I am the quintessential single mother of America. Just check out my stats: I'm white, I had my first baby when I was over 30, I've been to college, I'm not on welfare. Although I am unmarried, I am not single in the sense that I am alone -- I have a lover, and he is not the birth father of my child. I don't receive money from my daughter's birth father. I am self-supporting. Give me a few more thousand dollars a year and a blow dryer and you could easily mistake me for Murphy Brown. My demographic picture fits to a T the highest, fastest-growing group of unwed mommies in the country.

The mainstream propaganda about single moms and their kids is quite a different story from the statistics. If you were to listen only to Congress and their ideological flacks, you would think that it's those without-a-dime-to-their-name black teenagers who are having so many babies with no paternal surname. In fact, teenage baby rates are flat, and black teenage motherhood is in decline. If you're going to start throwing mud, I'm afraid it's middle-aged workaholic white chicks who can't keep their legs or their wallets closed when it comes to having a child of their own.

Black or white, wealthy or bereft, both kinds of women find themselves a target of a morality smear -- a constant refrain in the schools, media, workplace and courts that women carrying children alone are doing something wrong, and that their character has to be examined for the flaws that civilization must not repeat. Never mind the incredible class, age, and power differences between the adolescent who's still carrying a $5.95 Tamogotchi virtual pet in her pocket and the yuppie who's just returned from China with a tiny little girl who cost $20,000. The church and the state, including President Clinton, still use the word "illegitimate" to describe them all, with all the ugliness that implies.

Melissa Ludtke, a veteran Time reporter who had covered family and law issues for years, has written a book that assaults the popular stereotypes about unwed mothers with an enormous compilation of actual mom voices from each side of the fence. It's called "On Our Own: Unmarried Motherhood in America," and although the cover features a fair-skinned woman, exquisitely made-up, holding her little toddler, the actual text is filled with intimate interviews with everyday women. Ludtke begins this research by admitting that she too would like to be a mother and has become disillusioned with her marriage prospects to any man who would want children as much as she does. By the end of the tome, she is on her way to China to adopt.

Although the book has the personal angle of Ludtke's dilemma, this is not a memoir, nor do we get close to her sexuality and personal desires. Her training as a reporter is what shines through, her ability to sit and not flinch or smother, just listen and observe closely to what women have to say. Their confessions range from how they got pregnant in the first place to what it's meant to love, discipline and teach their children every day on their own, not to mention answering the question, "Where's daddy?"

Especially the "Where's daddy?" part. I think the whole book should have been called "Where's Daddy?" -- it's poignant search for the perfect, and ultimately absent, father is so painful and unrelenting.

And here's where I, the prototypical single mom, began to feel a little less typical, or at least seriously underrepresented. As Ludtke describes it, your average yuppie mom wanted to have a man, then a baby, in that order. Having a baby on her own is a disappointing Plan B. The teenage mom, on the other hand, has not spent many years in search of Mr. Right because, after all, her adult life has barely begun. Yet she too has the romantic hopes that a decent guy will come along who keeps his promises.

I'm afraid their disappointment, their Plan B, was my Plan A, my ideal, from the very beginning. I wanted a child, not a marriage, and it was plain to me that motherhood offered a satisfaction and meaning in life that being a wife, per se, could hardly hold a candle to. I'm not looking for a joint checking account to further my decorating and fashion goals. Skip the man (and being his surrogate mommy) and get to the good part -- that was my idea. If there were going to be men in my daughter's life -- and as it turns out, there are -- they would be connected to her through unlicensed love and commitment, not blood and/or a wedding band, which I find highly unreliable.

I know this is blasphemy to the great altar of the Nuclear Family. But I feel in good company with many alternative families who have purposefully rejected the Ozzie and Harriet norm. What blew my mind was that my impudence, my rebellion, was nowhere in Ludtke's 450-page book. She has examples of really mean mommies, self-centered mommies, mentally ill mommies, exhausted mommies --- why wasn't there one example of the I-don't-give-a-shit-about-daddy mommy?

Or, more to the point, where were the dykes? Where were the activists, the commune-makers, the tribe-reclaimers? I can't believe anyone could write a book about single moms and not look at the cutting-edge conversations about parenting that are going on in feminist, queer and other radical communities. While it is certainly true that Ludtke covered the miserable middle of the road, she did not speak to any philosophical leaders of single motherhood, because it is there that she would find not only lesbians but other women who have seriously challenged the notion of what a supportive, loving family to raise your children in is all about. Any single parent would get more juice and invigoration out of one slender issue of Hip Mama than they would an entire book by Ludtke.

