Today is October 31 -- Halloween. I have a five year old, an almost four year old and a 2.5 year old (all homeschooled). They do not know today is Halloween because I do not want to hear the moaning and crying to get dressed every five minutes. I'll tell them when it gets dark. How many years do you think I'll be able to get away with this????
Every year, I get the holiday boxes out a little closer to the actual date of the holiday. We celebrate holidays other people barely notice. I have a whole box just for St. Patrick's Day. What can I say? I was very energetic, once upon a time.
I used to be so big on Halloween, it was hard to wait until it was technically October to get all the decorations and storybooks and doodads out. This year I was so tuckered out that it was only today, the day before Halloween itself, that I hauled it all out -- and then only because my son needed the stuff to carve the pumpkin with. So we'll have a day, maybe two, of having fake spiders and that huge foam-rubber Halloween hopscotch game all over the place, and then it'll be, "Okay, honey, holiday's over. Time to pack it in."
I never used the television as a babysitter. But once when my son was a baby, I was holding him in my lap and he turned and started gnawing on his bassinet. It was padded on the edge, and I guess the firmness underneath the quilting felt good on his gums. I was so relieved at just being able to sit down, I read for twenty minutes before I thought about the fact that the bassinet had been a hand-me-down from people we didn't know very well, and that I'd never washed the quilted accessories.
When the kids want to take a bubble bath, I just squirt a little dish soap into the tub. Hey, it's bubbles, right?
My son was not quite two years old, and I was still getting the hang of mothering, cleaning, and prioritizing. One morning, he was following me around with a story book in his hands. "Read? Read?" he asked.
"Okay, honey," I said. "Let me just make the bed."
He waited quite patiently. As soon as he noticed I was done, he waved the book again and repeated, "Read? Read?"
"Sure, sweetheart," I said. "I just need to finish the dishes."
At this point, something inside him snapped. In the same piping little voice with which he'd asked for the story, and pronouncing each word carefully and separately (speaking in full sentences was still new for him), he rapped out, "Make the bed! Do the dishes! Make up your MIND!"
It was a turning point in our mother-child career. Neither of us gets to make a promise we won't keep.
I win the "real bad mommy" prize.
My daughter was very scared of going downstairs alone. Her bedroom is down there, so often, in order for her to retrieve a toy or something else she needed, she'd ask me to stand at the top of the stairs and watch her go down. If I'd talk to her while she was down there, she'd wait until she got back upstairs to answer, because "they will hear me if I talk when I'm down there!"
One day, she was heading back upstairs after one such daring foray. I have no idea what possessed me to do this. I really didn't expect the reaction I got. But I knew I shouldn't do it. I said, very casually, "Hey, look out behind you." She screeched and bolted up the last few stairs as if a demon were chasing her. I really had only expected her to sarcastically reply, "Oh, cut it out, Mommy..." But her terrified reaction was just awful. I am the world's worst mommy.
Note from The Baddest of the Bad: This entry epitomizes the world of difference between Hellparents and Real Bad Mommies. A Real Bad Mommy is self-aware enought to feel terrible when she screws up -- and we ALL screw up. A Hellparent just doesn't get it.
My oldest daughter was five months old. She was trying so hard to roll from her back to her front. Trying so very hard. So naturally I decided if I helped her, it would "show" her what needed to be done to succeed. I took her hand and pulled her over. Rather than being delighted she proceeded to cry hysterically - the pain cry. I picked her up and noticed her arm was limp and did not "work." I started to panic and called my husband to meet us at the doctor. Trying to teach my daughter to roll over resulted in a dislocated elbow and a LOT of questions from the Doctor! Thank goodness it was an easy fix. Needless to say she ended up rolling over just fine - on her own, two days later! Bad Mommy!
Okay, this is the Baddest of the Bad Herself. I promise not to get mushy like this ever again; but here's a story our ninety-four-year-old neighbor's grand-daughter told us about him that I have to share:
"My grandpa -- okay, we always called him Bapa, so that's what I'm going to call him now. Bapa was always looking out for me. He always wanted me to be happy.
"One day, we were all out on a picnic at the beach. My parents had made me a peanut-butter sandwich with apricot jam, which I hated. I figured if I dropped it in the sand, they couldn't make me eat it. Think again. They knew what I was up to and said I still had to have it.
"Bapa waited until they were off a little distance. He watched to make sure they couldn't see us, and then he buried the sandwich in the sand, so they'd think I ate it but I wouldn't really have to."
Floyd Carter, our next-door neighbor for fifteen years, slipped away to join his beloved wife and son last Friday. If there's a Heaven, it will be a happier place now with him in it. We love you, Bapa!
