SOLVED. Children's Fiction: About a Mother who stops caring and begins to float away? [s]

[Titus]

I read this book as a kid in the 80s, but I think it used to be my mother's book when she was a kid, so it was probably published somewhere in the 1950s or 60s, no later than the early 70s. It's middle-grade reading level.

The plot (which I remember in surprising detail; I really liked this book and read it a lot) was about a suburban housewife, stressed and overwhelmed with kids/husband/generally being a 1950s housewife, who snaps one day and just stops giving a damn. Her new lightness of mood makes her start floating. Her family freaks out, but she's actually pretty happy about it (mostly because she just doesn't care anymore, about them or anything else). A screwball comedy ensues in which her frantic family tries to keep her from floating away, the media shows up, etc. Eventually they do actually lose their grip on her outside, and she floats away like a runaway balloon, at which point an all-out rescue effort ensues, because she's going to eventually float high enough that she'll either asphyxiate or freeze to death. However, the book's style is still a light comedy style even when they're scrambling to try to save her life.

This is an incredibly weird book because of the style/content mismatch; I mean it's basically a funny book aimed at kids that's about a family trying to save their suicidally depressed mom. Which is one reason why I want to find it again and find out if it's actually as bizarre as I remember.

Other things I remember about the book:

There were cute little illustrations in a cartoony lineart style. I think the cover might've been a cartoony drawing of the mom falling or floating while everyone tries to catch her.

The book was surprisingly educational about different kinds of clouds, layers of atmosphere, and so forth. The mom was either some kind of scientist before she quit to have kids, or she was just really into it as a hobby, but she named all her kids after different kinds of clouds, and a lot of her narration as she's floating has to do with the layers of atmosphere that she's passing through and that kind of thing. This was the book that first introduced me to the jetstream (because she gets caught up in it).

I vaguely recall that the title is one of those "does what it says on the tin" titles like you typically got with kids' books in that era, but (in keeping with the rest of the book) there may have been some sort of weird twist to it. I think it may have included "Mother" or "Mom" in the title (something like "Runaway Mom" or "The Flying Mother" except not actually either of those), but I'm not completely sure about that.

(Note: I'm posting this on behalf of a friend who is not on Goodreads.)

[Rainbowheart]

The Weightless Mother

[Titus]

Rainbowheart wrote: "The Weightless Mother"

Thank you! How were you able to find it so quickly after my post? I've just ordered a copy from AbeBooks, this book seems extremely rare and difficult to find, to the point that even searching it up without the author's name doesn't even bring it up on most sites! Amazing you were able to find it.

[Rainbowheart]

Awesome, glad that was the right one!

What helped was you mentioning the word "mother" might have been in the title. I searched Worldcat for books pubbed between 1940 and 1975 with "mother" as part of the title, and it showed up in the results.