Motherhood Redefined : Relationships: It takes a woman and a child, but that’s the only common denominator. The interaction does not fit neatly into a single lifestyle because it is a matter of individual choice--and the choices are vast.

Once one of your more basic concepts, mother is now a term open to interpretation.

This year in Orange County for example, two judges were asked to consider who is a mother in the strictest legal and medical sense. Both ended up on the side of genetics--giving the child to the mother whose egg was used to create the baby.

Meanwhile, an Orange County infertility specialist was making mothers out of menopausal women who produced babies with other women’s eggs.

Not only doctors and lawyers are reconstructing the idea of motherhood. Children of the ‘90s also want to know: Can one child have multiple, simultaneous mothers including birth mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers, and all the women their father married? Who is the real mother--the mother who’s gone, or the one who’s there, taking care of you every day?

“By the word mother, we could mean many different things,” said Judith Resnik, a USC law professor who helped organize a recent symposium on “Reconstructing Motherhood.” Motherhood is “not driven by any one particular aspect of connection between parent and child,” she said.

At the same time, single women are quietly redefining mother as the breadwinner as well as the cookie baker. Demographers now predict that more than half the children born in California will be raised, at least for a while, by a single mother.

Some say mothers now aren’t even much different from fathers; they both do parenting .

“The interesting thing is that people make lots of choices about how they personally will define it, how they personally will parent or mother,” said Carole Levine, a family support consultant based in Evanston, Ill. Today on Mother’s Day, perhaps the greatest honor would be to support their choices, she said.

Here, three Orange County women--a single mother, an immigrant mother reaching out to the children of her community, and a married career mother who has struggled and juggled to do it all--tell who they are and what they do.

LETIA SHORT, Focusing on Her Son

This evening, for her Mother’s Day treat, Letia Short will take herself and her 4-year-old son, Ryan Travis, out to their favorite Italian restaurant just a few blocks from their apartment in Orange. It will be just the two of them--the way it’s been since she left his father, six months before he was born.

Short, 37, whom friends describe as exuding “momism,” was a tourist agent when she decided to marry--partly because she was ready to be a mother. But after a year, she knew they had too many differences. “Parenting certainly was not one of those things we would do easily together.”

Girlfriends assisted her in Lamaze class, and her parents and friends helped during the delivery.

To be the sort of mother she wanted to be, the sort that is home making snacks in the afternoon, Short has adjusted her living arrangements, her job and her daily schedule for her child.

“I always put him first,” she said.

She nursed him for a year--even during business meetings when she’d slip in and out without the others knowing.

She took a job as director of sales and marketing for a country resort in the Tehachapi Mountains. Most of the company’s business is in Los Angeles and Orange counties and she is able to work largely at home by computer.

Short researched preschools, decided on one that favored a developmental approach and moved into an apartment next door so that she could walk him to school and be near in case of an emergency.

Usually she rises at 5 a.m. to work on paying bills or doing dishes so that her evenings are free to give him her undivided attention.

For a while she needed to drive to Los Angeles every day. Ryan had to be at school when it opened, she had to be back by 6 p.m. or pay the dollar-a-minute fine. “It was stressful in my car,” she said.

There are some benefits to single parenting, she said. “You’re the sole decision maker,” she said. “There’s no voting. You can do things your way.” Some friends in troubled marriages have told her they envy her.

On the other hand, there’s no one home to talk things over with or pick up the slack when she’s sick.

And even though her salary is in the $40,000 to $60,000 range, she said that given her rent ($800) and day-care costs ($500), money is tight. “We live in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment. I probably will never be able to afford a house.”

Ryan Travis sees his “biological father” twice a month, she said. “We have male friends, friends who are married with children. He has good role models.”

She doesn’t date much, primarily because she wants to spend what little free time she has with her son--at least while he’s small. Moreover, her schedule and priorities make her “difficult to date,” she said.

Sometimes her small, seemingly complete family intimidates men, she said. “They wonder what role they would fill.”

DELIA VARELA, Nurturing a Community

From the rural villagers in her hometown in Jalisco, Mexico, Delia Varela learned what was expected of mothers. They simply gave themselves over to their children’s needs.

Now at 50, Varela has raised six children in two countries through separations and poverty only to land in an Anaheim neighborhood threatened by drugs and gangs. While her situation may be common, her response was not. She chose to expand her nurturing to the community’s most vulnerable children.

