What Makes a Bad Mom?

Plus the surprising origin of the MILF and a BOOK GIVEAWAY

For the past two days I’ve had a sick kid at home. My life has been all projectile vomit all the time. We’re in the clear now, but after I spent two nights in my eight-year old’s bed, making sure he puked in a trash bin and not all over himself or the bed I got screamed at by my other child when I woke her up this morning?

“You’re the worst because you gave him more love last night!!!!!”

Mom cannot fucking win. We just can’t.

If you have kids, you’ve probably wondered at some point if you’re a bad mom. I’d say this is true for 99.9% of us. And the other 0.1% is Ruby Franke.

Motherhood today is basically a no-win game. Do you work too much? Bad mom. Don’t work enough outside the home? Also bad mom. Gentle parent? Not okay. Parent too hard? You’re total shit.

This is why I was so psyched to get to talk to Cut reporter EJ Dickson about her new book One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Mom Influencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate.

This book is so well-reported (which is no surprise because EJ’s work at the Cut is always utter perfection…you must read this piece on her infiltrating Turning Point USA Young Women’s Leadership conference). In the book EJ digs deep into who gets called a bad mom, why it’s such a favorite label in media, pop culture, and in online mom groups and what that obsession says about power, class, race, gender and the patriarchy.

You can listen to the two of us chat about all of it on Under the Influence.

One of the things that I found the most surprising in EJ’s research is that the idea of a “bad mother” is not some ancient, eternal label, but rather a really modern construct.

For most of human and American history, the bar for parenthood was basically: keep your kids alive. Women were not assessed based on nurturing or emotional devotion. They were assessed based on productivity that included work in the home, work in the fields and work to provide capital for the family. The whole modern fixation on the mama as the moral center of the universe shifted a lot in the Industrial Age along with the rise of the idea that women should be the protector of the hearth and a safe place for men to return when they get back from toiling in the dirty world.

That’s about when judging mothers became one of America’s favorite hobbies. And it has been super useful through the rise of capitalist markets. Making women feel off-kilter makes us buy things. It fuels capitalism and keeps us endlessly performing and trying to fix ourselves.

I started this podcast because mom influencers made me feel like I wasn’t a good enough mother. They made me believe my house was never clean enough and I wasn’t breastfeeding hard enough. Then they’d sell me the solution.

Sigh. It’s all such a fucking scam.

EJ said something during our conversation that I want to tattoo on my arm:

Are you present? Are you there? Are you nurturing? Do you love your kids? Do your kids feel safe? Do they trust you? Do they feel accepted for who they are?

Beyond that, everything is gravy.

OK, but also, let’s talk about MILFs…..

I had never heard the origin of the term MILF until I read EJ’s book. (ALSO WE HAVE A GIVEAWAY FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS OF EJ’s BOOK…COMMENT MILF IN COMMENTS TO WIN…US ONLY)