Exploiting My Baby

At five months pregnant, I think a lot about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It’s not just that she’s the second woman ever to be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, but also because with her prim lace collars, understated pearl earrings and overall vibe of measured thoughtfulness and calm, she seems like a great mom. I wish she were my mom sometimes. I don’t know the woman, but I even kind of wish she could be my child’s mom. Who wouldn’t want to climb up on that robed lap and hear about how Mom volunteered for the ACLU or learned a new language to coauthor a book on judicial procedure in Sweden?

Kids need to be reassured that everything is okay, whereas my general opinion is that the sky is falling and everyone hates me. I don’t just sweat the small stuff, I flop sweat it.

I regularly miss ten freeway off-ramps just crafting a paragraph in my head or memorizing lines, after which I come to and panic because I’m horribly lost. I regularly leave the curling iron on until it singes the dresser and any nearby hand towels. So far, I’ve exhibited no patience for learning about birthing, birthing centers or baby development. When my doctor was running half an hour behind, I didn’t think, “Oh, well, I’ll just use this time to quietly reflect on this beautiful transition,” but instead, I approached the receptionist seventeen times to whisper, “ETA?” After that, I sat there angrily flipping the pages of American Cheerleader magazine and rolling my eyes. Kids don’t like eye rollers. They need someone who can go with the flow.

When I think about the fact that my baby is stuck with someone as imperfect as me for his primary female caregiver, I get so down there is nothing to do but focus on women who I think would be or have been way, way worse. It’s astonishing—and a bit sad, frankly—how much compiling an inventory of inferior moms puts me at ease. All I can say is that coming up with this kind of list makes me feel better about my own mom potential. So, with all due respect, thank you, worst moms in history, for lowering the bar.

JOANNA KRAMER—This mother, played by Meryl Streep in the 1979 film Kramer vs. Kramer, represented all that was wrong with ’70s moms. Joanna—icy, selfish and beleaguered—bails on her family, only to return a year and a half later to take back her son and screw up the life he’s finally put together with his pops, played by Dustin Hoffman. She wins little Billy back after a character-assassinating custody battle, but in the end, decides, whoops, sorry, he’s better off with his dad. It was all so harrowing that Justin Henry, who played Billy, got an Oscar nomination, becoming the youngest actor to earn that distinction.

“All my life I’ve felt like somebody’s wife or somebody’s mother or somebody’s daughter. Even all the time we were together, I never knew who I was. And that’s why I had to go away. And in California, I think I found myself,” says Joanna, explaining why she left her kid. Can you feel her pain? Boo hoo!

Of course, Joanna Kramer is emblematic of that whole generation of moms, because they always put a premium on “finding themselves.” This was such an important pursuit in the ’70s that lots of moms, like JK, were able to find themselves only by losing their kids. Thus, the second wave of feminism crashed hard on some kids, and you know you’re one if you can’t watch the scene in which Dustin Hoffman pleads for his kid in court without shedding a tear.

The movie struck such a chord that it cleaned up at the Academy Awards, winning Best Picture and garnering Best Actress and Best Actor awards for Streep and Hoffman.

MRS. WOLF SPIDER—A bad mother might not make her children lunch, but a worse mother might actually make her children lunch. What I mean is, a mama wolf spider is generally harmless, unless you happen to be her baby wolf spider. Once born, the babies congregate on their mother’s stomach, ready to be fed. In some cases, however, they wind up being the mother’s next meal instead. It’s one thing if your mother resented you, or read your diary, or spent all of her time with your alcoholic stepfather, or just never “got” you, but it’s another thing if she decided you were more delicious than adorable.

Zoologists have a tough time explaining filial cannibalism, the act of eating one’s offspring. One theory is that it roots out the weakest of the young, those that are taking too long to mature and would require more parental care. Theoretically, if the wolf spider mom eats the worst of her little wolf spiders, she will have more energy for superior ones.

MARILU HENNER—I feel a bit harsh putting this beloved actress on the list of worst moms. I mean, all she did was write a parenting book, I Refuse to Raise a Brat, and plaster her two sons, Nicholas and Joseph, on the cover. Personally, I would hate to have my mother’s literary career and overall cred depend on my ability to keep my shit together at the grocery store, at recess, at day care and everywhere prying eyes were looking for signs that I was, in fact, a brat.

As if that wasn’t enough, Marilu followed up her brat book by penning Healthy Kids, which warns against the dangers of “dead food” and instructs parents to avoid sugar, chemicals, dairy and anything else a kid might want to eat.

So to review, her kids could not be bratty or chubby, nor could they ever eat a marshmallow in public. Then again, as Marilu writes, “Children must learn that they can’t always get their way.”

That is definitely what they’ll learn in elementary school trying to trade their mung beans and rice for a box of Red Vines. “Their way” will be kale salad with gluten-free dressing eaten with chopsticks at the lonely corner of the playground. All because Mommy already spent the first third of the advance for the second book and needed to immediately expand her field of expertise to child nutrition. Nothing tastes worse than being the house on the block that gives out toothbrushes and lectures on Halloween.

