Bad Moms

by Nora McInerny

  “No. Because they at least get a sweet bike out of the deal. This is what it feels like to dress up as the Statue of Liberty and stand on the street corner spinning a sign that says TAX TIME IS HERE!”

  Kiki pauses for a moment to think, which I can’t believe she can do with two human beings tugging at her hair. One of the twins keeps squeezing Kiki’s boobs and shouting, “Eaaaaaaat!”

  “I think I’d rather be dressed as the Statue of Liberty right now,” she says, desperately trying to make eye contact with a mom who is just as desperately trying to avoid it.

  “Come on,” I say to Kiki and the girls, “I’ve got an idea.”

  McKinley may have gone purely digital with their student communications, but moms are still stuck doing a nightly backpack check for their kids. You have to, or you end up with mice in your kitchen and a permanent funk in your house because your kid thinks his backpack is a traveling trash bin for his old Arby’s bags and sweaty baseball socks. There are hundreds of moms checking hundreds of backpacks every night. Which means that each of these sweaty little kids is a little Trojan Horse.

  We trail the last kindergartner into the building as if we’re class moms ready to help out with today’s organic spelt-spaghetti craft project. We spend the next hour shoving our flyers into every available backpack, cubby, and locker we can find. And while I’m at it, I tear down every Gwendolyn James sign from the wall. That bitch is going down.

  27

  Gwendolyn James

  To: McKinley Mom Squad

  From: Gwendolyn James

  Subject: Election

  A gentle reminder that while we are certainly dismayed at the recent developments concerning the PTA election, McKinley is a democracy run by the adults.

  As such, I would like to remind everyone that we are beholden to a sacred code of election ethics that run in line with our McKinley Mission Statement, bylaws, and Best Practices. While I will not stoop to name-calling, I do know that several mothers expressed concern about the amount of propaganda being distributed on school grounds. I apologize for my own use of paper to create my campaign posters and am happy to report that I am planting 1,000 trees to atone for my misuse of resources.

  I hope that my opponents learn from this situation, as I have, and that we can all agree that politics aside, our biggest responsibility is not to our own ambition but to the well-being of our children.

  Xoxo,

  Gwendolyn

  PS—you can save 25% on my eCourse “First Class Kids: A Guide to Raising Exceptional Children” using code VOTEGWENDOLYN. Click here.

  28

  Kiki

  My parents had their talks in the kitchen after I went to bed. It was always less of a talk and more of an argument that they attempted to make as quiet as possible. I would try to piece together the gist of the conversation based on the few words that would waft up the stairs and into my bedroom. Kent’s parents have never had an argument. Not once. His mother told me that on my wedding day. She said, “Kiki, if you’re wondering what the secret is to a long marriage, it’s this: pick your battles. And most of them aren’t worth picking.” She told me that whenever she thought about picking an argument with Kent’s dad, she smiled instead. Soon, her brain would believe her mouth, and she would feel happy.

  Kent and I have our Big Talks on the loveseat in the living room. It was a gift from Kent’s mother last year. It’s very floral. She said that another secret to long-lasting love is always being close together, and that big sofas mean big problems. Tonight, I was in the kitchen after dinner texting with Amy about the campaign when Kent used his Serious Voice. Sometimes that means we’re going to have sex, but it’s not Friday, and we’re on a pretty strict sex schedule.

  “Kiki,” he says to me as I settle into the space he left for me on the loveseat, “I’m worried.”

  “Kent, I don’t know how many times I have to tell you, I’m fine with your erectile disFUNction. We make it work!”

  Kent gives me a tight smile and shakes his head as he unlocks the iPad. “No, Keeks, I’m worried about you.”

  Me? I rack my brain for what would worry him. I check my blood pressure every time I go to Walgreens and it’s great. I eat oatmeal three times a week to keep my heart healthy. I definitely get ten thousand steps a day. Our sex life has been like clockwork: three positions, six minutes from first kiss to cleanup. What could he be talking about?

  Kent taps away, and then pulls up a series of charts in the telltale yellow and black of the HNYDO app.

  “It seems like you’re really disengaged. Your performance has been slipping. Is everything . . . okay? Do you have something on your mind?”

