Bad Mothers

5.7 min readBy Published On: May 17th, 2012Categories: Features0 Comments on Bad Mothers

Written by Heather Foley

Last Sunday was Mother’s Day, so most of us spent the week inundated with stories of simply amazing and inspiring moms.  The mom who lost her legs protecting her kids from a tornado, the hardcore attachment parenting moms, former supermodel moms who now work tirelessly for worldwide maternal health, is anyone else bored?  Well maybe bored isn’t the right word, but enough already.  Don’t I have enough to feel bad about?  Societal pressure to be thin and pretty, to wear the right clothes and carry the right bag, blah, blah, blah, and now to hold up an unattainable ideal of motherhood?  What the eff society?  Its one thing to put pressure on me to look a certain way, but stay out of my family thank you very much.  I figured I can’t be the only one who rolls my eyes at the thought of keeping my kid in a papoose for the first 12 months or breastfeeding until a kid can cut their own steak, right?  So I thought it would be both helpful and fun to compile a list of moms who suck, and make us all feel a little better about our own mothering shortcomings.
Super tan mom.  Do I even have to say it?  This chick is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s.  For the record, I don’t think she took her daughter into the tanning bed, not because I think she seems like the type who would know a bad decision if it walked up and bit her on her leathery ass, but because she wouldn’t want to share her UV rays with anyone.  Lets be frank, if you resemble my penny loafers, look in the mirror and still say ‘I think I need to be a little darker’, you might not see things all that clearly.
 

Ocotmom.  Did you just film a solo porno to avoid foreclosure?  If your answer is no you’re already better than Octomom, if your answer is yes please get in touch with me, I am already fascinated by you.  Listening to Octomom talk is like taking a ride through crazytown, forget her elevator not going all the way up, I don’t even think she has an elevator.  And her interview with Oprah and Suzy Orman will always have a special place in my heart, mostly because it was obvious to anyone watching that Suzy wanted to slap the creepy vapid smile right off her face.
 

Wallace’s mom from HBO’s ‘The Wire’.  When cops show up at her door looking for her tween-ish son she informs them she has no idea where he is, and she’s been looking for him too because he had the nerve to take a couple bucks from her purse (and she works hard for that money, if you catch my drift).  The really sad thing is there are plenty of real moms like this out there in the world, so lets here it for the moms who would actually be concerned if their 14 year old kid disappeared on the drug-infested streets of Baltimore, whoop whoop.
 

The mom from ‘Flowers in the Attic’.  In the interest of full disclosure, I love, love, love this movie.  When I watch it its hard to believe it was a real movie, released in theaters and everything, and I wonder if Lifetime executives saw it as teens and thought ‘oh my God there needs to be a TV network devoted exclusively to crazy melodrama’ and that’s how Lifetime was born.  If you haven’t seen this movie go watch it right now, don’t even finish reading this blog.  And yes I know it was a book first, and the book is also bizarre.  The bat-poo crazy mom locks her kids in her parents attic, proceeds to live like they don’t exist, woos a wealthy man in attempts to marry him to collect his fortune all while (SPOILER ALERT) slowly poisoning her kids with arsenic because as we all know kids are a total bummer and ruin everything. 
 

The chicken lady from ‘Hoarders’.  Right now you’re probably thinking how can I pick just one mom from ‘Hoarders’, they are all clearly insane and terrible mothers.  You are 100% correct my friends, however there is a valid reason I chose chicken lady.  The ‘Hoarders’ cast claims that family is the most dysfunctional they have ever dealt with, so that’s a special kind of matriarch.  In case you’re not sure who the chicken lady was, she hoarded all types of animals (most were sick, shocker) and had a trailer devoted exclusively to chickens.  She had so many chickens crammed into crates that the chickens on the bottom were crushed to death under the weight of the other chickens.  Oh and also she had her kids taken away from her years and years ago and didn’t to seem to think that was a bid deal.  If you don’t feel superior watching the chicken lady you are far beyond my help and I weep for both you and your offspring.

Bonus miscellaneous moms.  I like a name that’s a little different, who wants to have 4 kids with the same name in their class?  Though I was never a big fan of my name, I was at least grateful that I was always the only Heather.  But then there is the other end of the spectrum, parents who pick a name that’s so far out there it borders on child abuse.  According my extensive research (stumbling upon statistics on msn) these are all real names, and their moms suck, Mayo Head (I totally just puked in my mouth), Lucky Green (did Dennis Duffy name this kid?), Maya Buttreeks (it must be hilarity nonstop in this house), and Mayor Bland (I guess its better than Mayor McCheese).  And lets not forget those wacky celebs that name their kids things like Fifi Trixibell, Moxie Crimefighter, and Audio Science.  If you name your kid something that doesn’t sound like a Bart Simpson prank call pat yourself on the back, you’re not the biggest a-hole in the world.

Ok, so maybe you didn’t win one of those amazing mom makeovers that every daytime talk show seems to have this time of year?  Maybe you’ll never win one, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a kick ass mom!  Did you literally just say ‘be careful with those guns because I’m not driving anyone to the hospital, you’ll have to take a cab’ to your 11 year old son and his friend?  No?  Well I did, and I don’t even feel bad about it.