On any weekday afternoon, a dozen or so school-age children can be found in the apartment next door to hers, which she rented with donations. They do their homework with the help of Spanish-speaking tutors. Occasionally, they also get a friendly dose of religion and old-fashioned family values from Varela.

Through an interpreter she says: “The children prefer to be here rather than listen to their parents fighting at home.”

Varela said she understands a child’s needs for warmth because her own mother was distracted, raising her and her brother alone.

At 16, Varela ran away. She had four children with a common-law husband who left them.

Varela worked in Los Angeles as a housekeeper and maid, leaving her children, 8, 6, 2 and 1, with her mother-in-law. She shared an apartment with other women in the same position. They sent almost all their money back home, at night washing the only clothes they had--their uniforms.

She married again and divorced, in the process bearing two more children and bringing her other children to the United States and legalizing them.

Her family now, she says, is a support network of other immigrant mothers she met through the church. All unmarried, the mothers turn to one another for the major celebrations, birthdays, Christmas, baby showers.

In 1989, they also organized Padres Unidos, a nonprofit outreach group that has held AIDS education meetings and fund-raisers to pay for the apartment, which serves as an unofficial day-care center as well as tutoring center. Sometimes, the apartment is open until 10 p.m.

Some of those who come belong to a welfare mother with 14 children. Some have handicaps.

Varela tries to instill boys as well as girls with the importance of family responsibilities, she said. And sometimes they ask her questions they don’t ask their parents. For instance, an 11-year old asked her, “Is love a sin?” She replied no. “Love comes from God and that could not be a sin.”

Last week, the children decorated wooden plaques with sentimental or religious pictures cut from magazines for Mother’s Day. Today, Varela will celebrate Mother’s Day with all of them in the community park.

Notably absent will be the children who don’t come to the center after school--the neighborhood boys in the gangs.

Usually, they turn their faces when they see her, Varela says with pride. They know what she thinks of them, because she tells them, and they are embarrassed.

KARLA BELL, Taking Her Shot at Parenting

The girls growing up with Karla Bell in the college town of Claremont used to joke that their 1950s-era mothers were bright, overeducated women who expended all their energy staging coups in the PTA.

But in all seriousness, several of those homemakers took Karla aside and told her, “Don’t do what we did. Have a career. Don’t accept a compromise.”

A few years later, buoyed by the first wave of women’s liberation, Bell made history as part of the first class of women graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Most were militant feminists who considered motherhood limiting to their careers and who sought niches in male-dominated professions of law or medicine.

Now, after a successful 12-year career in law in which she became a partner in a major Orange County firm, Bell, 39, has resigned to be a full-time mother to her two children, 3 and 1. When her husband, Charles Kanter, also a lawyer, leaves in the morning for work, she remains in their Newport Beach home, scheduling the children’s appointments and activities and volunteering for political campaigns and causes.

Contrary to appearances that she has arrived full circle, Bell said:

“What they warned against was never taking your shot. I had the opportunity for and had success in a different arena. Many of those women wondered if they could have.”

The key issue for her--as it is for nearly all the struggling and juggling working families--was time.

“Someone predicted that whether or not I could do it all would depend on whether my kid got sick a lot,” she said. “My kid got sick a lot.”

Caring for a colicky child who nursed every two hours, had repeated colds and diarrhea left her without the aggressiveness, resiliency and determination she wanted for a job that sometimes required 80 hours in a week. And neither her husband nor the live-in housekeeper could accept the responsibility.

“I felt it was my job in some way and I wasn’t comfortable with delegating it to my husband.” She said, laughing. “I suppose it comes down to the conviction that I could do it better.”

After a failed attempt at part-time work, she took a leave of absence to decide what to do.

A turning point came one afternoon watching a panel of feminists on a TV show. Asked what single change they would make if they could live their lives over, one said she’d spend more time with her children when they were little. Everyone else on the panel agreed.

“I felt as if I’d been released from my vows,” Bell said.

A housekeeper still does the housework and laundry. She runs the boy to preschool, attends parent-teacher conferences, goes on field trips, runs errands to the doctor and pharmacy “where I am a known and valuable customer” and organizes her child’s social life “that involves greater peer interaction.”

She considers having a third child. “The more children, the greater the challenge.

“I like it more now than I did at first. The more you learn, the better you get and the more you enjoy it.”

She knows her decision was made possible only by the nest egg she acquired when working and her husband’s salary. And she does not preach it as the best or only solution.

“That was the original idea of feminism wasn’t it? Choices?”