Good Mothers versus Badass Mothers

I swear, if I read one more article by a wannabe badass mother I am going to self combust. Here's the latest, telling us what good mothers do and proudly exclaiming her badass-ness because she doesn't do them. (It seems to be a made-up or arbitrary list of "good" parenting habits by the way.) Interestingly, "reading to your child" isn't on the list of good parenting points. Not sure what that says but I'd do that before I forced them to eat vegetables.

"Bad" seems to be the new "best" way to parent these days. I'm such a slovenly mother that I'm not going to wash my kids for two days. Ooooh. (You'll notice in the article that she's so Un-badass she has to give us a reason. Real badasses don't feel the need to justify.) I hate to pick on this mother in particular because goodness me, there's a post like this almost every week now.

And apparently "bad-mothering" is now a movement, to counter the saintly "good mothers" we used to read about, although personally, I knew very few like that. There's even a bad-mom blogging genre, for heaven's sake. But as this piece in Salon illustrates, the slacker moms (another badass term) are every bit as judgmental as any other preachy mothers. I quote - "The issue with all this bad mothering, besides the culture of reverse bullying it has created, is that it doesn’t do much to undo the good mother myth that it was set up to squash in the first place."

Exactly. 

How insecure do these badass mothers have to be that they write books about how bad they are? And let's recognize the massive elephant in this particular room - no real, honest-to-god badass mother is going to sit down and write a book - especially about her parenting style. Get real. She doesn't preach, she just does her own thing. And the kids of pretend badass mothers are probably perfectly "normal" too. It's a bit like confessing that you never take your make-up off at night, when you have flawless skin. You're not going to proudly confess that one if your entire face is covered in zits now are you? Any more than you're going to fess up to being a slacker mom when your first born is in a juvenile detention facility. 

So once again, I say unto thee - Just do what works for you and stop looking around to see what everyone else is doing. My guess is, we're all doing the best we can. 

Incidentally, here's a real badass mother.