This picture was taken on a very rainy day on a recent camping trip. We were desperate to find things to do that didn’t involve being stuck in the tent with a three and a five year old. We were lingering over lunch to pass the time and my husband and I even indulged in the unforgivable sin of a daytime beer. The kids were restless, but being the selfish bad mommy that I am, I wasn’t ready to face the rain yet and I was enjoying the view from our table. I usually insist my kids stay put when dinning out, but the restaurant was almost completely empty and we had the large back area to ourselves, so I let them stray from their seats. The three year old contented himself by sitting on the stage and watching the lights on the juke box, tapping his toes to the music. The five year old, however, made a beeline for the bar. At least I didn’t give him a quarter.
This is a two-parter Bad Mommy story. The other day my five-year-old daughter put a garbage bag over her head. Bad Mommy Moment #1: I actually let my kids play with plastic bags; I was standing right next to her and she put it over her head. She announced, "Hey, I can put eye holes in this and be a ghost for Halloween!" My first thought? GREAT IDEA! Bad Mommy Moment #2: The thought of putting holes in a garbage bag and calling it a costume sounds PERFECT to this busy mommy trying to figure out costumes for 3 kids.
My worst Bad Mommy moment:
My son was extremely clingy as a baby. We're talking The Human Leech. This wasn't so bad during the day, once I got accustomed to just leaving him in the sling every loving minute; but at night I was still figuring out how to make it work. Sometimes he was in a bassinet right next to my side of the bed. A lot of the time, he was in bed with me, because I was just too tired to fight it any more. It was so much easier to nurse or comfort him with him right there next to me. And I was so tired.
So. One night I was particularly exhausted. He was just a few months old. I had nursed him and put him down, but he wasn't having any of it. So I took him in with me. Still wanted a lot of my attention. Changed him, fed him -- he was restless, and I was dying. My husband was out of town, so I didn't have any backup.
Both of us finally fell asleep. I did, at least, and he didn't make any noise about it so I assume he did too.
I woke up in the middle of the night and did my automatic check for him. Wasn't in the bassinet. Wasn't in the bed with me. Time for a complete flip-out? You must have read my diary.
I went into one of those silent, unbreathing panics, but forced myself to stay calm long enough to take the next logical step. I started feeling around on the floor next to the bed. There he was, fast asleep. Thank heaven the floor was thickly carpeted. To this day I have no idea if he was sleeping too hard to notice that he'd fallen or if I was sleeping too hard to hear him cry. I'm really, really hoping for the former.
Group bad mommy moment: A bunch of us were at the park with our kids. They were all playing, and we were all talking. One of the moms broke open a brand-new package of chocolate sandwich cookies -- for us, since the kids were off doing their own thing.
So we're standing around partying -- eating cookies, talking. All we needed was a bottle of wine to make the day complete.
Just then, the littlest kid -- he's barely a year old -- stood up under a picnic bench and rapped his head smartly. He burst into a wail. All the moms said, "Aaaaaww." We all felt horribly guilty. We'd all been standing maybe five feet away from him, and not one of us was able to keep him from bonking his head.
His mom scooped him up, of course. He was still pretty ticked about the whole incident -- he'd given his head quite a whack, after all. So his mom grabbed one of the cookies and shoved it into his hand.
He just stared at it for a minute. Then he finally started to eat it, but in this kind of slow-motion fascinated kind of way. His mother explained a little sheepishly that this was perhaps the second time in his life that he'd had a sugary treat. We all agreed that it was a wonderful Bad Mommy afternoon -- group negligence leading to injury, followed by that crucial first step toward sugar addiction.
In order to keep this site the fun place I want it to be, I update it almost every day. If you're a math major, you've already figured out that in order to do that, I need approximately 365 new Bad Mommies stories a year. If I don't get them from my readers, I have to descend to my own Hall of Shame and dredge something up. It's true that I'm the Baddest of the Real Bad Mommies, but sooner or later the well's going to run dry! So please, please, with a cherry on top -- send us your worst! I never put names in the postings -- in fact, I've actually removed some from stories readers have sent, just to be on the safe side! You can send your confessions here, secure in the knowledge that no one but your kids, your in-laws, your family, your co-workers, and your immediate circle of friends will ever know that you're a Real Bad Mommy! I say go for it!
It was the end of a four-day camping trip with the kids, and we were all exhausted. We'd packed up all the gear, and were relaxing on the beach. The kids were off playing. The only problem was, they wanted us to look at everything. Come see this seahorse, come see this shell. After a while, we'd just had it. We didn't want to get up and look at one more thing.
