I’ve spanked my daughter. I wrote about it earlier this year. It was just once, and under very specific circumstances – she was putting herself and her baby brother in danger and she needed to be stopped, quickly – circumstances that don’t excuse the spanking but do, I think, explain it. I didn’t spank out of anger. I didn’t spank as a matter of habit or consistent practice. I spanked because nothing else was working in a given moment and circumstances demanded that I do something. I’m not proud of it. I hope that it never happens again. I fully intend that it never happen again.

A report was recently released that suggests that spanking might be a good thing, that kids who are spanked might be better off, might turn out better, than kids who are not spanked. This, I think, is troubling. Not because I think that spanking and spankers are in all circumstances evil and terrible – my own parents were spankers – but because I think that although spanking is not always or necessarily abusive, it tilts too obviously and too dangerously in that direction and anything that encourages the practice just might, you know, grease the slope.

(more…)

This was the week that I let my Bad Mother flag really fly, I think. I mean, sure, I have, in the past, covered such established bad ground as spanking my preschooler and nursing another woman’s child and dressing my kid up as a Droog, but that ground is pretty well-trodden – doesn’t everybody use A Clockwork Orange as a reference when costuming their kids for Halloween? – and in any case,  I don’t think that you can really call yourself a bad parent until you start blaspheming Santa. Which I totally did.

(more…)

You never really appreciate Santa until you have children. Sure, Santa is great when you’re a kid and he’s just that big guy in the snowsuit who flies reindeer and brings presents and eats a lot of cookies – which, let’s face it, basically boils everything that is great about childhood – presents, cookies, flying animals – down to its peppermint and gingerbread-infused essence and splatters a whole season with it – but once you’ve become a grown-up with your own children, Santa becomes something more. Something – some would say – better.

Santa becomes The Enforcer. A weapon, even. The Bad Moms’ Secret Christmas Weapon. Michael Bay should get on this.

(more…)

I have a confession to make: when I said that I was giving up on any kind of sleep training, I meant it, but I was also kind of hoping in, some small dark corner of my heart, that ‘giving up’ would be the magic bullet and that by ‘giving up’ I would be making space for the possibility that the whole situation would just fix itself, you know, because doesn’t it sometimes work that way? Well, it hasn’t, so far, although it’s only been one night – a long, difficult night during which the boy yanked about 263 strands of hair out of my head, one by one (counting oneself to sleep by hairs instead of by sheep: over-rated) – and I have to remind myself to be patient, to let it go, to try to stop worrying and love the wee hands gripping my head, really, because I do remain committed to this idea that this – this whole thing – is a thing that I will someday miss and someday mourn the passing of and someday want back, badly and that I should just give myself over to that, in whole or in part, or something.

This is me reminding myself. This is me reminding myself. This is… zzzz…

Okay, so I threw it out there and I said that the parenting stuff that I tend to feel most guilt around is the stuff that I (almost) never write about here. And then I asked whether that was reasonable, seeing as I advertise myself as a mother who knows no shame, and who believes firmly in the emancipatory power of speaking the truth – good and bad – about our experiences. And you all, quite reasonably, said that that was indeed reasonable, and what’s my problem?

I don’t know. It is, to abuse the simile, something like an itch that I can’t scratch, and that maybe I shouldn’t scratch, but that nonetheless is calling to be scratched and I can’t help but wonder whether it wouldn’t be better if I did scratch it, if only for the second or two of the scratching which, you know, always feels good.

Anyway. Here’s my confession, in video form. Which is to say, here’s a video that shows the sort of thing that I’m not proud of and that I tend to not write about, because, seriously:

(more…)

Yesterday, I took part in a televised discussion about so-called ‘bad parenting,’ shame and confession. I wore a lot of eyeshadow.

I never wear eyeshadow, so I was really kind of embarrassed by it. Later, when I asked my husband what he’d thought of the show, he said, ‘you had some really good things to say, but you looked like you were in pain.’ ‘That was the eyeshadow,’ I said.

(more…)

So we’ve been trying to get Jasper to attach himself to a lovey. Emilia offered the use of hers, but – noting the fact that Toady is, essentially, a giant plush phallus – my husband suggested, in the interest of not setting Jasper up for future discouragement, that she perhaps keep Toady to herself. Instead, we tried bears, penguins, squeaky giraffes, musical clowns, vibrating sheep, and a beaver.

