The Divine Secrets of the Bad Mothers’ Club

by Janet Alfieri

As I recall, the concept of the Bad Mothers' Club began one weekday morning in the spring of 1986. I was rushing to get my two elementary-school-aged kids clothed, fed, and on the school bus so that I could shower, dress, and make it to the Annual Senior Citizens' Olympics in time to cover the egg-on-a-spoon race for the local paper.
As I tossed a slab of toast and a glass of apple juice in front of each child, my then-nine-year-old daughter, a stickler for routine, asked why she and her brother weren't having their usual cereal. "Because there's no milk," I said, handing her a banana and looking at my watch.
"Why?" she countered.
"Because it turned sour," I said.
"Why didn't you get new milk?" she said, accusingly.
"Because I . . ." Here, I would previously have launched into a self-righteous accounting of a gazillion really good excuses for why I had failed to keep my family's cupboard stocked with fresh supplies. But I stopped myself in mid-excuse. "Because I'm a bad mother, honey," I said. "Now hurry up and eat your gruel. The bus will be here in five minutes."
My daughter seemed totally satisfied by my answer: there were no counter arguments or sulking. Later, at my friend Ruthy's apartment, while our kids were in the next room watching who-knows-what on television, I shared my latest child-rearing tip with her and our friend Annie, also a mother. I described the giddy sense of freedom I'd felt admitting I was a Bad Mother. It was like I had officially withdrawn from a competition I didn't even know I was in.
At the kitchen table, the three of us spent the rest of the evening exchanging horror stories about forgotten lunch money, lost or mutilated permission slips, meals that would make a nutritionist scream, and bogus bake sale donations. "For the last one, I put some Stop & Shop cookies on a paper plate and sprinkled confectionary sugar over them so they'd look homemade," Annie confessed, without a trace of guilt. The first meeting of the Bad Mothers' Club came to an abrupt end when Ruthy gasped, "Oh [expletive deleted]! I was supposed to buy Faith a package of seeds for her science class tomorrow. Do they sell seeds at the 7-11?"
Since Bad Mothers are typically disorganized, we held no regular meetings, had no national headquarters, and compiled no membership lists. Anyone was free to join as long as she was not a perfect mother and had no desire to become one. In fact, aside from slightly messy houses, the only outward sign that we, the founding Bad Mothers, even belonged to a club was the group recitation of our slogan. When one of our six kids questioned our maternal shortcomings in public, we would all turn and say, in unison: "Why? Because we're Ba-a-a-a-a-ad Mothers!"

Epilogue: Annie and Ruthy have recently become proud members of the Bad Grandmothers' Club.