If evolution really works, how come mothers only have two hands?
A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
I love my husband more than I love my children.
Most children would rather preserve the fantasy of a loving connection with their fathers and mothers, at all costs, even if it costs them their self-esteem. When you're three or seven years old, it's less frightening to think of yourself as an unlovable, disappointing screwup than to recognize the fact that you're living with a monster.
If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.
One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals.
The 'good' mother, with her fixed smile, her rigidity, her goody-goody outlook, her obsession with unnecessary hygiene, is in fact a fool. It is the 'bad' mother, unafraid of a joke and a glass of wine, richly self-expressive, scornful of suburban values, who is, in reality, good.
Good mothers make all kinds of choices. Making a decision that might sound selfish does not make a woman a bad mother.
My interests still are my interests. That doesn't make me a bad mother. I think that makes me a really good mother, because when I go and creatively satisfy myself and those interests, I come home satisfied.
Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him.
Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.
In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.
A bride who is bullied by her mother-in-law will herself become a bad mother-in-law.
There appears to be a disturbing trend in this nation to try to force single moms to choose between their children and their careers. If they take their careers seriously, they are labeled as bad mothers. If they spend time with their children, they are labeled as people who can't be serious about careers outside the home. This is a sexist double standard. No such guilt trip is imposed on men, who are generally not forced to choose between their children and their jobs.
It used to be the one or the other, right? You were the 'bad girl' or the 'good girl' or the 'bad mother' or the 'good mother,' 'the horrible businesswoman who eschewed her children' or 'the earth mother who was happy to be at home baking pies,' all of that stuff that we sort of knew was a lie.
I think that, when you play a mother, whether you play a bad mother or a not so great mother or an amazing mother, being a mother is already so complicated. It's already three-dimensional, automatically, no matter what the role is, because you're playing a mother.
or simply:
