Bad Moms

by Nora McInerny

  “You’ll be fine, Keeks,” he promised me. “Everyone always likes you, you’re the best person I know!” But I don’t think that’s true. About everyone liking me, I mean. Last year, I wore my Christmas sweatshirt, the one with a giant teddy bear dressed as Santa Claus, the one with actual bells sewn to it? And someone at Target told me that it was hilarious. Here, it seems like moms are always dressed like they just went to the gym, but they’re never sweaty or dirty in any way. Or they’re dressed like sexy teenagers from one of those CW shows.

  When I was growing up, a few of the moms in Minot worked part-time jobs at the school, or the dollar store, but otherwise, being a mother was their full-time job. They spent their days making lunches, vacuuming the sitting room, making dinner, and watching Oprah. In the winter, they’d snowblow the driveway and drive us to school on the back of a snowmobile. At night, they’d call one another on their home phones. I remember my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, laughing hysterically with Sharon Mulcahy or Mary Beth Jensen. Motherhood was like a club they’d all joined together. One they all belonged to, as equals. All of them except for Janice Holmes, because she was a real b-word.

  The moms I knew were all soft and inviting, like worn-in couches. They didn’t moisturize, they just put on Pond’s Cold Cream every night. They didn’t run small businesses or have blogs. They weren’t influencers, or mompreneurs. They were just . . . moms? I wasn’t even aware that there were different food groups until I went to college. Dinner at every house I ever went to growing up was simple: casserole, whole milk, a slice of white bread. For dessert, a bar made from some combination of flour, sugar, butter, chocolate, and caramel. The vegetables we ate came from a can, or from our own gardens. I don’t know if our gardens were considered organic, but I once grew a prize-winning zucchini and got a blue ribbon at the county fair because it really did look exactly like a giant question mark.

  I love my kids. I l-o-v-e my kids. But I don’t love being a mom the way I thought I would. I love macaroni necklaces and #1 Mom mugs that Kent buys the day after Mother’s Day when they’re on clearance. I don’t love feeling like Missus Peepers, watching the world from the outside while my daughter gets another piece of pea gravel stuck in her nostril.

  Today, Gwendolyn posted a photo of Blair and Gandhi sitting quietly in their Adirondack chairs, finger-knitting chunky scarves from what looks like hand-spun, organic cotton yarn. The caption read: “We are what we love, and I love every minute with these two.” I double-tap it immediately.

  I want to love motherhood. I want it to be effortless and fulfilling. I want to be a part of whatever club this is.

  I want to be like Gwendolyn.

  Gwendolyn James Style

  “How do you do it all?”

  It’s the question I hear most often.

  “How do you run a successful blog, raise two beautiful children, maintain a happy marriage, find time to train for another marathon, and inspire mothers around the world?”

  The secret is this: I just do.

  Do you want to know what you have in common with Beyoncé and Oprah and me and Gwyneth and Hillary?

  We all have 24 hours in a day.

  All of us.

  24 hours to mother, to run, to train, to inspire.

  24 hours to live, laugh, and love.

  You can fill that 24 hours with action and accountability, or with excuses and regret.

  You can spend that 24 hours wishing you had the life you wanted, or making it happen.

  24 hours.

  How will you use yours today?

  In Love,

  Gwendolyn James

  Click here to sign up for my “Mega-Mom” eCourse. Just $599 with code GWENJ.

  7

  Carla

  There’s a reason why I use a flip phone. There are lots of reasons, but here are the most important ones:

  The government has a harder time tracking them. An iPhone is probably real slick, but I don’t need the CIA knowing what I look up on the Internet, and that’s also why I use my library card when I need to Google something. It’s nobody’s business what kind of rash I have, and I want to keep that between me and WebMD.

  Russians will watch you through that stupid camera phone, and if I’m going to be on camera, I want advance warning and I don’t want it to be at that weird angle where my neck looks like an elephant leg coated in self-tanner.

  I don’t need all that email shit.

