The New Worst Moms Ever

More middle-aged moms are partying, drinking and doing drugs.It was a rough weekend for being a mother, at least on the Internet. First, there was the novelist Amy Sohn's piece in The Awl about the new "Regressives." These are wealthy urban moms in their late 30s and early 40s who drink, do drugs, cheat on their husbands, complain a lot, and call each other Slut, Hooker, Drug Addict and so on while going to parties in bangs and strappy sundresses. The whole piece, in its excruciating entirety is available here. (And my favorite lighthearted and humorous reply to it is here, mea culpa.) The behavior described is sure to be widely derided, as was the author's intention, since Amy Sohn has a new, controversy-courting novel out about just such Real Housewives of Park Slope.

But even knowing that the "Regressives" were custom-ordered to shock, the story made me feel sad and anxious. I was worrying about it as I rushed around getting two adorable little people washed and into their pajamas before sitting down to a home-cooked dinner in our chaotic apartment. Is human society really going down the tubes?, I worried. Why was my apartment so messy? It was clean just this morning. Am I a slattern too, like the moms in that story? I do live in a neighborhood not far from theirs. And yes, you may have noticed that I put my children's pajamas on before they ate dinner. Sometimes I do that when we're running late for bedtime. Am I a terrible mother?

Obviously, Sohn was talking about bad behavior on a much grander scale, but this is still one in a popular genre of look-at-all-those-terrible-moms-out-there pieces. And boy do we love to judge mothers. The New York Times ran two more fear-stoking pieces, one a suite of essays about over-parenting, and one by a woman lamenting that people are so judgey about breastfeeding or lack thereof.

The drug use and cheating are uncontroversially bad. Cheating is wrong. Drug use with little kids around is stupid. Smother-mothering and spoiling are all bad, bad, bad. The world is full of human vice, and plenty of it practiced by mothers. But demonizing other moms--Hooker! Slut!--is wrong too.

The part of Sohn's story that bummed me out the most was the casual reference to the mom at the party in a sundress and bangs, which was used as a shorthand for her immoral un-motherliness. Mothers can't win. Either we've let ourselves go, or we're vain and inappropriately youthful. Either we're self-absorbed and neglectful, or we're trying too hard--and definitely no matter what we're messing it all up. That "Slut", "Drug Addict" business between Sohn and her friends is no accident. Sohn says she's called "Hooker" because she wears tight clothes and smiles a lot. In a less self-hating world that would be a called being friendly and attractive.

Can't I stop worrying about who is breastfeeding or not breastfeeding, or judging me for judging them for not breastfeeding--even though they totally breast-fed except for that one time before their milk came in? (See this weekend's, "The Milk Wars" by Alissa Quart.) Do I have to read a whole collection of view-points on over-parenting to find out if I'm committing some ambiguous sins by trying to do my best for my kids? Do I have to be outraged if a clique of women I don't even know is doing drugs and cheating?

Can't I instead just enjoy putting two adorable little people to bed? Isn't that what parenting is all about, and if we don't forget it, we're all going to be okay?