Canada's online magazine: Politics, entertainment, technology, media, arts, books: backofthebook.ca

Politics, tech, media, culture and more, from a Canadian point-of-view

  • Politics
  • Media
  • Culture
  • Science and Tech
  • Living
  • Arts and Books
  • Features
  • The Video
You are here: Home / Arts and Books / Inside Read: Bad Mommy

Inside Read: Bad Mommy

06/09/2012 by backofthebook.ca Leave a Comment

Inside Read is our sampler of new Canadian books we think merit your attention. In Bad Mommy, Vancouver author Willow Yamauchi satirically assesses all the ways women can (and will) mess-up child-rearing, while also featuring tales from “22 admitted bad mommies . . . Instead of hiding mommy guilt and shame with brave smiles, matching mother-daughter outfits, and three-o’clock martinis, we celebrate our neuroses, shortcomings, and nasty little habits. Only Bad Mommy dares to tell the truth.”

Published by kind permission of Insomniac Press.

Bad Mommy and Her Boobies

Even if you have nicely established breastfeeding, guilt about being a bad mommy is still only a thought away. A nursing mother’s nutritional intake is fertile grounds for misgivings and fear. If the baby is gassy, Mommy had too much cabbage/chocolate/dairy/wheat/beans/whatever before nursing. The more you like something, the more likely it is that it be the very substance that will forever curse your child through repeated breast-milk exposures. Never fear! If the baby is sleepy, it was that beer you drank! If the baby is rashy, Bad Mommy ate strawberries! God forbid you eat anything during nursing that might cause an allergy in baby later on in life. Bad Mommies eat peanuts, shellfish, and soy and curse their poor nurslings to a lifetime of misery and allergies via toxic booby-milk exposure.

Then we come to the issue of weaning. In North America, most mommies wean before the age of one. The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests age two as a minimum for weaning; hence, all mommies who wean before the age of two are, by definition, “bad.” Isn’t it easy! Isn’t it easy to be bad?

Image: Cover of "Bad Mommy"Bad Mommy Cries It Out

Children need to form at least one attachment to at least one caregiver in their earliest days. Attachments are formed by reacting to a baby’s cues, for example, crying. If you as a parent do not react to your baby’s cry on demand, you will be teaching baby early on that no one cares for them and that no one can be trusted. As your child grows, this lesson will translate into anti-social personality disorder, and your child will become either a lawyer or mass murderer. Or both.

Many parents will let their babies “cry it out” so that the parents themselves can have peace at night. This is short-sighted, like drinking aspartame in your coffee; yes, there are no calories, but you will get cancer in the end. Children who are not “attached” to their parents, although excellent sleepers, do not really care what kind of havoc they are wreaking in their family home and later on in society.

Bad Mommy and Toys

Aside from video games, which will ruin our children’s ability to develop social skills and give them early myopia, there are many other ways to mommy poorly with toys. For example, you can easily manipulate and destroy your child’s burgeonning sense of sexual identity through toy choice. Buy little Annie a dolly and you are embracing the patriarchal hegemonic ideology that females must nurture small creatures. Don’t buy her a dolly and you will be missing the critical sensitization period of her life where she learns to love and nurture, leading her to likely not have children (and robbing your mitochondrial DNA its opportunity to continue to replicate and manifest itself in future generations). The lack of dolly exposure as a child might even lead her to mommy poorly — one might even say badly — as an adult! This is true particularly if you have selfishly denied her the joy of a younger sibling. How else will she learn this significant task?

This dilemma is also found with boys and weapon toys. Buy Christopher a dolly and you might as well tape a “kick me” sign to his back, since you’ll be dooming him to a childhood of ridicule and bullying. Buy him a toy gun and seal your fate in Bad Mommy Hell as he menaces the neighbourhood with his weapon, proudly telling the other local lads that his “Mommy lets him have it.” Bad mommies who actually allow gun-type toys in their homes know in the pit of their stomachs that someday this choice will come back to haunt them, hopefully not literally!

Many first-time mommies swear to the Gods that they will not allow weapon toys in their home. They are short-sighted and wasting their important prayer points; they will quickly learn this is an impossible battle to win. With some children, anything is a potential weapon. Toast can be chewed into the shape of a gun! The letter L and 7 fridge magnets — seemingly innocuous — when turned on their sides are also guns! Take away these and the trusty forefinger and thumb will come in handy for a little weapon-play at the kitchen table! Aside from amputation, there is very little you can do to stop a weapon-obsessed child from finding a weaponesque item to play with.

Should Mommy fight to curtail this instinct, it will go underground and manifest itself later in the teen years as her child joins some gang of misfits and and mentally ill youth to foment designs to blow up a high school (most likely wearing trench coats or all-black Goth ensembles).

From Bad Mommy by Willow Yamauchi. Insomniac Press, 258 pages, $19.95

Filed Under: Arts and Books

Subscribe to BoB by e-mail or RSS

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Google+
  • Living
  • Politics
  • Media
  • Culture
  • Arts and Books
  • Features
  • The Video
Fire sale sign

Fort McMurray: Shopping time!

By Brady Tighe We’re now officially in the aftermath phase of the northern Alberta wildfire crisis. The fire is long gone, and everyone with a home to return to is back in its … [Read More...]

Nathan Cullen

Electoral reform: Hashtag fresh thinking

By Alison@Creekside The most interesting and innovative idea to come out of the first meeting of the all-party Special Committee on Electoral Reform, or ERRE, was Nathan Cullen's suggestion, … [Read More...]

Trudeau on quantum computing

The Trudeau gush fest is getting old

By Jim Henshaw There have been several bewildered as well as angry accounts coming out of the USA lately about how little media time has been spent covering the Democratic Presidential Primary … [Read More...]

Rick Meyers in Nanaimo Pride Parade

My friend, Rick, at the Pride Parade

By Frank Moher On this dreadful day, I don't want to write about the shootings in Orlando. I want to write about my friend, Rick. Rick lives just outside of Nanaimo, a city of about 80,000, … [Read More...]

Stephen Colbert on Late Night set

Triumph of the drama nerds

By Frank Moher Two drama nerds have recently moved into high profile positions. Before I name them (or perhaps you’ve already guessed who they are; or perhaps you’d like to scroll down and look at … [Read More...]

From “Our Rape Blog”: Shooting the Moon

Originally published on Our Rape Blog, the author's account of the aftermath of a violent sexual assault. By Mary Fraughton Have you ever played Hearts? It’s a card game. For our purposes, … [Read More...]

First Nations defending Lelu Island

The video: Lelu Island: “They will come.”

From Creekside: The B.C. provincial government is trying to green light the construction of a massive LNG terminal on Lelu Island in the Skeena Estuary -- Pacific Northwest LNG, backed by Malaysian … [Read More...]

Google

Follow Us!

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter

RSS CBC News



Recent Posts

  • Fort McMurray: Shopping time!
  • From “Our Rape Blog”: Shooting the Moon
  • Electoral reform: Hashtag fresh thinking
  • The fish hotel
  • Hatred on an Alberta golf course
  • The video: Lelu Island: “They will come.”
  • My friend, Rick, at the Pride Parade
  • Our selective sympathy
  • The Water Bomber, The Frogman and The Great Canadian Novelist
  • Komagata Maru: The story behind the apology

Tags

9/11 Afghanistan Alberta bad behaviour books British Columbia business Canada Canadian military Canadian politics CBC celebrity computers Conservatives crime environment family film G20 Globe and Mail internet Jason Kenney journalism Justin Trudeau law Liberals Maclean's music National Post NDP newspapers oil sands online media Ontario Quebec RCMP religion sports Stephen Harper television theatre Toronto U.S. Vancouver women

Archives

The Video: Lelu Island: “They will come.”

Pages

  • About
  • Privacy

Copyright © 2023 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in