DOES FATHER KNOW BEST?

By MARGARET CARLSON

"It's always something" is the unofficial anthem of mothers who work. If it's not a sick child or a snow day or a workplace that has hardly flexed despite the fact that 68% of women with children younger than 18 work, it's an ex-husband using your career to try to take the kids away. Mothers with high-powered jobs like Marcia Clark, the prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson case, may have the most to worry about. In a flurry of recent custody battles, women who don't conform to the Donna Reed notion of motherhood have lost custody to men who slightly exceed Homer Simpson's idea of fatherhood.

As she heads to court this week to contest her estranged husband's petition for custody of the couple's two young boys, Clark should take heed of a similar case decided last fall in Washington. The fact that Clark is up early with the children and manages to get home and tuck them into bed most evenings before returning to the courthouse may not be enough to counter a presumption that lawyering is incompatible with mothering. It was not enough for Sharon Prost, deputy chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose ex-husband Kenneth Greene in 1994 won custody and $23,010 a year in child support. Prost told the court she rose at 5:30 a.m. daily to fix breakfast and drive the older child to school; the younger came with her to Senate day care, where she had lunch with him and logged him out many days well before the 6 p.m. closing time. Her boss, Senator Orrin Hatch, testified that when the Senate was in recess, about half the year, he supported her going home early. A psychiatrist, chosen and seen by both parties, found that Greene, who had insisted that there be an au pair in the house even when he was unemployed for more than a year, was attentive to the children but that Prost was the primary caregiver who provided structure and discipline. The judge, however, gave great weight to the testimony of the au pair, who said Prost was hardly ever home for dinner and ate surrounded by briefing papers when she was.

Prost filed a new affidavit last month in which she swore that she is still the primary caregiver for the children, except that now it is haphazard and at her husband's discretion. Prost says she still drives them to school and day care, stays home when they are sick, arranges for their shots, buys their shoes and goes along on field trips and to soccer practice. She does all the kids' laundry, which is dropped off along with them. Greene disagrees but is not required to respond to matters already decided at trial.

Some of these suits seem to be more about money and revenge than about the children. Gordon Clark did not sue for custody until Marcia Clark asked for more child support. The willingness of the courts to let young children be used as poker chips may be one more bow to the Angry White Male. But the signals from the new majority are mixed: work is bad when it takes the professional mother away from her kids, but good for the welfare mother who must leave her children for a job at a minimum wage that she will then owe to whoever watches them.

Even in the Simpson trial, there is a double standard. No one seems concerned that Robert Shapiro, who has young children, is out many nights at the Eclipse, the Beverly Hills restaurant of the moment, and no one dwells on Johnnie Cochran's troubled record as a husband. The double standard means a working mother not only has to worry that someone else will see her child take his first step while she is reading a brief but also that if she achieves success in a man's world, her child won't be there when she gets home.

--With reporting by Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles

With reporting by Elaine Lafferty/Los Angeles