Sorry, Elaine Nardo. Loved you on Celebrity Apprentice, and you seem like a nice lady, but you went from exploiting your kids, which I endorse, to setting them up to fail as shining examples of your child-rearing philosophies. Maybe they’ll turn out to be amazingly well-adjusted and wonderful men, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t ruin their childhoods with a combo platter of rigidity and carob.

MEDEA—This one is a gimme. Or more of a takey, as in, takey your own kids’ lives. You gotta go mythological for a mother this venal. In Euripides’ famous play based on the Greek myth, Jason leaves his wife, Medea, for a princess. Medea, in turn, butchers their two sons with a knife. Granted, it sucks to be left for a princess, but killing your kids for revenge means you will always make this list. And when someone like Susan Smith or Andrea Yates kills her kids, your name is going to come up until the end of time.

For example, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes famously burned football player Andre Rison’s house to the ground. Simple, effective—point made, plenty of headlines, no kids harmed. There are so many ways to open up a can of crazy and make a man regret cheating on you without filicide. By the way, though it’s been done all over the world, I don’t recommend cutting off his penis, strictly on the grounds that it lacks poetry. Or, I should say, the poetry is a bit on the nose and you don’t want your revenge gesture to be as trite as it is grisly.

Medea really got Jason where it hurt, but among other flaws with her historic act, it’s hard to go back and do that one again. You play that hand once, and then what do you do for an encore? Kill his cousins?

I bet if she had held off for a few months, she probably would have realized Jason wasn’t even all that. She would have dropped a few pounds from the heartache and popped over to the oracle to scope out some single guys wearing her “skinny” tunic and a new pair of sandals. Maybe she could have found an ancient friend with benefits or a support group of other single Argonaut divorcées.

DEMI MOORE—It’s not her fault, but no matter how old she gets, Demi Moore is probably going to be hotter than her three beautiful daughters. I file Demi with Naomi Judd, Cybill Shepherd and Christie Brinkley under “painfully pretty moms,” who can’t help but cast a big beautiful shadow over their daughters. And as we all know from Bette Midler, shadows are cold, they are cold dank places to catch eating disorders and while away hours studying one’s pores in a hand mirror.

It pains me to include Demi on this list, because there is so much to love about one of America’s premier MILFs. Aside from her hardscrabble upbringing and alcoholic parents, she struck just the right tone with her baby exploiting when she famously posed nude and seven months pregnant with daughter Scout LaRue, bringing attention not only to herself and her career (good job), but also celebrating pregnant women everywhere as sex symbols.

Yet therein lies the problem. Demi looked hot in her third trimester, she looked hot with a shaved head in G.I. Jane, she looked hot pre-boob job in About Last Night, she looked hot in what should have been an unflattering navy uniform in A Few Good Men. She looked almost impossibly hot at forty in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle , and from what I can tell from paparazzi photos, when she and Ashton Kutcher frolic on various beaches, she still looks just as hot in her bikini. One day, she may stop being hot, but I can’t imagine that day. I just can’t. Even her voice is hot.

We can’t blame her for possessing enduring beauty, but it might be nice if she would dowdy it up a little bit or maybe ease up on the plastic surgery and yoga, rock a St. John’s knit once in a while, allow a wrinkle to take hold. Instead, she refuses to age. She recently credited her youthful appearance to “laughter,” so I have to assume her surgeon is fucking hilarious. Moreover, while other moms are referring to iPods as “machines” and generally losing touch with technology, Demi is flirting with her husband via Twitter, so the entire Twitterverse can enjoy when Ashton sends millions of followers a photo of his wife’s perfect ass. That’s all fine, except his wife is her kids’ mom, and now her exquisiteness is inescapable across multiple media platforms.

Again, I’m sorry. I feel for anyone with a broken childhood and she gets extra points for wearing giant nerdy glasses as a kid and overall coming across like a loving and fiercely protective mother. Still, would I want photos of my mom’s flawless ass seen by the entire world as they inevitably compare me to her? Every single time I hear that Righteous Brothers’ song from Ghost, do I want to remember that Mom will always be a hair (a perfectly straightened and coiffed hair) prettier? The only thing more Unchained than the Melody would be my identity crisis.

TERRIE PETRIE—You may remember her from Dr. Baden’s HBO documentary series Autopsy. This befuddled Canadian mom wrote to Dr. Baden for help. First, her eight-day-old daughter died of SIDS, and later her three-month-old twins also died of SIDS. Only, they didn’t, according to Dr. Baden. After a long investigation, the forensic pathologist concluded that Terrie, who was sleeping with her twins after going out for a few cocktails, managed to roll over both times and smother them. Terrie was disappointed when she got the “cause of death” news, because she was kind of crossing her fingers for “genetic abnormality.”

Let it be said, these are examples not of world-class bad people but of horrifyingly bad mommying. Hence, Terrie makes the grade by soaring to new levels of neglect. I mean, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice—you know what I’m saying? This lady accidentally smothered three kids. Accidents happen and I can’t imagine the guilt and despair, but you would think after the first unfortunate smothering that this gal might buy one of those cosleeper things, or perhaps a freak-in’ crib.

