And when Brooke actually had that perfectly planned child, he was a hellion.

Bombeck writes, “Through it all, never once did Brooke publicly admit defeat. Other children could watch TV and ‘waste time,’ Wesley could do it and be ‘curious and searching.’ Other kids could shove people out of the way and be ‘aggressive.’ Wesley could do it and be ‘ambitious.’ When other children took money from their mother’s purse without her permission it could be construed as ‘stealing,’ but when Wesley did it, it was ‘reinforcement of the mutual trust between them.’

I so know this woman because delusional parenting is epidemic now. Surely you know parents who insist their child is “ADD,” when he’s never been taught boundaries and limits. Or that their daughter is “creatively introspective,” when it’s clear she’s hugely depressed. You can’t say anything because you’ll ruin your relationship with the adult. Parenting is private. It’s none of your business. And I understand why parents are so defensive. God knows I have been defensively delusional myself.

But it doesn’t do the kids any good.

Better to have funny parenting stories floating around our common landscape so we can recount them to delusional parents with the hope they’ll make the connection. People once knew the same fairy tales or myths. Stories help us see ourselves and get a sense of life’s pitfalls, especially when it comes to the universal issues of parenting.

We live in the same world with the kids, even if we don’t think they’re our responsibility. We are all role models. We make the context for the kids, through schools, voting, and just paying attention to the kids’ landscape. For my money, good government is good parenting. Laws parent. We all parent by contributing to the context in which kids grow up.

So everyday parenting needs more everyday attention, from all of us.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@cox.net , or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902.