Words are Medicine

There’s a new fad, according to the Wall Street Journal today: bad mothers.  And these bad mothers are bad and proud of it. Apparently several new books have risen from the literary ashes of the publishing world as it tries to compete with anonymous tell-all internet sites. One is unabashedly titled “Bad Mother” and chronicles a mythic litany of maternal horrors.

This, from the article and one of the books it is reviewing:

A mother in British Columbia wrote ironically on Twitter earlier this year that she wanted to smother her 3-year-old daughter because she wouldn't go to sleep, and a few hours later, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police showed up at her door. They checked on her child, who was safely tucked in bed, and left. "Maybe I should've put a little smiley face on it or followed it up with 'Just kidding,' " says the woman, who requested anonymity.

One book was inspired by a backlash the author received after she wrote an essay for the NY Times in which she admitted that she loved her husband more than she did her children.

She calls her book an attempt to calm the "frenzy of maternal anxiety" among self-critical moms. "It's a step in the right direction to say, 'Yeah, I'm a bad mother, so what?' " says Ms. Waldman, who has four children in Berkeley, Calif. "If we all simply refused to engage and said, 'What we're doing is good enough,' I think we'd all be a lot happier."

All that seems to matter to that writer (and the people she writes about) is how she feels about herself and whether she can hold on to her belief in her own adequacy whether or not she deserves to feel adequate. Indeed, whether or not she even really feels adequate. And I believe Ms. Waldman knows that.

It’s worse than a recipe for psychological disaster. It's a roadmap for the decline of civilization.

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