3.0
Bad Mother
ByPublisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “hilarious, heartbreaking, and edgy” (Newsweek) memoir on modern motherhood.
In our mothers’ day there were good mothers, indifferent mothers, and occasionally, great mothers. Today we have only Bad Mothers: If you work, you’re neglectful; if you stay home, you’re smothering. If you discipline, you’re buying them a spot on the shrink’s couch; if you let them run wild, they will be into drugs by seventh grade. Is it any wonder so many women refer to themselves at one time or another as a “bad mother”?
Writing with remarkable candor, and dispensing much hilarious and helpful advice along the way—Is breast best? What should you do when your daughter dresses up as a “ho” for Halloween?—Ayelet Waldman says it's time for women to get over it and get on with it in this wry, unflinchingly honest, and always insightful memoir on motherhood in today's world.
In our mothers’ day there were good mothers, indifferent mothers, and occasionally, great mothers. Today we have only Bad Mothers: If you work, you’re neglectful; if you stay home, you’re smothering. If you discipline, you’re buying them a spot on the shrink’s couch; if you let them run wild, they will be into drugs by seventh grade. Is it any wonder so many women refer to themselves at one time or another as a “bad mother”?
Writing with remarkable candor, and dispensing much hilarious and helpful advice along the way—Is breast best? What should you do when your daughter dresses up as a “ho” for Halloween?—Ayelet Waldman says it's time for women to get over it and get on with it in this wry, unflinchingly honest, and always insightful memoir on motherhood in today's world.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities71 Reviews
3.0
mairead
Created 10 months agoShare
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“the last page was !!!!: "The thing to remember, in our quest to do right by our children and by ourselves, is that while we struggle to conform to an ideal or to achieve a goal, our life is happening around us, without our noticing. If we are too busy or too anxious to pay attention, it will all be gone before we have time to appreciate it. The irony is, of course, that by thinking about mindfulness, I could just be setting up another unattainable goal, another way to fail at this impossible of jobs. A Good Mother is a mindful mother. A distracted mother, what is she? Surely you know by now: a Bad Mother. But still, perhaps it’s worth the risk. Even if I’m setting myself up for failure, I think it’s worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obsessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is. A mother who doesn’t fret over failings and slights, who realizes that her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgment of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn’t worry so much about being bad or good, but just recognizes that she’s both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad."”
“This book was.... I don't know how to describe it. So I guess the best way of trying to tell you what I think, is tell you what it did to me.
It made me feel exhausted, rushed, guilty, tired, not good enough, angry. In any particular order, depending on the part I was in.
Mommy Police is apparently the same wherever in the world you are. And the sad thing is, that even when your child(ren) has (have) left home, the feelings/things described in the book don't stop.
Written when I got the book:
Sounds like the perfect book for me: a modern working mother. Old enough to have a traditional mother myself. Wrestling from time to time with what I want, what my child needs and what the world outside my small family thinks I'm 'supposed to do'.”
Shelley Perigo
Created about 2 years agoShare
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Jessica Zapata
Created about 3 years agoShare
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Sharon
Created about 3 years agoShare
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About Ayelet Waldman
AYELET WALDMAN is the author of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, and Daughter's Keeper, as well as of the essay collection Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, and the Mommy-Track Mystery series. She was a federal public defender and taught a course on the legal implications of the War on Drugs at the UC Berkeley law school. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband, Michael Chabon, and their four children.
Other books by Ayelet Waldman
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