KATE GOSSELIN—Forget the usual stuff people hate about Kate; none of that lands her on this list. For me, it’s the eight little plates of hummus and sliced apples, the matching outfits, the annoying attention to maternal detail. Kate just overmoms it. While most of the worst moms in history got there by under-momming it, Kate represents all of the women who make the rest of the moms feel inadequate. Overmoms do things like grimly interview a dozen pediatricians before choosing the one that she deems best, no matter how far from her home; they blend their own organic baby food after weekly visits to the farmer’s market; they carry pacifier wipes in neatly packed and coordinated diaper bags, and generally tackle motherhood with all of the unfettered joy of a maximum-security prison warden.

Overmoms act like they are doing all of this for their children, when it’s usually just one long, vain, self-serving performance. Kate happens to be known for her work on television, but she represents an army of overmoms whose audience may be the in-laws or the neighbors, or all the other parents at school who have to receive her personally hand-knit birthday invitations.

Plus, her overmommying extended to overwifing, infantilizing her ex-husband until you almost pictured him in an Ed Hardy onesie sucking a pacifier in a car seat waiting for her to change his poopy diaper and shame him for not knowing how to use the potty. If part of mothering is modeling a halfway decent marital relationship, Kate also gets points for treating her ex like a valet.

She had to have known what she was doing when she chose an easily overshadowed shmo like Jon. She put this third-rate IT nerd through her parenting boot camp, emasculated him with her epic bossiness, and will now keep the mommying spotlight on herself until those eight kids run away screaming. To their own reality shows, no doubt.

DR. RUTH—America desperately needed Dr. Ruth. And Dr. Ruth is a hero. I just don’t know if I want my mom talking about G-spots, multiple orgasms, masturbation, premature ejaculation, proper condom usage, menstruation, or the dangers of rough anal sex. In a word: eeeewwww. I love that Dr. Ruth exists, but to be the child of the woman whose name is synonymous with frank sex talk must be kind of rough—not as rough as the anal sex she says can be risky, but rough.

As someone whose mother often disturbed me with her sexual openness, I know how uncomfortable it can be to hear your mom say anything sexual. But Ruth Westheimer doesn’t just discuss sex on radio and television; she’s written lots of sex books, including an actual encyclopedia of sexuality, a guidebook on sex for women over fifty, a treatise on “erotic pleasures” and even Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Talking About Herpes.

It might rain a shower of Mom’s herpes book on you, if the other kids find out and have a library card. If Dr. Ruth is your mom, you can be very proud, but not too proud to shorten your last name to West and head that direction away from anyone who can trace your lineage back to your real mom.

OCTOMOM—Creepy? Check. Attention-seeking? Check. Dishonest, delusional and superbly oblivious about her children’s well-being? Check, check and check. Octomom gets bonus bad mom points for attracting the likes of fuchsia-lipped Gloria Allred, who scares children as much as she scares opposing counsel.

Nadya Suleman, an unemployed single mother of six who added to her brood by having octuplets using in vitro fertilization, is such an easy target that I was tempted to skip her, but that would make this whole list suspect.

Not only does the Octomom seem to be filling some deep psychological hole by continuing to have babies she can’t afford, she also seems like a compulsive liar and media hound. And there’s the question one always asks the mother of multiples: With that many kids, how can you possibly exploit each one of them equally?

Getting lost in the shuffle would actually be a best-case scenario for an octo-kid, because a day out with Mom at Disneyland means fighting for camera time while you get ignored in favor of any digital recording device.

JOAN CRAWFORD—“No wire hangers” is as famous an awful mom line as there is. Whether Mommie Dearest is totally factual or just the narrow way Joan’s daughter, Christina, recalls her childhood doesn’t matter now, because Joan is the subject of a kitsch classic and is inextricably linked to the campiest maternal fit captured on film. The eyebrows, the image obsession, the succession of boyfriends Christina had to call “uncle” and the daughter-annihilating, scenery-chewing meltdowns forever cement Joan in the collective consciousness as one of history’s worst mothers.

Ultimately, one of the worst things you can be called in the world is a terrible mother. There’s a special ring in public relations hell for bad moms. I’ve been through my own mother situation, and the last thing I want is to be anywhere near this list.

These women took the hits, and sometimes gave them, so the rest of us could have some perspective. Maybe I’ll take a wrong tone in explaining how the tooth fairy doesn’t exist, maybe I’ll send you to school with mismatched socks, maybe I won’t be helpful with civics homework, but listen, future child: I won’t drown you, smother you, abandon you, thwack you with wire hangers, eat you, mortify you with talk of herpetic lesions or marry Jon Gosselin. If I can avoid those things, I’ll basically be doing all right. While it’s inevitable to compare myself to those altruistic moms with boundless energy and enthusiasm for parenting, those who neither undermom nor overmom, when I look at the ledger I’ve created, I’m just hoping to be closer to Judge Ruth than Dr. Ruth.