Bad Moms

by Nora McInerny

“I’ll just take these for safekeeping.”

  THE CAR RIDE IS ICY COLD. JANE HAS STOPPED CRYING, BUT she’s also stopped talking to me. Instead, she stares out the window like a captive plotting her escape.

  When we pull into the driveway, she’s out of the car and into the house before I can even put it in park. I grab my bag, and her bag, and a few empty cans of sparkling water that have been rolling around in the back and walk in after her. I know enough to let her cool down, but it’s hard. I halfheartedly tidy up the living room, which is an absolute garbage dump. I haul out the trash and recycling. I let Roscoe out, and give him a treat when he comes back in. I glance through the freezer to see what I can thaw and reheat for dinner. I do my absolute best to pretend that I am not the worst thing that has happened to my children, but the moment I hear her crying I’m up those stairs two at a time and thunk—running directly into her locked bedroom door. I knock. I knock again. There’s silence, and then the sound of Jane turning the lock.

  The door whips open, and Sad Jane has been replaced by Angry Jane. Angry Jane scares me, and always has.

  “What do you want?” she snarls.

  “I’m just, I’m just checking on you, baby.”

  “Well, don’t bother. You haven’t bothered for the last month or so, so why start now?”

  “Janey, that’s not fair—”

  “No, it’s not fair when your mom decides that partying with her new friends and sleeping in and kicking your dad out is cool. It’s not fair when you get kicked off the soccer team because your mom pissed somebody off. It’s not fair when my life falls apart because I have a terrible mom.”

  “Jane, I’m sorry—”

  She’s already turned her back on me, rifling through her desk. “Here,” she says, stepping back into the doorway and shoving an old notebook into my hands. “Take it. I’m nothing like you, and I hope I never am.”

  The door slams. My heart breaks. She gave my journal back.

  Gwendolyn James Style

  I believe the children are our future.

  —W. Houston

  Nobody thinks it will happen to their child. But the sad fact of the matter is that today’s kids are turning more to drugs at a younger age than ever, and for all kinds of reasons: divorce, parental neglect, genetic predisposition to self-destruction . . . the list goes on.

  Now, as moms, we know we all make mistakes. One of my most popular posts is all about the 78 most common mistakes made by new moms—and how to avoid them (click here to read). But the biggest mistake we make is thinking that it won’t happen to our kids.

  As part of a community that has recently been affected by drug use and trafficking, I feel a responsibility to my fellow moms to help educate one another on how we can all do better, to make sure our kids do the absolute best.

  Talk to your kids about drugs! A Google Image search of “people who use drugs” will help illustrate the life consequences for their poor decisions.

  Know who their friends are! And more importantly, who their friends’ moms are. Apples never fall far from the tree, do they?

  Pay attention. Is your child irritable? Too calm? Sleepy? Not sleeping enough? Hungrier than normal or without an appetite? It could very easily be drugs. Urine tests are cheap to procure online (click here to use my affiliate link!) and will give you peace of mind.

  In Love and Style,

  Gwendolyn James

  35

  Kiki

  This is the worst week of Amy’s life. Which makes it the worst week of my life, because the thing about having a best friend is that you really feel for them. You feel their highs and their lows. It was more fun to feel like I’d had sex with Jesse Harkness than it is to feel like I’m getting divorced and my kids hate me and I’m also unemployed, but this is what friendship is.

  Amy’s front door is unlocked, which is strange. Usually, Roscoe barks his head off before my feet even touch the front porch, and Jane is shushing him from the armchair where she’s snuggled with a book. When I peek my head inside, there’s no Roscoe, and no Jane.

  “Hello?” I call, stepping into the living room, where Dylan is usually talking into a headset and playing some sort of violent video game. No Dylan.

  “Amy?”

  I tiptoe up the stairs, ducking my head into her bedroom, her bathroom. No Amy. I find her snuggled in Jane’s bed, curled up under the covers. She pokes her head out to look at me, and my heart breaks. I’ve never seen Amy like this before. She’s so . . . sad.

  “I’m such a fucking fuckup,” she whispers, and I do what I do best: I curl up next to her and listen.

  WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, MY MOTHER USED TO MAKE ME Bad Day Banana Bread. We called it that because it was filled with chocolate chips, and nothing makes a bad day better than fresh banana bread with more chocolate than any bread should have. I played with Amy’s hair while she cried and talked. Dylan and Jane and Roscoe had left to stay with Mike for a while. Mike had been nice about it—and I personally wouldn’t mind if Kent took our kids for an indeterminate amount of time—but Amy is really, really sad, and saying that I was envious of her would not have helped.

  Once she’s at least able to sit up and drink a glass of water, I leave Amy in Jane’s bed and go downstairs to her kitchen. Jane, I hate to admit, had a point. The sink is piled with dirty dishes, which is my pet peeve because the dishwasher is right there, right next to the sink! How much time do you save by dropping your dish in the sink? None! The floor is sticky, like someone hadn’t bothered to wipe up a spill properly. And the counters are cluttered, absolutely covered, with junk mail.

  It’s clear that Bad Day Banana Bread is not my only task for the day.

