Bad Moms

by Nora McInerny

  This is “my time,” so I spend most of the class mentally going over my agenda during the day, and a fair amount pondering the fact that at least 60 percent of these women are married to dudes who consistently look as though they’re eight months pregnant, and who have never pulsed, scooped, or sculpted any part of their body, and definitely not at six AM. Mike still has the body he had in college: not totally ripped, but fit enough that my mom still showers him with compliments. “Mikey!” she purrs to him every time she stops over, “I can’t believe you have TWO KIDS!” She says this like Dylan and Jane came out of his body, and then ate from his nipples for ten months each.

  This morning’s class is too intense for my mind to wander far. “I want you to pull up on those vaginal muscles,” Kelsey screams over a late-nineties rap song. “Pretend like this ball said something terrible about your child!”

  I squeeze as hard as I can. Until my thighs burn and my legs shake.

  “Squeeze! Squeeze like you’re trying to suck that ball right into you, using nothing but your legs and your vagina!”

  I had dedicated this practice to my children.

  ANY ZEN I HAD LEFT FROM TRYING TO SUCK AN INFLATABLE ball into my vaginal canal was gone by the time we left for school. Jane was not happy with her summer recap video. “The teacher asked for a REPORT,” she cried, as if I’d betrayed her deepest confidence. “This is a VIDEO. It’s totally wrong!”

  Dylan had looked at his sister sympathetically. “I thought you’d be upset because all those photos make you look like a brontosaurus.”

  Jane had responded by locking herself in the bathroom. Dylan had responded to that by telling her if she didn’t open the door, he would pee in her dresser drawer. He’d done that once in his sleep, so the threat was credible.

  Mike had wandered into the hallway, eyes glued to his phone, just as I was attempting to pick the lock with a bobby pin, which is only possible on TV and in real life is just a good way to waste a bobby pin and damage your bathroom door handle. “What’s going on?” he’d asked none of us specifically, and the tension had dissipated immediately. Jane unlocked the bathroom door and slipped into Mike’s arms for a hug. Dylan apologized to his sister without being asked and used the toilet instead of her dresser drawer. Mike pulled me into his arms for a group hug with Jane, who tried to wriggle away.

  “No way, Janer!” He laughed, pulling her face into his armpit. Jane screamed, and Dylan snuck out from the bathroom and jumped on Mike’s back, shouting, “Unhand her, fiend!” Our house filled with my favorite sound: the laughter of my three favorite people.

  I love Mike for that—how quickly he can defuse the chaos, even if it’s him who caused it. But I hate that Mike’s only real attempt at parenting is just making everything a joke. I hate that he always swoops in for the fun stuff and conveniently misses the hard stuff. And I really, really hate Mike for waiting until 7:48 to pull his Fun Dad card. And now we were most certainly going to be late for the first day of school.

  THE SPEED LIMIT ON OUR CITY STREETS IS TWENTY-FIVE. Which means you can reasonably drive thirty and make the case that you’re just keeping up with traffic. Which means I am driving extremely unreasonably—closer to forty, if I’m being honest—when our van pulls up to McKinley. We are not late. We could have actually been early if there wasn’t a pointless one-way meant to “calm traffic” that forces us to zigzag our way to the front of the school. I’m tempted every day to just take the left on Sycamore, but Jane loves rules too much. Anyway, we are not late. School begins promptly at 8:10 and it’s 8:07, and besides, there are plenty of other cars pulling up behind me. Or, at least one. A Trans Am, maybe? The kind of car you typically only see people driving ironically or in music videos from the early nineties.

  Jane activates the sliding door the moment I put the van in park, and she and Dylan tumble out of the car. They both had told me all summer that this year I was to stay in the car at drop-off. Or, as Jane put it, “Under no circumstances should you exit your vehicle during school drop-off. Do you understand?” I had nodded yes every time; I had agreed to the terms of service. But on the very first day of school, when I’d always, always jumped out to hug them goodbye? It’s muscle memory that compels me to undo my seatbelt. To run around the front of my idling minivan. To pull them both close to me and smell their heads. Those first few years, I’d have to pry them off me, wipe their tears, and lovingly shove them toward the front door. But not this year. This year, before I can gather them into my arms, they’ve already merged into the stream of kids wearing too-large backpacks, no doubt containing the standard “How I Spent My Summer” report, a dull recap of their summer printed on 8.5” × 11” paper and stapled in the upper-left-hand corner, the way Jane would have liked.