  You know how sometimes you don’t even know you have something on your mind until someone says something like “Do you have something on your mind?” and then all of a sudden, the entire contents of your brain are pouring out of your mouth and into the air and you can’t stop it? I hardly ever do this when I’m with Kent. Usually, the cashier at the grocery store will ask how I am, and then four minutes later I’ll realize that I just shared a very intimate story about my life with a teenager who was just trying to make small talk and definitely did not need to know that rhubarb holds a lot of emotional significance for me as it reminds me of my dead grandmother, and that’s why I had been crying in the produce section.

  Tonight, though, Kent is the cashier looking for a way out of this one-way conversation. I can tell he just wanted to talk about the app, about how I haven’t been approaching my homemaking with the zeal of my youth, but I can’t stop myself. I tell him all about what’s been happening with the McKinley Mom Squad. All about my new friends and all about my former idol, Gwendolyn. Surely he’d recognize the ridiculousness of Gwendolyn’s cult of personality. He would love Amy. Maybe he would even help us with the campaign? He had run for student government all four years in college; certainly he’d learned something from all those losses. Carla would frighten him, so I soften her rough edges just a little bit. I tell him that she works in gynecology, which isn’t exactly true but isn’t false, either, because I’m pretty sure she’s seen more vaginas than my own lady doctor has.

  When I’m finished, Kent takes a moment before responding.

  “So . . . that’s what’s wrong? Those two moms I saw you with the other week? They’re more important than our kids? Than our family?”

  Kent’s hands grasp mine, and our eyes lock. In his lap, the HNYDO app buzzes away, undoubtedly creating more data about what a bad job I’m doing at keeping our household running as smoothly as Kent’s slacks, which I steam for him every morning because he doesn’t like to put on cold pants.

  “They’re not more important than our family, but they’re important. They’re fun. They make me happy. They like me.”

  “Keeks, everyone likes you!” Kent kisses the top of my nose, which is one of my favorite kinds of foreplay. But not tonight, Buster.

  “Kent, I just want to have a life. I don’t want everything I do to be about the kids and this house and HNYDO. I haven’t seen my college friends since Emily’s wedding.”

  Kent blinks.

  “That was five years ago, Kent!”

  Kent smiles, and then . . . yawns? Wow, I guess 8:30 really snuck up on us tonight.

  “I’m glad we had this chat,” he says, tucking his iPad under his arm. “It’s good for us to be on the same page.” In the distance, I hear the song that haunts my dreams: three notes played over and over. The dryer is letting me know it’s time to fold laundry.

  “THE SAME PAGE! HE SAID IT’S GOOD TO BE ON THE SAME page! Well, I’d like to know what book he’s reading because he participates in three fantasy football leagues. He spends the third weekend of October on a Guys Trip with his friends from college, who are really our friends from college, who also leave their wives at home with the kids. He lives for those weekends. And you know what he says? You know what he tells me? He tells me, ‘Kiki, it’s important for me to be able to get away and cut loose som
etimes so I can come home and be a better husband and dad.’” My Kent impression is getting really, really good. I can tell because Amy and Carla have a look on their faces like they want to puke their guts out.

  Tonight is draft night. Or, the first of three draft nights, so Kent won’t be home until after nine PM. I’d planned to relabel the shelves in our pantry and get my HNYDO app rating up, but then Carla called and said she had a major case of the fuck-its and didn’t feel like cooking and was I interested in all-you-can-eat breadsticks and salad and stuffing the kids full of carbs?

  I TAKE ANOTHER SIP OF MY SHIRLEY TEMPLE AND LEAN IN. “Cut loose? Cut loose! Well, doesn’t that sound amazing! You’d think my hours as a full-time, twenty-four-seven mother would earn me just a little time off but apparently, nope!”

  Kent’s mother told me never to discuss my private issues outside the confines of my marital home or with anyone other than my husband, but it feels so good to vent.

  “Kiki,” Amy says, “you’re right. That sounds really hard, and really lonely, and I’m sorry.”