  I mean, I have an email address, but that’s only because I need something to give to salespeople that isn’t my phone number. My phone number is a prize to be won, not something I’m handing out at Walgreens so they know what kind of vitamins to give me coupons for. How about no vitamin coupons? How about a coupon for Nyquil or nicotine gum or something actually useful? Giving someone my phone number is like giving them my home address. Giving someone my email address is like telling them, “Good luck finding me.”

  Not everyone has the luxury to just not email. I know. I’m blessed.

  I’m lucky to have a career where I’m not sitting at a desk all day, replying to messages from John in Accounting about where the invoices are for the whatever thing. I’m lucky not to be sitting at home wiping nuts and butts nonstop.

  When I was in high school, I took a series of tests with my guidance counselor to help me figure out what to do with my life, but I already knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to be my guidance counselor. Lisa—she never let us call her Ms. McCarthy—was smoking hot. She was the only teacher at our school who wore heels in the winter, when this godforsaken place is covered in feet of snow for months at a time. She’d wear her frumpy winter boots only as far as the lobby, and then change right into a pair of stilettos. The other teachers thumped around like rhinos, but Lisa click-click-clicked down the hallway, tight skirt hugging her butt. She reminded me of my mom, only employed, and she had a way of looking into your eyes that made your skin feel hot and your brain feel loose in your head. I found myself saying things to her that I hadn’t said to anybody else, spilling my little teenage guts all over her floor and taking a tissue when she gently slid them across her desk toward me. My mom always told me that I should just get a job in a correctional facility so I could find a man, but I wanted to make people feel like Lisa made me feel: like they mattered.

  And thanks to all those tests, that’s exactly what I do! Every day, I wake up, put on my face, hike up my tits, and make the world a more beautiful place, one vagina wax, one manicure, one facial at a time. I know more about the women of our city than their husbands, their best friends, and their therapists combined. By the time they get to my table, they’ve spent fifteen minutes sipping cucumber water in the sunroom, ten minutes listening to nature sounds and having an “aromatherapy experience,” and anywhere from thirty to forty-five years saving up their deepest secrets and insecurities.

  The rules of my table are the same as a therapist’s office: it is a safe space, and I won’t tell anyone about the hole your child punched through your labia during childbirth, or about the confusing weekend you spent with your best friend from college where you maybe had sex but does it count as sex if it’s mainly hands? (Yes, it does.)

  What’s funny to me is how my table works like a two-way mirror. These women pour out their secrets to me like they’re cheap liquor on Thirsty Thursdays. They tell me the things they haven’t told anyone else in their lives, things they probably don’t even admit to themselves when they’re paying thirty-five dollars to sit in a dark room riding a bike that doesn’t even fucking go anywhere. And you know what they know about me? Nothing. They don’t know my last name, or my star sign. They don’t know that I’m a mom, or that I rely on whatever they choose to write into the tip area when they sign their credit card slip as they go.

  These women, who I see every day at the grocery store or at school pickup, don’t see me like I saw Lisa. They don’t see me at fucking all.

  8

  Amy

  “What I’m about to show yo
u is highly confidential, and intensely personal. Please hold all commentary until the end of the presentation.”

  Jane is standing next to her desk, her hair brushed and parted neatly in the center. She is, for some reason, wearing one of my blazers over her soccer T-shirt. I thought she’d called me into her room to tuck her in, but instead, she confiscated my phone and seated me in her beanbag chair the moment I crossed her threshold.

  “Sixth grade is a critical year for me,” she says. “What happens this year can and will impact the rest of my life. Every grade, every goal: it counts. It could be the difference between me having it all . . . or losing it all.”

  Jane takes a deep breath and hits the spacebar on her laptop, and IN IT TO WIN IT: JANE MITCHELL’S TEN-YEAR PLAN shoots up onscreen with a flourish. When did my kid learn PowerPoint?