  My throat aches. Am I going to cry? Are they really not going to glance back at me?

  “WAIT!” I shout, and I see their little bodies freeze in horror. I am addressing them. In public. I have broken our verbal contract. They turn toward me, slowly and wordlessly. Their eyes say, “If you say another word, we will both scream for help.” Their mouths shout, “WHAT?!”

  There are moments in life when you have to lean into the awkwardness you’ve created. This is one of them.

  “I love you guys so much!” I scream, holding my hands up in a heart shape. “I love my babies!”

  Jane and Dylan blanch, more horrified than I’ve seen them since the day they walked in on Mike and me watching Fifty Shades of Grey on a Saturday morning. They both turn coolly away from me and walk toward the first day of sixth and eighth grades.

  “Hey, Amy,” a crisp voice calls out.

  I turn to see Gwendolyn James, standing with her posse, wearing what I’m sure she believes is a sincere-looking smile. Gwendolyn is waving at me with perfectly manicured fingers (nontoxic, small-batch polish), her giant diamond ring—#conflictfree, I knew—dazzling in the morning light. This is my punishment for embarrassing my children: I will now be forced to interact with this woman.

  “Hey guys.” I smile back, and find myself drifting over, drawn by the irresistible gravity of social etiquette.

  “I don’t know how you do it.” Gwendolyn sighs. “You leave your kids all day and go to work? You’re so strong.”

  I hesitate, startled by the brazen backhanded compliment and unsure how to respond. Gwendolyn frowns, mistaking my silence. “You do work still, right?” I catch her eyeing my blazer, which . . . yes, does have a little bit of cream cheese on the lapel.

  “Yes,” I say, trying to smile, “I work.”

  “Well,” she says, “that’s probably why I haven’t heard back from you about this year’s Mom Squad Fiscal Plan.”

  FUCK. Maybe forty-nine hours had passed since she sent her last email, and no, of course I hadn’t replied. I’d intended to reply, but I barely have time to read my emails, let alone reply to them. I’m sure, somewhere in my millions of drafts of unsent emails, there are at least thirty replies to Gwendolyn, each attempting to say as positively as possible, “Please just assign me a committee or push me off a cliff. Your choice!”

  “You didn’t get my reply? Hm,” I say, playing dumb as I scroll through my phone. “I’ll resend it. I bet it got caught up in your SPAM filter.”

  Gwendolyn smiles charitably, her teeth so white they look nearly iridescent. She has a face so pretty you really have to hate her, and a personality to match.

  IT’S NOT THAT I DON’T LIKE GWENDOLYN. EVERYONE LIKES Gwendolyn. Everyone likes Gwendolyn, because they have to like Gwendolyn. She’s @GwendolynJamesStyle, the authority on motherhood for our school, our neighborhood, and for her 144,000 Instagram followers, who shower her with praise for things like a photo of her coffee cup placed in the perfect light of her perfectly white kitchen, or her inspirational phrases, like: Mom all day, then rosé.

  I don’t get it, but I do get it. Like everyone else at McKinley, I follow everything that Gwendolyn does. It’s a form of digital self-harm, comparing my mothering to hers. Compari
ng my children to hers. Comparing my house, my clothes, my car, my life to hers. I’ve seen every blog post, every Instagram story. It’s a great way to make sure you avoid running into her, actually.

  Seeing Gwendolyn is like being hit by a sniper: you don’t know what’s happened until she’s already taken her shot, and your guts are spilling out on the concrete in front of you. Dramatic? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe, if you look closely enough at something shiny and beautiful, you start to see that it’s made mostly of Instagram filters and clever angles.

  When Dylan started at McKinley, one of Gwendolyn’s friends had complimented my dress. We were all volunteering at one of the many “special days” McKinley has for its students, a series of carnivals and farmer’s markets and artisanal craft fairs where the children sell their own handmade wares and donate the money to charity. That compliment had meant a lot to me. It had eased some of the anxiety I had about being so much younger and so much poorer than the other moms. They had arrived in outfits made by brands I hadn’t even heard of, bought in stores I never thought of walking into. I was shopping in the clearance section of Old Navy (still do, always will), and before I could blurt out “It only cost $8.97!,” Gwendolyn had filled the momentary silence.

