Dedication
For Madge,
the Original Bad Mom
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Part I: Summer
1. Welcome to Hell
Part II: Fall
2. Amy
3. Carla
4. Kiki
5. Amy
6. Kiki
Gwendolyn James Style
7. Carla
8. Amy
9. Principal Burr
10. Kiki
11. Amy
12. Carla
13. Amy
14. Kiki
15. Amy
16. Carla
17. Kiki
18. Amy
19. Carla
20. Kiki
21. Amy
22. Carla
23. Amy
24. Principal Burr
25. Amy
26. Carla
27. Gwendolyn James
28. Kiki
29. Amy
30. Carla
Gwendolyn James Style
31. Principal Burr
32. Amy
33. Carla
34. Amy
Gwendolyn James Style
35. Kiki
36. Carla
37. Oska
38. Carla
39. Principal Burr
40. Kiki
41. Amy
42. Principal Burr
43. Amy
44. Carla
45. Amy
Part III: Winter
46. Amy
Gwendolyn James Style
Part IV: Spring
47. Carla
48. Kiki
49. The Bad Moms Pledge
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
Summer
1
Welcome to Hell
To: McKinley Mom Squad
From: Gwendolyn James
CC: Principal Burr; McKinley Staff
BCC: Gwendolyn James
Subject: MCKINLEY MOM SQUAD 2019!!!
Hello Mamas,
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the leader of the McKinley Mom Squad, more commonly known as the PTA. I’m a mompreneur who runs the lifestyle blog that Reese Witherspoon called a “must read” (link here). I’m passionate about empowering all moms to step into the fullness of the motherhood journey. My girls, Blair and Gandhi, are proud McKinley Mustangs, and I’ve loved every minute of our time at this award-winning institution of learning.
I hope you’re all having a restful summer. You know the girls and I have been squeezing every drop of joy out of these past two months (if you’ve missed any of my daily posts, you can click here to sign up for my weekly newsletter, and here to follow me on Instagram). But no matter how many puppies we save from being put down, or visits we make to the homebound elderly, there is nothing that makes us happier than knowing the first day of school is just around the corner! In fact, it’s just 33 days away (click here to download my back-to-school checklist and get 10% off your next order from Amazon!).
Attached please find the McKinley Mom Squad Contract. It’s not just for new moms—we’ve had some significant changes to our programming since our last meeting, which were outlined in our weekly podcast, on our website, and in our email newsletter.
Our 100% involvement rate doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because all McKinley Moms take the below contract seriously. Please note that this is not a legally binding document, but that signing it binds you to something greater: the sisterhood of mothers in your community, who are raising their children alongside yours. Please make sure you sign and return this to me within 24 hours or you will be placed on immediate probation.
Looking forward to getting to know all of you this coming school year.
In Love and Style,
Gwendolyn James
AKA @GwendolynJamesStyle
McKinley Mom Squad Contract
I, __________________________, being of sound mind and hot body, hereby dedicate myself to the betterment of McKinley School, and to the achievement of my child.
By signing this document, I agree to the following:
To attend all PTA meetings within this school year. This includes our regularly scheduled bi-monthly (that means twice a month, not every other month) meetings, any and all emergency meetings, additional committee meetings for events I have committed to, and any other meeting that should arise at the behest of our leader.
To serve on a minimum of two (2) committees for this school year, knowing that two is the absolute minimum, and I’ll likely have so much fun I’ll want to do even more.
To ensure that any and all food I provide for the children of McKinley follow our dietary guidelines (link here).
To ensure that any and all items I bring into our school are free of BPA, phthalates, parabens, GMOs, plastic of any kind, latex, soy, corn, or any corn by-products.
To do my best to put forth an attitude of gratitude, and to be the change I wish to see in McKinley.
Xo,
Print and Sign Name/Date
Part II
Fall
2
Amy
6:00–7:00: Gym
7:00–7:30: Wake up kids, shower, start breakfast
7:30–8:00: Feed kids, walk dog, get dressed
8:00: Wake up Mike
8:00–8:30: Morning Huddle: Call In
8:15–8:30: School drop-off
8:30–9:30: Weekly Team Meeting
9:30–10:30: Sales meeting
10:30–11:30: Marketing status meeting
11:30–12:30: Performance Review, Tessa
12:30–1:30: Lunch
12:30–1:30: Meeting with Dale
12:30–1:30: Product tasting
1:30–3:00: BLOCK TO DO ACTUAL WORK
3:00–4:00: Proposed: Meeting with Dale
3:30–4:00: School pickup
4:00–5:00: Proposed: Supply Chain Update
5:30–6:00: DINNER!!
6:00–7:00: Email catch-up
6:00–7:00: Proposed: West Coast Sales Update
Remember when you were a kid, and summer seemed like it was full of wonder and possibility? The days would be hot enough to go swimming and drink lemonade and the nights cool enough for roasting marshmallows and catching fireflies. Perfectly sliced watermelon would appear before you even knew you were hungry, and you’d be carted to and from enough camps and sporting events to keep you from ever feeling bored. At night, you’d tumble into bed perfectly satisfied and exhausted, into a deep and dream-filled sleep. In the morning, you’d leap from bed, fully rested and ready for a new day filled with new adventures.
