the "bad mommy" orgy

It used to be that all writing by mothers about motherhood was sweet and light and happy. Motherhood was all rainbows and roses and soft-focus babylove. Mothers simply didn't admit -- at least in print (in large part, because no one would print it) that sometimes being a mother is boring, painful, depressing, and just plain hard.

Then came the amazing and wickedly subversive Erma Bombeck, who managed to get publishers to let her write about these things -- but only if she couched it all in slapstick humor. Her books sold in the gazillions and mother-readers loved them because lurking just beneath the laughs was the extreme pathos of the darkest days of mothering little kids.

Today, however, the dam has burst and it seems to me that we are now in the midst of some kind of "bad mommy" orgy, with writers and publishers tripping all over each other to see who can admit in print -- hard copy or online -- to being the worst, darkest, most disturbed mother on the block.

This new piece by Ayelet Waldman in the NYT Magazine takes the cake. In it, she says that she loves her husband far more than her children. I'm not sure there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but it has the ring of "Look at me! Look at me! I am a very weird and imperfect mommy, hence I am oh-so-hip."

I think that mothers are so happy to finally to be able to talk/write openly about the hard parts of the role: the dark, nasty underbelly of mothering, that we are seeing a feeding frenzy. For so long, NO ONE talked about postpartum depression and related things that it's refreshing to finally have these topics out in the open.

But to my mind, there is nothing cool or hip about TRYING to be the biggest slacker-mom. And saying repeatedly in print how ambivalent one is about being a mother is also starting to bore me.

Maybe I'm just a pollyanna, but overall, I dig being a mom. It suits me. I adore my kids and most of the time, find them great company. Of course, mine are older now (13, 9 and 7) and I well remember the exhaustion and run-raggedness of the days when they were 7,3 and 1, but even then, I mostly liked it. I loved being pregnant (after the nausea passed - that sucked) and enjoyed breastfeeding as much as any experience I've ever had. I remember the early months after each one was born as a euphoric period -- probably it was hormonal, but I fely giddy happy when they were tiny and I could lie in the bed and just stare at them in awestruck wonder and count their fingers and toes....

I do have bad mother days. Some days I do really fail at mothering and then I feel guilty. I write about these things and I think it's important for women to talk about, read about and write about these things so we don't feel so alone on the job. But I sure would like to see some balance in how motherhood is presented. It isn't all pathos and ambivalence and depression; sometimes -- most of the time for me -- it's the most satisfying part of my life.