  “She’s in great shape because running late is her cardio,” she said breezily, and we’d all exploded in laughter. Even me. Laughing seemed easier than saying, “Wait, what do you mean? Is this about the time I tried to sneak into kindergarten orientation late—and on a conference call—and the principal called me out? Are you talking about the time that Dylan refused to perform in the holiday concert until I arrived, but my boss had called an all-hands meeting for six PM on a Thursday, so I didn’t walk in the door until the last song, which meant that Dylan spent forty-seven minutes lying on the floor of the stage?”

  For months I replayed the interaction, over and over in my head, trying to decipher her secret code.

  Eventually, I realized the message was loud and clear: Gwendolyn James is an asshat.

  3

  Carla

  First day of school!!! STARTS AT 8:10 AM.

  Vag waxes: 10–3

  Jeopardy: 4

  Karate: 5

  What I Did on My Summer Vacation

  By Jaxon Dunkler

  This summer ruled. I heard the weather was beautiful, but I can’t confirm that, since I slept until about 3pm every day, and then spent the rest of the daylight hours sitting in a cloud of my own farts and playing Fortnite.

  Every evening, I took a break from my gaming to go to baseball practice for 3 hours. My mom, who is super cool and takes Karate, drove me in her awesome car. The only bad thing about my mom is that she’s so hot that my teammate’s dads get uncomfortable around her, so she can’t come to a lot of the games.

  The hottest thing about my mom is her brain. Not many people know that my mom has read the entire Harry Potter series, or that she was voted “raddest” by her high school class. She has gotten the Final Jeopardy question right twice. She loves Sudoku. She can also change the oil in a car and drive a stick. Surprising, right? Nobody expects a lady who looks like her to have it all.

  This year, I’m looking forward to playing more baseball, and to having the coolest, hottest mom at McKinley.

  Jaxon’s handwriting looks like a chimp got hold of a ballpoint pen. Seriously, one time a guy at the strip mall had a chimp he had taught to use a pen and if you paid him ten dollars the chimp would write your name on an index card for you. Looked just like Jaxon’s handwriting, but I still got a chimp card. I used that chimp card as an inspiration for this report. I also held the pen in my left hand, which made it look halfway believable. This year, Jaxon’s finally got a good teacher. And by a good teacher I just mean a hot dude teacher. I think any teacher is a good teacher, because anyone who can handle being around more than one kid for more than an hour at a time clearly has a gift. But none of Jaxon’s teachers have been anything near bangable. Mrs. Weaver was pretty hot, but she was stone cold. You could just tell her vagina had formed a layer of ice over it years ago.

  This year, Jaxon has Mr. Nolan, the only male teacher who wasn’t alive during the Vietnam War. He’s tallish, has most of his hair, and one time when he was wearing short sleeves, I saw a little bit of a tattoo peeking out from under his sleeve. And it wasn’t one of those dopey floral tattoos that guys have now. This was a straight-up barbed-wire armband. Hot stuff, and not what you’d expect from a man with a deep side part and a collection of pastel polo shirts. Mr. Nolan is a solid six even in his pleated khakis, and you only get one chance to make a first impression. I wasted that first impression by threatening to run him over in the crosswalk last year, but I doubt he remembers every confrontation he has in the school parking lot, and this way, he’ll be able to get to know the real me through a trusted source: my dumb son who forgot to do his own summer report.

  Nobody can call Jaxon dumb but me. He’s dumb in a cute way, like a puppy chasing its tail, or a baby trying to play with itself in the mirror. Nothing gets Jaxon down, and the only thing he ever worries about is baseball. I have no idea how he got into baseball, but he’s freakishly good at it. I would love to take credit for that, but I did my best to keep him out of sports. Signing a kid up for sports is just signing away your free time as a parent, and I love my Carla Time. It’s hard to even tell who is good at baseball, there’s so much standing around, but I’ve heard from a lot of coaches and a lot of parents that Jaxon is good.

