Writings / Reviews: Lequanne Collins-Bacchus

General Interest Review

Bad Mommy
By Willow Yamauchi
London, ON: Insomniac Press, 2012
304 pp. $15

For anyone who is their mother’s child, Yamauchi’s Bad Mommy, sheds light on why we should call our mothers more often. In forty chapters of anecdotes about raising little romanticized miracles, Yamauchi exposes the experience of mommy guilt that plagues many and the walking contradiction that motherhood is.

The imagined good mommy is a housewife who is happily married, middle-class, heterosexual, abled, physically fit, financially stable, always enthusiastically present, endlessly patient, cooks healthy homemade meals every day, knows the exact words of advice for every imaginable problem and happy-go-luckily shuttles her children to their music lessons, tutoring classes and sports practises. It is not coincidental that we only find examples of good mommies in fictional, 1950s characters like June Cleaver.

A good mother is never bored, miserable, annoyed, frustrated, overweight, reclusive,  but aren’t these things we all feel regardless if we have mini-mes?   A good mother puts her child’s needs before hers, she happily and enthusiastically rejects her own identity to build up that of her biological parasites. But clearly, this is not always possible if mothers are people just like everyone else with their own identities, personalities, dreams and feelings regardless if they have committed themselves to the taxing job of raising children.

Yamauchi’s humourous yet revealing depiction of motherhood illustrates the plethora contradictions mothers walk.  Women’s choices are constantly analyzed once she grows crotch fruit. She can be considered too old or too young for children, too detrimentally wealthy or too detrimentally poor, too attached or too distant from their children, too unhealthy to even have children or too concerned with maintain her good health, wrongly married to a person or simply not married and on and on, the list is endless as everyone’s midpoint between extremes is different.

We read anecdotes about mothers who worry about a glass of wine in their first trimester, hurting their child’s social status by choosing the wrong name, if they are spoiling their child by letting them sleep in their bed, how long they should breastfeed their babies for and when it is socially acceptable to do so despite having half-naked women in countless advertisements. As well as other mothers feeling guilt about feeding their child junk food, not being able to afford daycare, using synthetic diapers instead of cloth, or letting their child watch too much television. In Bad Mommy, Yamauchi is not an apologist for abusive mothers, but rather asks us to question our misplaced mommy guilt. She highlights that this guilt often arises from just being a person who has a child, not from inherently bad traits and we should recognize this difference.

Further still, what this good-hearted chronicle unfortunately does not touch upon, bad are those who are not mothers by a certain age. Women are also negatively defined by their lack of embracing motherhood, as if it should be the defining accomplishment for a woman whether they embrace it or not. They are bad for not being one whether it is due to abortion,  miscarriage,  infertility,  choosing to be childfree or, more recently a la GOP, not approaching their health with a pronatalist attitude.

No matter what a mother does for her child, where she does it, how she does it, with whom or with what she does it, she will always be under scrutiny.  In Bad Mommy, Yamauchi calls us to laugh at our unrealistic ideals about mothering because no one is perfect. She invites us to take ourselves more lightly because no matter how one parents their child, all that matters is that their child is cared for from a place of love.

As Yamauchi opines, regardless of a mother’s intentions, someone will always find fault with their choices. Bad Mommy lets mothers redefine motherhood with a loving gut, rather than following the self-contradictory over-policed parenting discourse of the day. While mildly contrived in its humour, Yamauchi’s Bad Mommy is a refreshing read for mothers and mothers-to-be while serving as a reminder for happily childfree women and those who just remembered it has been too long since their last call to mom.