The bad parents are running amok! They’re everywhere you turn, talking about postpartum depression, confessing that their kids are addicted to SpongeBob, throwing their breast pumps in the garbage!
That’s the word from Salon.com. The author looks at two bad-parent books that have just hit the shelves: one by a mother (Ayelet Waldman), and one by a father (Michael Lewis) and notes the distinct similarity between the two. Tho Lewis claims to revel in his badness, while Waldman seems to agonise over it, the author concludes that the similarities in each of their experiences just go to show that parenting needs to be de-gendered. Probably right. But what struck me is that, even in this openly-bad-parent crazy, the edicts of the cult of the perfect mummy (which, I know, I bang on about; I shall continue until everyone sees what I see or somebody shuts me up) are still being respected; still being revelled in, even. It’s as if these “bad” mums are so very committed to perfect mummihood that they’re even willing to flog themselves publicly for their own shortcomings. After first thinking ‘oh goodie, fun and honest mum literature, at last!’ I now wonder whether “bad mums” aren’t just uber-competitive perfect mums, too perfect even to admit to their own perfection, lest they should appear to be finished striving. Ugh.
For contrast, if you’re in Britain (sorry, my American friends!), do catch this quite interesting documentary entitled “Kimberly: Young Mum Ten Years On” about a 24-year-old welfare mum in London who is struggling to keep custody of her second child, her first (born when she was 14) having been taken away from her by the state.
I was just bitching about this today — the ‘bad mummy’ syndrome wherein women compete to be the “worst” when what they are really doing is competing to be the best. I cannot fucking stand it.
Saw the Kimberly: Young Mum documentary and thought it was very good.
thanks for your comments. good to know i’m not just being bitchy/paranoid…or if i am, that i’m at least not alone in it!
Ah elp, if only I could put you through to my sister in law (who is a darling, btw!)
By all means, keep it up.
Hi, I’m such a fan of Bad Mummy Syndrome that I named my blog (paltry, don’t bother going) after it.
You guys seem so hard on us that I felt I had to respond.
I argue that Bad Mummy Syndrome is not about perfect mummies pretending to compete to be the worst mummy of all, the Bad Mummy Syndrome is a dialect. It’s CODE. It’s a code we use to tell other Mummies (or Daddies) that most of the plethora of rules and systems we are bombarded with these days from books, media, and well-meaning interfererers are at best, designed to make us feel inadequate, and at worst, shite to the point of dangerous.
Examples:
“My daughter is still in nappies and she’s four! I’m hopeless at this toilet training thing!” is code for, “My mother, my mother-in-law, my grandmother and every other fucking busybody who would tell me how to rear my children is giving me a hard time about this. I know my daughter and I know she’s unlikely to be psychologically scarred, but hey, mark me Bad Mummy for not fitting in.”
Bad Mummies of my generation would probably roll their eyes in sympathy at this, generation Y might give a sympathetic “Meh.” But after the eye rolling and sympathy noises comes the really, really important bit. The listening Bad Mummy (Bad Mummy Two) must now appropriately denigrate herself. Why? Because if she doesn’t, Bad Mummy One really IS a bad mother. If she doesn’t, Bad Mummy One is all alone.
So, Bad Mummy Two might say, “Mine slept with us until he was five, we just couldn’t convince him that a separate bed was the way to go!” This is code for, “I tried, I tried everything, but in the end the nightly screams and tantrums wore me down, I figured that he must, for some reason only known to him, need me at night and I opted for a quite life with sleep in it. Half the world is telling me that co-sleeping for that long will cause deep Freudian traumas that only emerge in his teens. But I know he’s a happy kid who got what he needed. Sue me for Bad Mumminess why don’t you.”
Other translations might include:
“I caught my two year old drinking liquid soap today.” Is code for, “I’m so fucking tired, and she’s so fucking precocious that NOTHING is safe in the house any more. They say you have to watch them every second but how is that really truly possible if you have to look after everyone else as well?”
“I locked my three year old in her cot for half an hour yesterday. When I got back she’d thrown all the toys I’d given her onto the floor and had nearly broken the gate she was shaking it so hard!” Is code for, “I had to separate us or I was going to physically hurt her. She has screaming rages over such tiny things and it goes on all day, drilling into my skull, I think I’m going insane. If I don’t get a decent break from her soon I will simply go catatonic.”
I could go on and on. But I’m thinking I’d be pressing my luck.
Bad Mummy Dialogues are not about “competing to be the worst Mummy”, they are not about being unable to admit to our own perfection, they are about reassuring each other that these things are normal. That it’s normal to have problems, that it’s normal to feel like strangling your kids (they can be unbelievably frustrating, even the little angels!), and it’s normal to feel completely inadequate and at sea.