  But more importantly, he’s a good kid. He may not be the sharpest bulb in the pack, but unlike a lot of the kids at McKinley, my kid isn’t an entitled brat. I handed him his report in the car, and he grunted out “thanks” between bites of his breakfast. The paper looked suspiciously clean, but luckily that lovable doofus hasn’t figured out how napkins work, and his report was instantly smudged with grease stains. Most Arby’s don’t open until ten AM, but the cashier at the Marshall Street location is an old “friend” of mine, and since he sleeps in the parking lot, he doesn’t mind making my boy a couple beef and cheddars before school.

  McKinley is a circus when we arrive. There are dozens of vans idling in the street in front of the school, and the traffic cop, whose only job is to keep things moving, has given up entirely. He stands there, dejected, in the middle of the street, not even bothering to direct the moms who refuse to even notice his orange traffic flag. The whole drop-off line is dumb as hell. They expect you to just inch forward in the right-hand lane until your car reaches the front of the school. They even marked the left lane as “NO DROP OFFS,” painted repeatedly in giant yellow letters right on the road. But fuck that. We’re late, and there’s still a whole line of mom-mobiles moving so slowly they’re probably in reverse. I whip up the left lane, ready to plead illiteracy to anyone who gives me shit and slam the car into park. “Love you,” Jaxon mumbles, kissing me on the cheek with his greasy mouth. Jaxon lumbers away from the car with his bag of Arby’s and a backpack that will probably never see an actual book. I don’t bother trying to take a photo, they do those at school anyway.

  I swear, Back to School is like a drug for these moms. And I say “moms” only because the pickup and drop-off and PTA and volunteers are a solid 95 percent female. And not single moms, either. I’m a weirdo here, a complete outlier. Most of these broads have perfectly able-bodied husbands who all seem to have a disability that prevents them from doing jack shit for their kids.

  McKinley is known for the smoking-hot moms, and I say that absolutely including myself. Now, for my taste, most of the McKinley moms are a little uptight. Nobody who runs without an assailant behind them can possibly be very good in the sack, but the men in our suburb seem to get the appeal of a skeleton cased in a very slender, very tan meat sack and wrapped in lululemon.

  The McKinley dads, though? They don’t get enough credit. I know because I spend forty hours a week waxing their wives’ labia and trimming their cuticles, and all these bitches do is complain about their husbands. Keith i
s too fat. Jonathan is distant. All thirty-seven Matts seem to be unable to tell the difference between Real Housewives of Orange County and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Kevin’s bonus wasn’t as big as they’d expected, and now Tabby has to break it to the kids that they won’t be going to Nantucket for the summer. Instead, they’ll be slumming it in Door County, Wisconsin. It’s going to be humbling.

  None of these dads are Vin Diesel, but the men of McKinley have their charms. And even though I definitely could, I don’t sleep with married men. And I don’t have sex with them, either. Dom Toretto said it best: a man’s gotta have a code. Dom Toretto is Vin Diesel’s most popular character—from the Fast & Furious filmography, obviously. He’s why I bought my car. I met Vin at a bar in the city one night, and he was selling his favorite street-racing car because he just had too many, and wanted to spread the love of racing. He had me pay him in cash, so he could protect his privacy. All I have to remember him by is this car, and the four hours we spent in the backseat together. Oh, and a selfie I took with him right before we banged the first five times. I wish I hadn’t been so drunk, because it’s too blurry to really tell that it’s Vin. And I’m 90 percent sure it was him. 70 percent sure. People act like he’d have no reason to be in the Midwest on a Tuesday in February, but people are dumb as hell.

  But back to dads.

  A Jock Dad looks great but is usually too insecure to have any fun. Jonathan spent the entire ten minutes we were together looking at his own abs in the mirror.

  A Boring Dad is kind of perfect if you just want a warm body on top of you, and someone who agrees to bring a tray of take-out nachos with him when he comes over.

  My personal favorite is a Sad Dad, one whose divorce is fresh, like Keith. Keith is a little chunky, but since the divorce, I’ve seen him at the karate studio nearly every day, working out his rage issues. He’s still got a potbelly, but what’s not to like about a guy who makes you look fitter the moment he takes off his shirt? A Sad Dad’s standards are low enough that anything you do will be considered off the charts hot. They’ve been poking around in the same vagina for at least a decade, so you don’t even need to do anything. You can just lie there, bite your lip, and say a few curse words and they’ll think you’re a sex goddess.