Well, behind all that joy and wonder was probably a mother wondering how the hell she was going to manage to keep you entertained and alive for three months. A mother counting down the days until the first day of school. A mother like me.
Summer is freedom for children, and a prison sentence for mothers. At least during the school year, you can count on your kids being in one place for eight hours. Summer requires us to fill sixty to eighty days with a variety of activities that are somehow all scheduled to be as inconvenient as possible for anyone who may have a job outside of chauffeuring their children around. Every year since Dylan was born, I’ve sworn that this summer I would take it slow. This summer I would enjoy my life and my kids. Have you seen that meme about only having eighteen summers with our children? Just eighteen summers before they grow up and leave forever, to repeat the cycle of wasted summers with children of their own? Well, I’ve wasted twelve of my eighteen summers with Dylan so far. I wasted them
working to support our family and driving the kids from activity to activity in a minivan whose interior is coated in a fine dust of Cheerio residue and melted ice cream. That meme can go to hell and take all the mom guilt with it.
Every New Year’s Eve, I’d take the time to envision the three of us enjoying picnic lunches and riding roller coasters and taking our dog, Roscoe, on long, leisurely walks every afternoon. I’d resolve to only work part-time, and not “part-time plus constantly being available on my phone at all hours of the night for my incompetent boss and his team of adult infants.” I’d see myself making intricate salads with the mysterious vegetables in the CSA box I pick up every Friday at the school parking lot. That’s how specific my vision was: that I’d actually know how to use a kohlrabi, and the kids would like it.
But, like the twelve summers before it, this was not the summer for enjoying myself. But you’d never know it looking at our end-of-summer assignments. By our assignments, I mean Dylan’s and Jane’s projects, which of course I helped with. I may have failed at summer, but my kids are going to start the school year with an A+ on their summer reports. I haven’t spent ten years working in sales and marketing to let my kids turn in some handwritten essay on dirty loose-leaf paper. Instead, I tapped the interns at work to help me create two beautifully crafted, cinematic recap videos, which are already up on YouTube and ready to show off to the class. Tonight, we’d watched them as a family after dinner, gathered around Mike’s phone while our summer slid by our eyes, set to music that sounded enough like Top-40 pop to be enjoyable, but not enough like any specific artist to be flagged by YouTube. See? I’m a pro.
Jane’s video is a recap of her accomplishments. It’s the summer that she:
Read thirty-three books
Attended seven soccer camps
Was named Most Intense by her club soccer team, the Northern Mites
Ran her first 5K (and won her age group!)
It does not include that, of Jane’s seven soccer camps, none started before the workday or ended at the lunch hour, and all required me to get to work late and leave early every day for seven consecutive weeks.
Her club soccer team members, who just last year were more like a collection of girls in matching outfits aimlessly chasing a soccer ball, suddenly gained full control of all their appendages and shot to the top of their league. They won game after game after game, and with every congratulatory trip to the Dairy Queen for twist cones, we watched our hope for any relaxing summer weekends dissolve into a series of weekend soccer tournaments in far-flung suburbs where the dads seem to be legally required to wear cargo shorts.
The video montage includes Jane triumphantly scoring goal after game-winning goal. Our real-life montage would include that, and the rest of us baking in the hot Midwestern sun for seven hours on a Saturday, so desperate for shade that Mike and I became the parents who started bringing a pop-up “sun shelter” with us to every game so we could at least see our phone screens without straining our eyes. One day, as the temperature hovered in the mid-nineties, with no cloud in the sky, I prayed for the first time in years.
“Dear God,” I whispered, “please let her team lose.” The Lord refused to hear my prayer and punished me with an undefeated season and a child who was now officially addicted to winning.
While I was trying to plot with God against my daughter, I should have been thanking him for Dylan. Sweet, sweet Dylan. His video was a challenge, because it’s hard to make dynamic content for someone whose summer was like one extremely long weekend. He slept late. He stayed up late. He wore a small groove into our couch, just the size of his skinny little butt. He will go back to school with a skin tone that’s lighter than it was before summer started, and with a possible Vitamin D deficiency. The only clear memory I have of him from this entire summer was the day after he started coding camp, which I’d signed him up for thinking it would be a creative and productive way for him to explore his love of video games. “Tell us about camp,” I said excitedly that night at the dinner table, sure he would absolutely ooze with enthusiasm over how I’d found the perfect activity for him. In so many ways, Dylan is an exact replica of his father. Of course, an actual boy child is supposed to look boyish, but looking at Dylan and Mike together you can see that Dylan’s future face will have the same charm it does now, even when it’s lined with light wrinkles and his hair sprouts a few strands of silver.
“Well, I wanted to talk to you about that,” Dylan said, leaning back in his chair the same way that Mike does when he is about to say something particularly annoying.