  Never in my life have tears sprouted from my eyes this quickly, but Amy’s words have touched the little button of truth inside me I was scared to push. I am lonely. How can I be lonely when I have four kids and a husband? The math doesn’t make sense! I’m wiping the corners of my eyes with my napkin when Carla interrupts.

  “How’d you even get out of the house tonight?” Carla asks. “Does he have a monitoring bracelet on you like a parolee?”

  My phone buzzes on the table. Does he have a monitoring device on me? A photo from Kent fills my screen. He is wearing a Minnesota Vikings jersey he’s had since college and giving a thumbs-up.

  KENT: Guess who has two thumbs and just got first pick?

  I self-consciously open the camera app, temporarily stunned by what I see when my face appears onscreen, mostly chins and nostrils. I make my own awkward thumbs-up and snap a photo quickly, hoping that nobody notices.

  ME: Guess who has two thumbs and is so proud of you!

  Carla is staring at me when I put my phone down. “Is that him?” she asks. “Do you ever get a break? Like, from all of this?” She gestures at the table next to us, where our collection of kids are enjoying a dinner of cheese bread and cheese pizza and breadsticks. The waitress had gotten tired of bringing refills, so she’d left a big plastic pitcher of milk in the middle of the table. Carla’s son, Jaxon, is chanting “Chug! Chug! Chug!” while Dylan drains a glass of 2 percent. Bernard and Clara are watching him with rapt attention, holding their own glasses of milk and waiting for their turn to join the tiny frat party. Jane is studying, her face about two inches from a textbook about plant biology that I’m fairly certain is two grades ahead of where she should be. The twins are quietly dipping their breadsticks in vats of ranch dressing, their chubby little arms covered in grease and sauce.

  “Repeat after me.” Carla pauses, then coughs violently into her hands. You’re supposed to do the Dracula cough—even the twins know that!—but at least she wipes her hands on her jeans before she reaches for another breadstick.

  “Kent,” she continues.

  “Kent,” I repeat.

  “Stop being such a whiny little bitch and let me have my own fucking life!” The dining room of Frankie’s Pizza momentarily pauses, unused to the shouting of expletives in a fast casual family restaurant.

  “Stop being such a whiny little b and let me have my own fudging life,” I whisper.

  “Atta girl,” says Amy, encouragingly.

  DYLAN FINISHES HIS GLASS OF MILK, SLAMMING IT UPSIDE down on the table. Jaxon celebrates by lifting Dylan in the air like the two of them have just won the Super Bowl. “Dy-lan! Dy-lan! Dy-lan!” The little kids all join in the chant—does Jaxon know how to speak, or just cheer?—and Amy and I gesture at them to shut their beautiful little mouths before we’re asked to leave. Carla, of course, could not care less that our children are the center of attention.

  “Jesus,” Carla says, “I can’t believe that giant came out of me. You know, I’m still not the same down there? It doesn’t matter how many Kegels I do, either. My vagina is like a hospital hallway. It’s like a double-wide trailer. It’s like—”

  “Do you think anyone is going to come to the meet the candidate night?” Amy’s giant dark eyes looked . . . scared. Is that insecurity showing? It’s actually criminal for someone who looks like Amy to be insecure. I’m sure if I could find one of her old yearbooks in her house, I’d be able to prove that she was voted Most Popular her senior year. And not popular in the Gwendolyn way, where you’re really just scared she might slit your throat if you don’t follow her on Instagram, but popular in the genuine way, where you just want to be around her because it’s probably how lizards feel when they lie on a sunbaked rock.

  “They fucking better,” Carla shoots back, leaning across the table, “or I’m not gonna be so gentle with the wax next time.”

  I might have laughed a little too hard, because Jane looks up, startled, and shoots a look our way that clearly indicates she would like to have some quiet study time at this casual family eatery. Amy mimes locking her lips and sighs heavily toward us.

  “I’m trying to get Jane to chill the fuck out. Sometimes I think she almost gets it, like she’s almost going to enjoy her life, and then she cries because she wasn’t invited to the gifted and talented camp at some school I’ve never even heard of and I think, What the fuck have I done? Like, do you see any other kids reading next year’s biology textbook at the dinner table? No. No you do not, because it’s bonkers.”