  Jane’s presentation includes her goals for what she called “the three pillars of personal success,” broken down by one, three, five, seven, and ten years. She’s calculated the amount she would need to save each year to retire comfortably at age sixty-three, and the projected cost of a four-year college with and without an athletic and academic scholarship. My first thought was Why the hell did I do her summer report if she’s apparently a PowerPoint savant? My second thought was How does my kid know more about personal finance than I do? And should I hire her to plan the next ten years of my life? Jane has always been an intense child. As a baby, Mike and I would look into her eyes and say, “She’s onto us.” She was wiser than us from the start, an old soul who happened to land in the laps of two people who conceived her older brother after a night of keg stands and body shots.

  “What do you think she’s thinking?” we’d ask each other as her giant brown eyes fixed on us, boring deep into our souls.

  “Probably that she was born into the wrong family,” Mike would say, and we’d both laugh at this serious little creature, evaluating us with such skepticism.

  Jane had every right to be skeptical. We were barely twenty-two when Dylan was born, and not even twenty-five when she joined us on the planet. Most of the parents in our Baby and Me group were closer in age to our own parents than they were to us, and they looked at Mike and me as if we were irresponsible teens, instead of irresponsible legal adults. But Jane did belong in our family. She does belong in our family.

  I had been just like Jane growing up. I didn’t have PowerPoint at her age, but I did have a series of journals and a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I had dogeared and underlined. The book had been a gift from my own mother, and at the time I dreamed of passing it down to my own daughter one day. But I knew from Jane’s birth that she would not need any help getting motivated or being a self-starter.

  “MOM.” JANE’S IRRITATED VOICE SNAPS ME BACK TO HER focus group of one. I can tell from her pursed lips that she was annoyed with my lack of participation. “Do you get it? A lot is riding on my making the soccer team this year.”

  When Jane gets worked up, she can’t get her words out fast enough. She is definitely worked up, flipping back through her presentation as her voice gets higher and higher. “Soccer is everything this year. Making the soccer team will prove that I am a well-rounded student-athlete. That will ensure I am admitted into a competitive high school, which will ensure my attendance at a quality university, which will set me up for a good life! If I don’t make the team, I’ll die alone and on the streets. Is that what you want?!”

  I struggle to get up from the squish of the beanbag chair.

  “One second, baby.”

  I’VE MADE IT A POINT TO INTENTIONALLY AVOID OUR BASEMENT. It’s a hole in the ground that our house sits on. An oversize storage unit for all the detritus of our life together. Also, there are spiders.

  I find the box under our staircase. It’s one of many my mother had left on our doorstep when Mike and I had moved in together. Her writing was still on top, scrawled in permanent marker. Mike! These are Amy’s. She’s yours now, and so is her mess! Ha!

  There it is: my childhood in a box. I dig through the blue ribbons and the postcards from my friends’ trips to Florida until I find it, a blue composition notebook, clearly labeled: AMY MITCHELL. 6TH GRADE. MOM DO NOT READ THIS!

  JANE IS BEYOND DISAPPOINTED WHEN I RETURN TO HER room. “Why would I want to read your childhood diary?” she asks, wiping the cover of the notebook with an antibacterial wipe. I forgot that I may have been the last generation to be raised with secrets; Jane and her friends broadcast their feelings and insecurities on social media. My friends and I stuffed them into notebooks we hid from our mothers, and in intricately folded notes we passed to one another in the hallways.

  I crack open the notebook and start to read aloud, doing my best to decipher the bubbly cursive.

  “September 7. I swear to God I am the only person in my class who has any ambition. The other kids just don’t understand me. They’re perfectly happy to spend their days paging through the Delia’s catalog or Frenching their Jonathan Taylor Thomas posters. Well, excuse me if I have dreams for myself, Kristen!!!! Excuse me if I know where I’m going in life and what I want! They don’t understand the value of having a vision. I know exactly what I want out of life. I’m going to go to Mizzou and major in journalism. Then I will move to New York and live in a fancy apartment. I will not have a husband because I will need to fully focus on my career as a news anchor. I will have two Pomeranians.”

  I close the notebook, prematurely satisfied with the life lesson I am imparting on my offspring. Jane is already on her laptop, editing her presentation.