“I resigned today.”
Resigning isn’t usually something one does from a fully voluntary activity that one’s parents paid two hundred dollars for, but Dylan seemed undeterred when I questioned him about his word choice.
Dylan continued. “I think that with the limited resources we have for the summer—namely, time—it would be a better use of those resources for me to just stay home with my Xbox. Plus . . . it’s free.”
“Good thinking, bud,” Mike agreed. “Plus, if you get good enough at this shit, you can make a Twitch account, and livestream your little game thing, and actually make us money.” Mike winked at me, though I know him well enough to know when he’s serious. “Think about it, Amy. This kid could go from a cost center to a profit center for us. By doing this shit!”
I know that I’m supposed to be limiting the kid’s screen time. And you know what? I did limit his screen time, by taking the Xbox controllers to work with me, which meant that he downloaded his favorite game to the iPad, which I then limited with a special app that he was somehow able to circumvent, which is when I gave up. That explains why Dylan’s video is three minutes of Dylan spooning on the couch with Roscoe, Dylan conked out in the backseat of the car on the way home from one of Jane’s tournaments, or photos of Dylan staring slack-jawed at the TV with Roscoe tucked in next to him. I did the best with what I had and titled the video “Dylan’s Summer of Snooze.” Not bad, right?
Is that the bar I’m trying to meet? Not bad? I know from Instagram just how much summer the other mothers have squeezed from these past few months. I know whose kids went to language immersion camp (the Koehlers), and whose kids spent time learning to program their own video games (the Wenners), and I’m pretty sure one of the eighth graders gave a friggin’ TED Talk about climate change.
It’s late, and I should sleep, but I’ve been watching these videos over and over on my iPad, and with every view it’s clearer that I need to be better. Be more present. Be more organized. I need to do what all those old ladies in the grocery store checkout line would pressure me to do when Dylan and Jane were tiny monsters, squawking and screaming in the cart. “Enjoy every minute,” these women would say, blinking their watery eyes at me. “It goes so fast.” I would smile and bite my tongue, because those days refused to go by. A single Monday could take three years to get through.
Tonight, while the crickets are singing their end-of-summer song outside our windows, our kids are sleeping down the hall and Mike is burning the midnight oil in his home office. I feel like he needs to take a productivity workshop, because even I don’t work that much after hours, and I’m at a startup.
I’m way too tired to wait up for him, so I iMessage him the links to the video, waiting for his thumbs-up emoji before putting on my sleep mask, my hand cream, and my mouthguard. Mike calls my nighttime routine the Boner Killer.
It’s just cool enough for the breeze to feel like autumn tonight, and I sense that changing of the seasons more sharply than I used to. As of this evening, my thirteenth summer as a mother is officially over. How did I do? Not bad. And not great.
The CSA vegetables have all turned into a rotting soup in our fridge.
Dylan is not yet a profit center for our family but has probably developed a repetitive stress injury from pushing controller buttons all summer.
I’m already late for everything on my calendar tomorrow, and tomorrow isn’t even here yet.
I HAD EVERY INTENTION OF BEING EARLY FOR THE FIRST DAY of school.
I left Mike snoring gently, his phone still in his hand from the night before, and snuck downstairs, letting Roscoe out for his morning pee, filling his water dish, and grabbing my keys and one of the million reusable water bottles the kids always leave on the counter.
I suppose men can attend my gym, but it’s marketed directly to moms. The lobby encourages you to remove your shoes and “center yourself” before entering, but since most of us are running five minutes late and want to get to “our spot” in class, it’s really just a pile of ballet flats and flip-flops cast off on the way to class. The windows of each classroom are covered in sheer drapes that diffuse the outside light into a warm glow. The overhead lights are strictly prohibited, but the teachers pretend to light the flameless LED votive candles before each class.
The class is always filled with other McKinley Moms, the kind who wear coordinating lululemon outfits and seem to never break a sweat. I tend to wear whatever I can pick up off the floor without turning on a light, which today is a shirt of Mike’s that reads “Fill to here with margaritas.” Squaring myself to the wall of mirrors, I noticed that the “fill line” cuts right across my boobs, adding a touch of class to my ensemble.
Class lasts forty minutes, which gives all of us enough time to get home and get our kids ready for school. Our instructor starts with some Sanskrit words, which seems slightly wrong coming from a white woman named Kelsey. Then, before she presses play on her Work, Bitch! playlist, she asks us to silently dedicate our practice to someone. “Send them your sacred energy,” she whispers, handing each of us a small, blue inflatable ball, which we dutifully tuck between our legs. For forty minutes, we listen to Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande and scoop our butts, carve our thighs, and pulse along to the instructions shouted at us from our instructor, who narrates and participates in the entire class. She has four children and absolutely no body fat, possibly because she spends three hours a day pulsing and scooping and carving, and possibly because I have never seen her eat a bite of food, even at the all-school picnic.
Bad Moms Page 1