  “That’s a good problem,” Carla says, dunking her pizza crust in my milk. “I’m pretty sure that if you gave Jaxon a book, he’d just try to karate-kick through it. Or rip it in half, maybe? Good news is, I’m off the hook for a college savings account. Clearly.”

  I think about my own mom, and if she ever wondered about her own mothering capabilities. I doubt it. She delighted in people asking if we were sisters, sometimes calling me “sissy” in public just to try to encourage the question so she could gleefully exclaim, “Kiki, did you hear that? They thought we were sisters!” I hated that, just like I hated my mom asking me to prom. Just like I hated going to prom with her—in matching dresses, of course—just like I hated how she’d “pop in” to the dorms at the University of North Dakota as if she had just been in the neighborhood, and not that she’d driven over four hours with an overnight bag. I hadn’t realized how weird it all was until my roommate and Kent pointed it out to me, but I’d never brought it up to her. How were moms supposed to know if they were doing a good job? Should we be giving our kids comment cards? Having the kinds of check-ins Kent and I have? Or just waiting until they’re grown-ups and it’s too late to do anything about it, and hope that we haven’t raised serial killers or multilevel marketers who are badgering their high school friends to come get rich quick with them while working from their phones?

  “The worst part is that she’s just like me,” Amy says as Jane adjusts her glasses and leans even closer to her book. “She wants everything to be perfect all the time, and it makes her insane, and it makes me kind of hate her sometimes? Lucky for Dylan, he turned out just like Mike, and he’s lazy as shit. I found a bottle of pee in his room yesterday, because he’s too lazy to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night.”

  My brain crackles with excitement. Amy’s kids are weirdos, too.

  “Yesterday,” I confess, “I gave Bernard the wrong kind of juice and he called me an idiot.”

  “Jaxon still watches Sesame Street, and I’m not even sure that he gets it, you know what I mean?”

  “Dylan failed study hall. Principal Burr said nobody had done it before. Nobody. Ever.”

  “Clara took money out of a homeless woman’s cup.”

  “I’m only seventy-five percent sure that Jaxon’s dad is his dad.”

  “Dylan tried to make a grilled cheese sandwich on a lamp.”

  “Clara killed our neighbor’s fer
ret with her bare hands, and we all said it was an accident but sometimes I think . . . was it?”

  “Yesterday, in the shower, I spent ten minutes fantasizing that Mike would take Dylan in the divorce and Jane and I could just spend our days in a house where nobody celebrates their own farts.”

  “I left Bernard at the mall on purpose.”

  GEEZ LOUISE THIS FEELS GOOD. ALL THOSE THOUGHTS THAT I was certain made me a terrible, awful, no-good mother? They were normal. Or at least normal to these other two psychos. The three of us are laughing. Not the nervous kind of laugh I usually throw in when the silence feels awkward, but a real laugh. My eyes are watering, and my stomach hurts, and every breath I manage to sneak in just turns into a bigger giggle. It’s so consuming, we hardly notice that our kids have stopped destroying the restaurant and are staring at us with a mix of fear and embarrassment. I wipe tears from my eyes and give Bernard a thumbs-up, which he returns with his middle finger. As the high of our giggles subsides, something quieter creeps in.

  “Ugh,” moans Amy, looking at her kids, “I love them so much it doesn’t even make sense.”

  “The other day, Jaxon fell asleep on the couch, and I could see what he’d look like as a grown-up, and then I imagined him moving out and getting someone knocked up and me being a grandma before I was fifty, and I just cried like a baby.”

  “I think I’d die for them,” I agree. “Like, any of them. Right now. A bullet, a train, a gradual poisoning? Whatever. I’d do it.”

  It’s all true: the good parts and the bad parts. It’s all true, all at once. We may not always like them or want to share a home with them. But gosh dang it, we love them.

  29

  Amy

  MOM: Amy. Mikey told me that you’re having problems.

  MOM: I hope you’re not being too hard on him.

  MOM: Amy. Just talked with Mikey. He’s heartbroken. Give him a chance.

  MOM: I’m calling you.

  MOM: Answer.