  “Jane.”

  “Mom.”

  “Sound like anyone you know?”

  “Not really. Those aren’t SMART goals. Those are just dreams. A SMART goal is Specific, Measurable—”

  “I know what a SMART goal is, Jane. But do you know how much of my sixth-grade life plan came true?”

  Jane gives me the same look I give people when they’re trying to force me to answer a rhetorical question.

  “None of it,” I answer. “No Mizzou. No New York City. No fancy apartment. Two kids. Zero Pomeranians. One husband—and it’s not even Leonardo DiCaprio.”

  Jane rolls her eyes so hard I’m afraid they might dislocate.

  “I get it, Mom.” She sighs. “You didn’t achieve your dreams. But that doesn’t mean that I won’t.”

  Well. That went poorly.

  “The point I was trying to make, honey, is that my dreams changed. I have everything I never dreamed of, because my dreams when I was in sixth grade were just ideas of who I could be, not who I definitely for sure would be.”

  Jane gives me the same skeptical look she was born with.

  “What I’m trying to say, Janer, is that there are many paths you can take in life. And most of them aren’t even on your radar yet. If you’re too attached to one idea of what a good life looks like, you run the risk of missing out on what a good life is. The things I couldn’t imagine—you and Dylan! A dog that is basically the opposite of a Pomeranian! Those are the things I can’t imagine living without. Just . . . keep your options open, honey. You don’t have to have it all figured out in middle school.”

  Jane gives me a tight smile and closes out her presentation. It’s time for me to tag Mike into this conversation.

  LET ME BE CLEAR: I HATE THE PHRASE “MAN CAVE.” IT’S proof that toxic masculinity has seeped into every aspect of life: How could a guy possibly have just an office or a room to himself? Could a den possibly suffice? A study? No. The modern man requires a room that is so manly it can only be described as a cave to which he drags his kill. Or, in Mike’s case, takes conference calls and plays Call of Duty with our college friends. His office isn’t off-limits to any of us, but there aren’t many reasons to go in there unless you like the smell of old coffee and stale farts.

  Whatever he prefers to call it, I call it Mike’s home office. But it’s more like a dorm room than anything else. Which is why he should have put a fucking sock on th
e door.

  LOOK, WE’VE BEEN MARRIED SINCE BEFORE WE WERE OLD enough to rent a car. I’ve seen the guy masturbate. But there’s something extremely unsexy about seeing your husband sitting in an Aeron chair jerking off in front of a computer screen.

  “Oh, shit!” he shouts when I walk into the room. He’s pulling up his sweatpants, scrambling to act like nothing is happening.

  We’re both embarrassed. But because I grew up reading women’s magazines that beat it into my head that it was my job to keep a man interested in me, I quickly do the mental gymnastics necessary to turn something embarrassing into something . . . sexy and embarrassing?

  “Sooooo,” I whisper—why am I whispering??—“what are you watching?” I’ll admit that it’s really hard for me to watch porn. I’m not a prude, it’s just that there’s never enough plot, and I’ve had enough sex to know that there is never a reason to scream that loud. Also, what happened to pubic hair? It’s there for a reason! It’s hygienic! It protects your vagina from stuff!

  Mike looks like he’s witnessing a car wreck. There’s no sound coming from his computer, so maybe he’s just looking at pictures? Would that be weird? I remember my brother always disappearing to his bedroom with the JC Penney catalog, but that’s only because we grew up in the dark ages when our family Internet access was limited to the number of free minutes provided by the free AOL CDs that showed up in the mail.

  By the time I do my sexiest walk (are walks sexy?) over to Mike’s desk, his boner is safely tucked back into his Wisconsin sweatpants, and he is frantically clicking around, trying to close the window.

  It didn’t work. On the computer, I can see a plain, halfheartedly decorated bedroom and a tall blond woman who exists only in the dreams of straight men and—“Oh my god, that’s a huge bush!” I blurt out. Apparently I’m wrong about pubic hair. This woman clearly has Sasquatch in her bloodline.