RINGING UP

By MARTA SALIJ
KNIGHT RIDDER
& quot;Callie's Tally: An Accounting of Baby's First Year, Or What My Daughter Owes Me" by Betsy Howie (Tarcher/Putnam, hardcover, $22.95).
There are moments in every new mother's life when she realizes, with a start, that she has crossed over, that she can't pretend anymore that she can go back to her old life.
Betsy Howie had one of those moments last year, on an audition for a TV commercial where she was supposed to play a mother. This should be a snap, she thought -- she was a mother with a 7-month-old daughter.
And she was a veteran of dozens of commercials just like this one (Clorox, Monster.com, Wendy's, Guardian Life), in which she'd played the young mother feeding cheese slices or whatever to the perfect child.
"It's good sport to run along the faces and do a quick count of the moms -- real mom, auditioning mom, real mom, real mom, auditioning mom, and so on," Howie writes in her new book, "Callie's Tally: An Accounting of Baby's First Year, Or What My Daughter Owes Me."
"It's not hard to figure it out. The auditioning mothers are not authentic. They look rested, coiffed and thin. They look the way America wants them to."
Howie was having some fun with this game, until a stressed-out casting director put her not with the auditioning actress moms, but with the real moms.
"That was a painful moment in the book," says Howie, 40, with a smile that makes it seem like it isn't that terrible to stop playing moms in cheese commercials. "I was just way too authentic to play a mom!"
Howie may have lost her commercial gigs, but she's found a new outlet for her humor. Her diary of her daughter's first year is selling well.
Idea behind book
The book is built around a receipt-by-receipt accounting of everything Howie buys for her daughter -- as if Callie would ever dream of paying her back.
"My editor had a good line. She said it was the ultimate tale of accountability between a mother and daughter," Howie says.
Howie is a Michigander, reared in Grand Rapids, with paternal grandparents who worked for the Free Press and maternal grandparents from Ann Arbor. She's the first in generations to not go to the University of Michigan.
"I was going to New York to be an actress," she says, so she went instead to NYU.
She did act, in plays and commercials, wrote a musical that was performed off-Broadway, wrote a novel ("Snow," published by Harcourt Brace in 1998), got a job at Scholastic to run the publisher's contests for children, and found herself at 38, as she writes, "a nose above nothing" careerwise. Hey, take a number.
Time to acknowledge that stardom -- well, early stardom -- wasn't going to happen.
By then Howie had taken one leap of faith, as she puts it, and bought an 1850 farmhouse in a 1,000-person town in northwest Connecticut, in which she lives with her partner and Callie's father, whom she identifies in the book only as "Lonnie."
Buying a house outside Manhattan had the unexpected effect of improving her career. "Literally, the day I closed, I booked a national commercial, and then I booked 10 within the next 6 months," she said.
She'd been doing only a couple of commercials a year until then, so you could consider it a big reward from the universe for her leap of faith.
Time to acknowledge that ol' biological clock. "It's hard, when your greatest ambition that you can express is career, and you're trying to work the notion of a child around that," she says.
Leap of faith. Nine months later, Callie.
Callie was the big reward from the universe. A smaller reward was the book deal Howie signed for "Callie's Tally" two weeks before her daughter was born.
A surprise
For two weeks, she was ecstatic. "I have it all!" she said.
Then Callie was born, and Howie discovered the "all" in having it all doesn't include sleep.
"I had micromanaged my whole life and had not once stepped myself through what an average day would be like," Howie says. "I had no idea! Not a free minute!"
Howie also discovered that the sassy tone of the prenatal early chapters -- this child is costing me and you better believe I'm keeping track! -- softened the minute she held her baby.
"There's nothing ironic, glib or sarcastic about it," she says. "It's just the sweetest, purest, most rewarding experience of your whole life."
Callie is now 19 months old and accompanying her mother on a book tour that's grown hugely since it was first conceived.
"I started out begging Tarcher for $3,000 so I could rent an RV and drive around the country," Howie says. "Now I have the head of publicity handling my book." Howie's also working on a play based on the book.
But there are still humbling moments. One minute she's on the phone with a producer for "Oprah."
"Then that night I go to a book signing, and there's nobody there," Howie says.
The universe, though, keeps rewarding Howie. Somehow, she managed to get her mother to retire and move from Ann Arbor to help her with Callie. Howie's mom is coming along on the book tour, too. Hey -- an entourage!
Time for another of those Mona Lisa smiles.
"For an unknown author, I'm very famous."
XMarta Salij is books editor at Detroit Free Press.