When I asked Ludtke what her strategy was for empowering single moms and fighting the political weather we suffer under, she wasn't quite sure what I meant. She wants her book to be influential -- for the power people and elite to read it and feel moved. She also suggests that people who care get involved in Big Sisters, Girl Scouts and other mentoring programs that are designed to raise young women's self-esteem.

I felt myself sinking under the liberal wistfullness of it all. The viciousness we treat teenagers and their kids with these days is nothing short of eating our own young, and to throw the leftover at middle-class moms is despicable. "Self-esteem" seems to be a code word for passing the buck to the most beleaguered, with the treacliest of charitable intentions. Individual generosity and trying to get a few tears flowing at the right dinner parties is not going to cut it! We need role models, not just victims, and politically we need a plan of action that kicks Big Brother Daddy's ass.

I know Ludtke's book is a welcome dissertation on the plight of single mothers, and in that sense it is unsparing. It will make you cry. But what's missing from the pathos of plight are the ideas of how to fight, how to empower children and teenagers and make a public commitment to the families we actually live in, instead of our puritanical institutions and exploding daddy mythology.

I can go into my idea for a Million Shit-Kicking Mothers March at another date. For the moment, let me be a role model and an advisor, with the requisite caveat that I am, after all, just a single mom in training -- I've got many more years to go.

A single mom's kid gets two ideas about what a daddy is: one from you, the mom, and the second, five years later, from school. The first impression is by far the more important.

Children are not born asking for "daddy," nor do they have any idea what daddyness means to their mother except through her own expressions. And it is the mother's dreams or wishes for a daddy-figure for herself, not her kid, that are going to make an impression on her young one.

What does "daddy" mean? To most of us, regardless of what our own birth father was like, a daddy in the symbolic sense is someone who is the ultimate protector, firm yet doting, strong yet tender; he "takes care of you" in the role of the masculine nurturer. He's a lot like a good mommy but he's got that positive-macho edge. And there's not one of us who hasn't wished for that Santa Claus kind of guy to be there when we felt afraid or alone.

Now here's the important part: When you start fretting "my child needs a father," you need to get a grip and realize you are speaking for yourself. You are yearning for someone to help you out, take care of you, pick you up off the floor and give you a well-deserved piggyback ride. So go find someone to do that, get the support and comfort you need instead of ragging on your kid as if she or he were incomplete.

When you, the single mom, are broke or tired or bitchy, it's not because a man is missing. It is because you are broke and tired, and the combination is impossible. Ask any married woman if she is cash-happy, filled with energy and just a bundle of love. They aren't sitting on Santa Claus' lap either. The big secret about married moms is that most of them find themselves in same situation as unwed parents --- struggling for support, blaming themselves for not being able to do it all and struggling with the expectations of the nuclear family test bomb. If their man is their partner in that struggle, it's because he's revolted against the distant-father/shut-down-husband role model, not living up to it. If they're making a family together, it's because they're both playing "daddy" when each other needs it.

Your kids need people to love them and learn from, period. Men, women, whatever. Yes, if you are all alone and don't offer them any other adult companionship and care, they are going to suffer from the isolation. You are going to go crazy from lack of support -- notice that's a gender neutral idea. But you can't expect to stick some male figure in the room and expect a magical masculine euphoria. Don't introduce your kids to their absentee birth father and expect that they are going to "relate." Don't look for boyfriends who you think are "father material" -- look for lovers who can love and take care of you, the mommy. When you, the mom, are tended to by friends and lovers who can give you the daddy energy you need, your kid is going to appreciate it tenfold.

"Daddies" come in all shapes, sizes, philosophies -- and genders. Some women are more butch than the burliest male specimen. Some men are utterly uninterested in teaching your child sports or how to use a urinal. Stop asking people to live up to the worst gender stereotypes and let folks who can get to know and love your kid offer what they have. It doesn't matter if they're men or women. It doesn't matter whether you're sleeping with them or not. Your child's health, and your personal well-being, are dependent on your faith and open-mindedness about what a family can be, not on some nonsense about what a "husband" is supposed to live up to or what your blood family is supposed to deliver. Instead of asking, "Where's daddy?" we should be asking, "Where is love? Where is strength? And where are those qualities in myself, so that I'll know the real thing when I see that remarkable character in others?"