Finally, one of the kids started heading toward us lugging a rock pretty much as big as she was. She was calling her mom to help her, but it was in that tired fretful voice where every syllable is five seconds long. You know -- "Moooooooom, heeeeelp me." We're the total attachment parent types, but still, neither of us budged.
So she's lugging this rock toward us, fretting every step of the way. Finally she just flops down in the sand dramatically, in a kind of I-can't-take-it-anymore way, and drops the rock next to her. She was fine, but looking at her from our angle, you could almost think that she was trapped under the huge stone. She sits there and commences to just wail. "Maaaamaaaaa!"
My friend rolls her eyes and snaps back, "Mommy's tired! Chew your leg off!"
After I finished laughing hysterically, I told her that I'd have to report her to the Real Bad Mommies committee, and she agreed that this was entirely justified.
When my daughter was ten years old, she asked me if she could shave her legs. I was ten when I started shaving, but I had black hair on my legs. My daughter inherited her father's coloring and is blessed with blond hair on her legs and arms, so I said no. I really did not see a reason for her to shave her legs and I told her I thought she was too young.
Of course, she was incensed. There was a lot of yelling and door slamming. She asked over and over, "Why?" and I replied over and over, "Because you're too young."
Finally she screamed back, "It's not my fault I'm too young, it's YOUR fault! You should have had me sooner!"
I am a really bad mommy!
When my son was in diapers, he wore cloth. So he had this big bulky layer protecting his tushie from the outside world, the not-so-occasional fall, and of course Mama playing his bootie like her own personal bongo. (It makes a terrific noise if the baby's got those anti-leakage plastic pants on over the cloth.)
After he was trained, I was so in the habit of his having this heinie-armor on that one day without thinking I started on one of my usual drum-solos. Of course he had just underwear on now, so his poor comparatively-bare bottom (okay, he had two layers of clothing on, but still) took the full impact. He didn't even notice what I'd done, so obviously it couldn't have been too bad -- he would have let me know in no uncertain terms if it was! -- but I still felt awful about it for the rest of the day. All right, the rest of the decade.
My friends are always telling me about being embarrassed about running out of some kind of important food, and having to eat Pop Tarts for dinner or something. (That one really did happen, and it was to a very good mommy.) I run out of stuff, too, which is inexcusable since I live two measly blocks from an open-twenty-four-hour grocery store. My Bad Mommy food anxiety is more subtle than this, though. I'm not afraid of my son telling the world about how we ran out of milk and had to have something weird for breakfast. I'm worried that after years of conscientiously buying the milk, pouring the milk, and telling him to finish the milk, scientists will find out that long-term consumption of cow's milk leads to stupidity, hemorrhoids, cancer of the pinky toe, or something equally horrible. And then he'll blame me. You know, the way I blame my parents for not strapping me into a car seat, putting a bicycle helmet on me, smoking indoors, packing kids five to a backseat and the heck with the seatbelts, etc.
My son's favorite story book used to be "The Magic Porridge Pot," by Paul Galdone. It's about, you know, a magic porridge pot. This little girl is crying in the woods because she and her mother don't have any food and she can't even find any nuts or berries or anything. Very pathetic. And then this weird old woman comes up and gives her a pot that will make all the food you want.
The important part of all this backstory is that I used to do a very creaky voice for this old woman, and at one point she says, "Do not worry, my dear." That's after the little girl has said to herself, not knowing anyone was there listening, "What will we do? We're so hungry." Got it? Okay.
One morning I'd read this story to my son. It was about an hour later, and I was a complete basket case. It was just one of those days when no matter how I tried, I just couldn't get us out the door. "Oh, for crying out loud," I finally said in a not-too-quiet voice, "I can't stand this any more! What am I going to do? We're never going to get out of here!"
My little son, maybe four years old, comes up and says in this weird, crackly voice, "Do not flip out, my dear."
I started laughing hysterically, but I felt like the worst mommy on the planet. Here my son was making me feel better, when it was supposed to be the other way around. Plus, even weird witchy women in story books were way nicer than I was. Great.
Okay, here's my most recent bad mommy moment. It's so recent that it's happening as I type this right now.
My daughter, age 7, has been prancing, stomping, and marching all over the house, up couch and down, naked as the day she was born, for the last hour (uncharacteristically for me, no exaggeration, I promise) singing at the top of her amazingly powerful lungs, "My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored," ...etc. etc....up to and including the "GLORY, GLORY HALLELUJAH!!!!!!"
Over and over. And OVER. And, well, you get it, over..... A solid hour, with no letting up.
