Bad Mommies
I had an errand out of the house today. Daniel stayed home with my parents who are visiting briefly. Although I was only gone about an hour, apparently he spent much of the time hanging out the window, wondering if and when I was coming home. When I did return, he sighed with relief and said, “Oh Mommy. You came home.” You’d think I was prone to random disappearances.
My book club has decided to read Running With Scissors, a memoir of a childhood spent among dysfunctional adults. The opening pages (I have not read any further yet) are about the author as a boy, following his mother around as she prepared to go out and how desperately he wanted her not to leave him. It seemed an unfortunate juxtaposition (although this boy’s mother was off to a poetry reading and I was off to CVS).
Whenever I read this sort of cathartic, oh my childhood was so strange and awful literature, I tend to focus on the mother characters — I watch them, evaluate them and constantly compare them to myself, looking to see if I’m as bad as they are and whether my own child will be forced, due to my obsessive knitting or tendency to serve lots of leftover sausage, to write yet another confessional autobiography in order to exorcise his demons. I don’t like scrutinizing myself in the mirror of yet another Bad Mother, but it’s part of what worries me right now. I may not be a Bad Mother exactly, but what if I’m Only an Okay Mother, or A Unpredictably Difficult Mother or a Useless at Crafts Mother? I probably am.
How good do you have to be at this?
None of the above. You are a [b]good[/b] mother.