He liked the beaver.

We realized our mistake too late.

(more…)

Things are getting desperate around here. Like, really.

I can’t remember the last time I slept more than two or three hours at a stretch. I had hoped that my brief trip to Chicago would provide a full night’s sleep, but, alas, I spent that night waking up every hour wondering why I wasn’t being woken up every hour. Which, you know: FRUSTRATING.

The source of the problem is this: wakeful little Jasper and his grabby little hands. The boy has been in some kind of continuous developmental spurt/growth spurt/teething bender/WHATEVER since early September and the only thing that calms him down when he wakes – as he inevitably does, every night – is a fistful of my hair, preferably clutched while his little body – conveniently relocated to the master bed – is wrapped tightly around my head. Removal of legs or arms or fists results in high pitched wailing.

(more…)

I’m not sure what is funniest about this recent post at Salon: that Googling ‘bad fathering’ automatically prompts the suggestion that what one really wanted to search for was ‘bad mothering’ (because, as we all know, there are no bad fathers, just bad Google algorithms), or that the first time (ha!) this blog appears on Salon is as a screen-captured example of Google’s determination to put all the blame for bad parenting on mothers.

My husband will be relieved to hear that there’s no point in him starting that ‘Her Bad Father’ blog, seeing as I have, apparently, pissed all over that territory for both of us. He’ll also be relieved to hear, that, according to Google, he’s off the hook forever for every and any bad parenting decision he makes, seeing as it is, apparently, a Googlistical impossibility that he ever be accused of bad fathering.

(Which, while we’re on the subject: bad fathering? Why employ the active verb in a Google search? I suspect that a search on ‘bad fathers’ might yield different results. Turning my attention to that, however, would deprive me of the opportunity to say this: BAD DADS ARE THE NEW DRAG.)

(Thanks for all the warm wishes yesterday. Jasper seems to be improving. And the claw marks on my head are healing nicely. Need to sleep for, like, a week, though.)

Before I had children, I was deeply discomfited by the idea of breastfeeding. Neither pregnancy nor childbirth alarmed me – both would be uncomfortable, I figured, and the latter would involve some extreme measure of pain, but, really, nothing that the ordinary horrors (the monthly bloating and cramping and general misery) of womanhood hadn’t prepared me for – but breastfeeding? A tiny person, feeding off of you? Off of your boobs? Really? It provoked all variety of confusing fears about the psycho-sexual experience of motherhood (you have to expose your boobs? really?), and even though I understood, intellectually, that there was nothing weird or creepy or gross about breastfeeding, and fully intended to nurse my children, if I had them, I still, sometimes – involuntarily, and almost imperceptibly – shuddered when I thought of it. Breastfeeding. Breastfeeding. Eww.

Of course, when I finally did have children, that all changed. Mostly. My personal experience of breastfeeding, apart from the pain and difficulty (more on that in a moment) was – to be maximally gushy about it – transcendent. Nursing my babies, nourishing my babies, holding them close and providing for them – me! with my very own body! – was, to understate it, amazing. But that was in the privacy of my home. Nursing in public was difficult for me: I was anxious about exposing myself, about receiving disapproving glances and unwanted stares. And every disapproving glance or unwanted stare (stink-eyed in malls and libraries, ogled at DisneyWorld, asked to cover up on a plane) just reinforced my shame. It also, however, provoked a measure of frustration and, later, outrage. How was I supposed to care for my children, nourish and nurture my children, when so much of the outside world frowned upon it? And: how dare they?

I’ve written at length about my frustration with the fact that public breastfeeding is still not wholly accepted in Western culture. That mothers – women – are made to feel any measure of shame around the act of nourishing their children is, in my opinion, deplorable. And the fact that it was not so very long ago that I felt such shame – and that I bought into the shame long before I even put a child to my own breast – still hurts my heart. Which is why I didn’t hesitate to support public criticism of Nestle during their recent social media debacle, and why I was more than happy to support another blogger’s efforts to promote breastfeeding-friendly advertising on BlogHer blogs. The calculus was simple: anything that undermines efforts to help breastfeeding become an accepted public norm = bad, anything that promotes breastfeeding = good.

But is any such calculus ever so simple?

(more…)