The reason this reassuring dialogue is couched in terms of imperfection, the reason that it takes the form of a public flogging is that we are bombarded from every angle with the possibility of perfect parenthood. Advertisements flaunt unattainable visions of perfect families in much the same way they flaunt unattainable physiques. Books and seminars offer miracle solutions and cures to all that ails your potentially perfect offspring (and if they’re imperfect it’s your fault by god, get your act together woman!) It seems there isn’t a parenting problem under the sun that doesn’t have a book on it or a product out that promises miracles.
With all this advice and help out there, where are the excuses for shoddy parenting in any form? We speak in terms of the Bad Mummy because we know this, we know that in the public eye there are no excuses. We are ashamed, guilty of not attaining an ideal that is as impossible for most parents as a Kate Moss figure for most teenagers.
So next time you overhear us “competing”, please, try cracking the code before you come over all judgmental. It’s fear of harsh judgment that gave us Bad Mummy Syndrome in the first place.
emma, thanks for sharing your thoughts. first, i want to say that i’m sure that not all bad mummies are created equal, as it were; i don’t think there’s one and only one explanation for such behaviour. when people start *publishing books* about what bad mummies they are, well, i’m sorry, but i do think that’s a way of bragging without bragging. it seems clear to me.
i think i do understand the motivation for what you are describing, but i feel i must take issue with the approach. your translations say things like ‘I know my daughter and I know she’s unlikely to be psychologically scarred’ and ‘They say you have to watch them every second but how is that really truly possible if you have to look after everyone else as well?’ in short, you don’t actually think yourself a bad mummy. you think you have good reasons for mothering in the way that you do. and so do i! so why be disingenuous? why not say ‘i’m using my own brain and figuring out what’s best for my own child, and what i’ve figured *is* best for my child, and anyone who says otherwise can take a flying leap’? why feed the problem by taking on the ‘bad’ title? from where i sit, it seems like you stab your fellow thinking-mothers in the back by doing so.
Emma, there seem to be at least two things that might be going on:
1. You’re adopting reasonable standards and then using “bad” of them in order to defuse the phrase “bad mommy.”
2. You leave in place the standards of perfection, but allow that you’re not going to meet them all the time, hence you are sometimes bad.
These are very different, as elp is pointing out. It would be really too bad (!) to leave the standards of perfection in place.
Isn’t it just a bit of fun tongue-in-cheek to call yourself a bad mummy? (And do what Emma describes)
i don’t think it is, monkey. it’s helping to set the bar impossibly high for mothers. so for example, you’ll never get “i got really cross one day and hit my kid” as a bad-mummy statement. you get statements like “i only breastfed exclusively for the first seven months”. the act of condemning your actions as “bad” is an act of setting the bar; and the bad-mummy rhetoric invariably sets the bar stupidly high. emma’s example “i caught my kid drinking soap”; this makes a mother *bad*?? of course it doesn’t! but if you, the mother, identify this as bad, it makes you especially *good* (i’m so good i worry about every little thing). that’s the game. and in that, it acts to reinforce this idea that a good mother can never try hard enough; that mothers who call it good enough are failing or doing harm to their children. and this is the sort of idea that leads to opinions like ‘a good mother shouldn’t be in the home with her children’ and ‘a good mother should never think of herself’.
sorry, i meant ‘a good mother SHOULD be in the home’. obviously.
I wonder if there’s room for contextual variation, which can be made sense of using jj’s excellent distinction. In some contexts, e.g. where we all think that the current standards are ridiculous, ‘bad mother’ might be a way of mocking these standards. I’m pretty sure, in fact, that I’ve used it this way. This could happen, for example, where we both agree that e.g. it’s stupid to ban children drinking fruit juice, and we both know this. I might then say “Ooh, I’m SUCH a bad mother– I let Jender-Son have a sip of my orange juice!” I don’t think there’s any way this helps to uphold the no fruit-juice ideal in this context.
you let jender-son drink orange juice?!
sorry, i couldn’t resist.
yes, jender i see what you mean. i don’t know. i mean, like i say, it’s probably the case that there’s ‘bad mum’ and then there’s ‘bad mum’. but i actually still think you’re being a bit competitive (albeit on the defense) when you make comments like the juice comment. what you’re saying is something like ‘i know better than to level a stupid prohibition like that on my child’. and, i mean, it’s good you know better than to do stupid child-rearing things. but there’s something…damaging about reviling in this sort of talk, i think. right, maybe that’s relevant: there’s a difference between making the odd comment and declaring yourself globally a bad mum.