Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace Read Free Page B

lover, she valued his wealth and attention, more than she valued her children’s lives. Instead of getting a real analysis of the psychology of her crime, we were told that Susan Smith killed her children in order to be loved, and to be rich. Selfish bitch.
    Even the maternal crimes of idiot starlets like Britney Spears amount essentially to selfishness. She’d rather go out to clubs than take care of her kids. She’d rather sleep in than report for her drug tests. She’s spoiled rotten, and a rotten mother because she’s so spoiled.
    Not long ago I reread
Anna Karenina
, in Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s magnificent new translation. In the novel there is an achingly sad scene where Anna, who has abandoned her husband and beloved son to be with her lover, excoriates herself with the worst insult she can imagine—she’s an unnatural mother. A natural mother, one who understood the relative insignificance of her own happiness, would never have indulged it. Most of us are, obviously, not about to fling ourselves beneath the wheels of a locomotive, but the fear of being an unnatural mother, a Bad Mother, is all too familiar to us. We are supposed not only to sacrifice ourselves for our children but to do so willingly, cheerfully, and without ever feeling any seething resentment, and when we fail, as we must, we feel guilty and ashamed.
    The question becomes: How does one find consolation in the face of all this failure and guilt? One way is by reveling in the dark exploits of mothers who are worse, far worse, than we are. We obsess about these famous bogeymamas; we judge ourselves for a little while not against the impossible standard of the Good Mother but against the heinous Bad Mother. The more rigid the prescriptionof the Good Mother is, and the more complete our failure in emulating her, the more extreme the Bad Mother needs to be. Terrified of our own selfishness and failures, we look for models further on the spectrum from ourselves than we are from the Good Mother. We may be discontented and irritable, we may snap after the sixty-seventh knock-knock joke, our kids may watch three hours of television a day because we’re too afraid, after checking our local map of sexual offenders, to send them outside to play, we may have just celebrated the second anniversary of the last time we had sex with our husbands, we may have forgotten to bring a snack to the playground, or, God forbid, brought a snack replete with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, we may be divorced from our children’s fathers, our children may not have fathers, our kids may sleep in our beds, our kids may not sleep in our beds, we may bottle-feed, or we may breast-feed for too long, our kids may score in the twelfth percentile on the verbal-reasoning section of the Iowa Tests, we may feed our kids peanut butter or strawberries too early and give them allergies, we may be so vigilant about not feeding them anything allergenic that they refuse to eat anything that’s not white, we may yank on our daughters’ ponytails while we are combing their hair, we may feel like the world notices and keeps track of each and every one of our maternal failures, but at least we’re not Andrea Yates or Susan Smith. We’re not Wendy Cook or Britney Spears. Hell, we’re not even Ayelet Waldman.
    That is,
you’re
not.
    Another strategy some of us have come up with to deal with our sense of failure and guilt is to rebel, to embrace the very identity we are afraid of, to loudly proclaim ourselves bad moms. We bad moms proudly wear our ambivalence on our sleeves. We vociferously resist and resent the glorification of the self-abnegating mother. We snarl at the mention of Dora the Explorer or Raffi. Weshrug at the orange Cheetos dust smeared across our children’s mouths. We swap stories of our big-box travails (“Your kid ran away from you at Target? That’s nothing. I yelled at mine in the parking lot of Ikea and someone called the cops!”). We