Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood - The Good, The Bad, and the Scary

Being a parent is dirty and scary and beautiful and hard and miraculous and exhausting and thankless and joyful and frustrating all at once. It’s everything. (Confessions of a Scary Mommy, Gallery Books 2012).

• I’m sick and all I want is for my mommy to come and take care of me. I’m forty-seven.

The days may last forever, but the years pass by in a blink; the secret to survival is actually remembering to take a deep breath every now and then and enjoy ourselves along the way.

...I realized that there is no shortage of the love a mother has to offer her children. There is a never-ending supply of love, pride, and affection, and each child will no doubt receive his equal share. Thankfully, it's just the way we are built. There is, however, something that each child doesn't get the same amount of, and that is called attention.

• I kiss my young teenager good-bye in the morning as she leaves for school, rising above the hormone-fueled snarling and histrionics. Then I close the front door and flip her off, with both hands.

I’m torn between wanting the absolute best for my daughter and being jealous that she has it so much better than I ever did.

I think birthdays should be less about celebrating the birth of the child and more about celebrating the fact that we succeeded at keeping them alive for another year.

See, this favorite child of mine changes by the day. No, by the minute, actually. Who is this favorite child of mine? It’s the particular one who is pissing me off least at any given moment in time. They have all had their fair share of being the favorite and they have all inspired the “Oh my God, did I really give birth to you” moments as well. It’s one of the best things about having more than one child: there’s always another one to go to when one of the others is driving you up a fucking wall.

Admitting that this job isn’t always easy doesn’t make somebody a bad mother. At least, it shouldn’t. We’re all on this ride together. We are not the first ones to ever accidentally tell our children to shut up, or wonder—just for a moment—what it would be like if we’d never had children. We aren’t the first mothers to feel overwhelmed and challenged and not entirely fulfilled by motherhood. And we certainly won’t be the last. Nothing can be lost by admitting our weaknesses and imperfections to one another. In fact, quite the opposite is true. We will be better mothers, better wives, and better women if we are able to finally drop the act and get real. Who are we pretending for, anyway?

Shouldn't we be secure enough in our own parenting, though, that comparing ourselves to others become obsolete?

How about something we actually want to buy? Alcohol, for instance. That would be the perfect school fund-raiser. Or how about a sickroom for children with lingering fevers to spend the day hanging out in instead of being at home? Or classes over winter break? Practical things that I, for one, would gladly pay for. Even

For a mother, mornings of young, school-age children are a carefully orchestrated combination of timing, skill, and luck. It’s nothing short of an act of God to get three children to school by eight, looking halfway presentable.

The baby is a bit of an asshole, but he’ll grow out of it. We’ll survive.

I shall not judge the mother in the grocery store who, upon entering, hits the candy aisle and doles out M&M’s to her screaming toddler. It is simply a survival mechanism.

I naively thought that when I had kids, my language would somehow clean up, but instead, I found that parenthood gave me much more of a reason to curse. I mean, really, what was I swearing about before, anyway? Traffic? A zit? A broken nail? Spilled milk? Puh-lease. Once I became a parent, only then did I really have something to swear about.