The Memeification of Bad Moms
On turning 40
I’m turning 40 this week, so please '“like” this post and share it with your two melodramatic Gemini mom friends.
My birthday happens to coincide with our collective shedding of the COVID-19 chrysalis, and that has me in quite a mood. Aging is often equated with experience or wisdom, but for me the biggest different between 40 and 20 is my sense of control. I’ve slowly come to accept that ultimately, we humans have very little of it. Not agency or power, but control—that intense, clenched fist, constipated, ego-driven, authoritarian taskmaster.
Jerk.
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Around this time last year, just as a semblance of normalcy was returning to New York City after quarantine, Cookie fell off the couch and hurt her arm. (Are you sensing a pattern here?) I had my back turned, so I don’t know if she rolled off by accident or tried to jump off and landed the wrong way. I know I heard a thud, and I turned around and ran to her immediately.
She was hard to console and kept holding her arm, so I quickly called my pediatrician’s office. The nurse on call asked if there was swelling or bruising. There was not, and she advised me not to bring Cookie in unless absolutely necessary. This was June 2020. The COVID-19 fear level was still a bight red-orange. I’d hardly been to the bodega, much less a germ-filled pediatrician’s office or emergency room.
After an initial sob session and some arm-rubbing, Cookie seemed fine for the most part. Over the course of the next week, she occasionally winced when I touched her arm. It bothered her a little, and because I’m her mom, her pain, however minor, bothered me, too.
I brought Cookie to NYU’s pediatric emergency room for an X-ray. Her arm, as it turned out, was broken. I felt sightly guilty that we’d waited just over a week to have her checked out, but I’d surveyed everyone who came into contact with her—daycare providers, my mom, my sister, my husband—and they all agreed her arm didn’t seem broken. She was picking up toys and holding hands. Fine? Fine.
I was mothering and working full-time. In a pandemic. I’d finally, at long, last, started to cut myself some slack. I wasn’t perfect.
Should I be?
My relief over getting her X-rayed and treated was quickly supplanted by an unexpected turn of events. Due to the type of fracture Cookie incurred and my “delayed care”, I was told by the doctor on call that it was necessary to open an Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) case to ensure my daughter’s safety.
What does one do when under investigation for being bad mom? Not just a bad mom, but a potentially abusive, negligent one? Do you defend yourself and sound, well, defensive? Do you comply and use your fancy liberal arts degrees and balanced sense of justice to reason that your vibrant, loved, well-fed and perfectly healthy (minus the broken arm) ``16-month-old has to go through an agonizing ordeal—an IV stuck in her arm and a CAT scan and a full skeletal scan and handling by doctors checking for bruises and so much painful scrutiny—so that some other poor kid, one who is actually neglected or abused, whose only hope might be a sharp-eyed doctor, can be saved by a stringent system?
Cookie and I were not allowed to be discharged, and forced to spend the night at the hospital, where I underwent questioning by an NYPD detective and an ACS social worker, and she underwent an invasive battery of tests to rule out abuse.
On the plus side, we had a great view from our hospital room, and I stayed up all night devouring a novel I’d been meaning to read on my phone, because who could sleep? Us moms, always multi-tasking!
That was just the beginning of our Kafkaesque ordeal, which included the police showing up at my Brooklyn home at midnight to question my husband, months of visitations from social workers, dismissal from our daycare, and consultations with lawyers. In the end, my husband and I were cleared.
You might wonder how such a thing could happen, but these things happen all the time. Control, lack thereof, remember? Many parents aren’t so lucky.
My family had a difficult, unfair experience—and we got past it. I initially tried to write this as a feel-good “here’s what I’ve learned” essay, but my takeaway is a cynical one: once you get ground up in the gears of a system—particularly one that deals with child welfare—it’s hard to not to extract yourself from the machinery without time, money, or resources.
My husband is a lawyer. I’m a journalist. We knew what question to ask. We had a network. We had the awareness to write everything down. And still.
Many parents charged with abuse then get dinged for lack of supervision. Their surveillance lasts a long time. Let’s say they have no choice but to leave their child home alone to go to a job interview and their social worker drops by unannounced. Let’s stay they love their child. Let’s say parenting is hard. Let’s say plenty of kids are in awful situations and need help. Let’s say hard is a relative term.
Let’s say if this is the worst thing to happen to me as a parent, then I’m pretty darn lucky.
When I share this story with friends, their response is often the same: but you’re a great mom! Maybe, but that’s not the point. “Bad mom” has become something of a badge of honor in certain circles. The wine o’clock mom, the checked-out mom, the I can’t stand my kids mom, the workaholic mom who has no time for silly games. The parody and satire of motherhood is attractive, even necessary, I’d argue, because parenting is absurd.
Being investigated for child abuse based on flimsy evidence is also absurd. It was also freeing. By clearing the very low bar of not being an abusive parent, I realize how much energy I was expending trying to vault over a ridiculously high one. It took a crisis wrapped up in a pandemic to make me realize my warped parenting expectations were unhealthy for me, and my daughters.
So much of good motherhood is performative. Not just the Instagram posts or the holiday cards, but also the performance of the harried supermom, the one who just wants a margarita and a pedicure because she’s (humblebrag) been working so hard at her important job and her hot husband can’t even load the dishwasher correctly.
It’s here where I’d insert canned sitcom laughter. The “good moms” can post about being less than perfect because no one is going to suspect them of actually hurting their kids. The “bad mom” memes are so popular (I, for one, love them) because they make us overachieving, vigilant, moms feel seen. It’s a relief to see someone, even a fictionalized alter ego or an illustrated meme, struggle more than you. (Sorry Courtney)
These “bad moms” also serve as kind of social safety valve. The real bad moms, the ones who lose their shit and who we don’t like to talk about, are far too scary to even consider.
If you’ve made it this far, perhaps I should tell you that I’m going to buy myself a bunch of books and get a pedicure, and maybe Instagram myself doing so.
I also hope you’ll join me in donating to CASA, which helps kids in NYC foster care, where many children wind up after being in the family court system.
Forty years is a long time to wander.