Not only have I not gotten out the video camera to record this auspicious beginning of her (no doubt) long and distinguished performing career, but I actually told her a few minutes ago, "You know, this is really close to not being cute anymore."
Luckily, I don't think she is too damaged, as she simply blinked at me a few times, then turned away with a mighty "GLORY, GLORY HALLELUJAH!!!!!"
What's even worse, last week she got on a roll with a chant that would make John Lennon proud:
"All we are saying, is give peace a chance!"
This went on until my husband actually lost his temper and yelled, "Sometimes peace means SILENCE!!!"
Sigh. We suck at this parenting thing.
I have been known (in the sense that even the neighbors can hear me, and comment on my performance) to go over the top when it comes to my response on certain "hot-button" issues. I just never seem to be able to tone it down when my son says that he doesn't feel like doing something he's supposed to.
I know it's wrong. When I ask him to please put his stuff away, get dressed, etc., and he whines, "I don't waaaaant to," I know I should calmly but firmly tell him that he needs to anyway -- we all have things that we don't really feel like doing but that must be done just the same. I know this is what I should say, because the perfect mommy in my head tells me so.
Unfortunately, she never wins this battle. Because what actually comes out of my mouth is always something along the lines of, "Oh, really? REALLY? This is the planet of 'I Don't Have To If I Don't Want To?' I didn't know we'd moved there! What a great place! Let's see -- gee, where do I start? Well, I don't feel like doing the laundry -- those aren't even all MY dirty clothes anyway. I sure don't feel like doing the dishes. And I know right now that I'm not going to want to make dinner. Heck, I don't even feel like being awake! I'm going back to bed right now!"
I realize this is horribly, horribly wrong for any number of reasons. However, it does seem to get the job done. Even when my son doesn't want to do the right thing for the right reason now, he'll do almost anything to circumvent my going off on my rant. I just hope I die before he writes his memoirs, because I'm pretty sure I don't want to see what he's going to have to say about me.
I saw a Real Bad Mommy in action at a theme park the other day. She was pushing two kids in a stroller, and they started to whine and complain. "We don't like it in here! We want to get out! This is boring! You're mean!"
"Oh, yes," she said without missing a beat. "I'm a terrible, terrible mommy to be pushing you guys around in a stroller where you can sit in the shade and relax while I do all the work. Horrible. There you are, sitting comfortably! I am so mean!" I felt like cheering.
Whenever my kids sing something, my husband always makes up his own words to what they're singing. They're always inappropriate and wrong, and we laugh hysterically while the kids scream at us.
My nine-year-old daughter once fell asleep late in the afternoon. We woke her up at bedtime -- "Come on, honey, it's time to go to bed." She was totally disoriented, and instead of heading for her room, she started for the front door. "Honey, what's the matter? Where are you going?"
"I need to go home," she said.
She snapped out of it in a minute, and we all had a good laugh. Just a cute family story -- wasn't it funny the time Little Woogums tried to go home after her nap.
Except that my husband can never let that kind of thing go. She fell asleep again another time -- same thing, late in the afternoon -- and my husband went to wake her up at bedtime. "Honey," he said quietly, "come on, wake up. It's time to go home."
"Wha?" she kind of mumbled, totally out of it -- just like last time. He actually got her to put her shoes and coat on, and they went out the door. Of course the other kids and I are practically wetting our pants by now.
They got all the way out the front gate, and then she started figuring out that something weird was going on. "Where are we going?"
My husband turned around and opened the gate again. "We're going home," he said, and led her back inside.
We've done this several times now -- "Wake up, honey, it's time to go home." She falls for it almost every time, at least for a couple of seconds. It never gets old. Yes, we're evil.
When I'm tired and my son can't fall asleep, I'll lie down with him, usually conking out way before he does. My husband comes in and wakes me up when he's about to go to bed himself. It's nice because that way I get to feel like a failure as a mommy (never taught my kid to just go to bed and go to sleep, already) and a wife (don't spend enough quality time with my man).
I don't know if this is real bad mommyness or not, but I sure felt like a bad 'un. I nursed my son for about a million years, and I would always read when I did. My stepmother and a bunch of other moms I knew were shocked by this. "Well, when I nursed, it was special to me," my stepmother said. "I would settle down with him and just look at him. It was a very precious time." Which made me feel great -- like I didn't think my kid was "special" or "precious" or whatever.
Of course, much later I read this book by a woman who had eight kids or some such thing. Her mom gave her a hard time because she hadn't been reading when she nursed. "I managed to read the entire Bible by the time I weaned each baby," she said. So then I felt bad again, because I'd mostly just been reading novels and stuff.
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