"I Am a Failure as a Mother," a talk given on NBC radio in 1932 by Clara Savage Littledale, mother of two, has a lot to answer for, including a couple of new memoirs by grownups determined to profess their parental ineptitude: "Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood" (Norton; $23.95), by Michael Lewis, father of three; and "Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace" (Doubleday; $24.95), by Ayelet Waldman, mother of four. Littledale was the founding editor of Parents’ Magazine; in the nineteen-thirties, her radio program--a column broadcast over the wireless--filled Emily Post's noontime slot on Wednesdays, Miss Manners's day off. Lewis and Waldman are columnists, too. "Home Game" started as a series on Slate, episodes in which Lewis, tenderhearted and befuddled, tries to figure out the unwritten rules of the "new fatherhood"; "Bad Mother" revisits essays first written for Salon, in which Waldman uses stories about her family to argue that there’s no such thing as a good mother. If you've ever read a parenting blog, and I don't say you ought to, you have a good idea what lies at the heart of these books: ersatz confession. Lewis finds newborns hard to love; Waldman hires a maid to clean up after her maid. Lewis tells all--all!--about his vasectomy; Waldman provides her sexual history. Waldman insists that how any woman rears her kids is nobody’s never-you-mind. "Let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business," she writes. This puts a reader in a tight spot: can I or can I not skip the chapter in "Bad Mother" wherein our author confides her regret over her breasts’ lost buoyancy?"