  I’VE KNOWN A LOT OF KIDS WHO DID DRUGS. OR, I KNEW OF them and they weren’t anything like Jane. They were always a little too old and a little too street smart for their age. Jane can’t even say the word “bra” without being embarrassed. Once, after school, I’d tucked her fallen strap back into her T-shirt, and she’d turned maroon with embarrassment. When I was her age, the bad girl in my grade was named Devon. Devon definitely smoked drugs because she talked about it all the time. Seriously, she would say stuff like “I smoke drugs.” Her parents were always out at the casinos and she spent a lot of time alone. I looked her up on Facebook the other day and she looks older than my mom. I know things have changed since I was growing up in North Dakota. On Oprah, I once saw a bunch of teenage girls who said they put vodka-soaked tampons into their vaginas to get drunk. They got drunk through their vaginas! And I’m sure their parents just thought, Hm, she sure goes through a lot of tampons, I hope her period isn’t too overwhelming.

  By the time the banana bread is ready—perfectly crisp on top, spongey in the middle—the kitchen is not quite sparkling, but certainly better than I’d found it.

  “Hey.” It’s Amy, bleary-eyed and bed-headed, standing in the kitchen doorway. “You did this for me? Kiki, I’m so sorry, you didn’t have to come over and clean up my dumpster house.”

  “Of course I didn’t have to. But I wanted to. That’s what friends do.” I cut her a generous, butter-covered slice, trying not to stare at her while she takes her first bite.

  “This is really fucking good.” She smiles, chocolate smeared across her perfect white teeth. It worked. It always works.

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. We’re startled by the sound of pounding on the front door. A muffled voice floats through the front door.

  “Open the door, bitches!”

  36

  Carla

  What Would Vin Diesel Do?

  Well, I’ll tell you right now, he wouldn’t let some bitch get away with framing their friend’s kid for possession. No way.

  I knew the moment Amy texted me who was behind this shit.

  First off, Jane wouldn’t know how to smoke drugs if her life depended on it. I was the bad girl in middle school, and in middle school, bad girls don’t know how to hide it. They don’t want to hide it. I walked around my middle school telling eve
ryone that my mom was at her boyfriend Randy’s house for the weekend and I had four wine coolers and half a joint to share.

  Now, bad women know how to hide it. And nobody, I mean nobody, does more drugs than the white women of McKinley. Pot is the new . . . pot? Stressed-out white ladies everywhere, the kind who love calling the cops when they smell even a hint of weed at a public park, are all secretly toking up because it helps their “stress” and “anxiety.” They’ll call it something cute, like microdosing, but vaping in your minivan isn’t microdosing, it’s just . . . dosing. The moms who used to casually ask my colleagues and me where in the world someone would even buy drugs? Now, they grow it themselves, tucked into their gardens among tomatoes and wildflowers, or in basement grow spaces just off the laundry room. It’s like they thought Weeds was an instructional documentary.

  Normally, what other people do is none of my business. I firmly believe that not getting into other people’s bullshit is what keeps me young. But like Vin says, I don’t have friends, I have family. And when someone fucks with my family? I will literally drive a car through a building to save them, if that’s what it takes.

  I WAS ABOUT TO TAKE A LITTLE CATNAP IN THE MOTHER’S lounge when I saw her. Gwendolyn’s little nanny pal, sitting on the same couch, tapping away on her laptop.

  “Hey,” I said, getting up and taking the seat across from her, “you’re Oska, right? Whatcha working on over there?”

  Oska crumbled like a cake. All I had to do was show the tiniest bit of interest in her as a person and she sang like a little bird.

  Look, I pride myself on not knowing jack shit about the Internet, but this lady was basically the inventor of that shit. She isn’t just Gwendolyn’s nanny, she’s Gwendolyn. Or, the Internet version of her at least? She takes Gwendolyn’s photos. She writes her blog—whatever the shit that means—she writes her eBooks. Gwendolyn James is a big fucking phony.

  37

  Oska

  It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, Gwendolyn was a totally nice, normalish rich lady. I was nervous just walking up to her giant house for the interview, but then Gwendolyn and I played on the floor with Blair and she asked me about my childhood and my family. Gwendolyn offered me the job after twenty minutes, and then I stayed for two hours just to hang out and drink coffee with her while the baby napped. I knew she was my boss, but she felt like more of a friend. A really, really rich friend who bought me the skincare products I could never afford and took me along to all her fancy parties because her husband was always traveling for work or standing in his home office barking into a Bluetooth headset at someone in a different time zone. I was supposed to be watching Blair so Gwendolyn could have some free time, but instead, the three of us just hung out together. It was nice.

  Here’s where things changed: Blair’s first birthday party. Gwendolyn had invited all of Blair’s friends from her New Mom Group. We’d made a sheet cake and bought some juice and some party hats, and Gwendolyn had strung up one of those HAPPY BIRTHDAY signs made from the interlocking letters. We only had one A, so “birthday” was spelled “BIRTHD4Y.” Close enough, right? Wrong! It was so not close enough. Because then Paisleigh’s mom showed up and started asking things like “Does the juice have added sugar?” And “Is this cake made from a mix?” Which felt more like an accusation than a question. She wanted to know when the photographer would show up, and where the smash cake was.

  Gwendolyn and I had no idea what a smash cake was, but we figured out later that it was apparently a small version of a birthday cake that you had made just so your baby could smash it into a pulp while your photographer took pictures. Gwendolyn didn’t have a smash cake. She didn’t have a hand-lettered birthday banner or a photo backdrop for the parents to pose their children for professional photos. She’d assumed that a first birthday party—which the baby would never remember—was, you know, just for fun.

  “And what’s the entertainment today?” one of the other mothers asked, and before Gwendolyn could totally lose it, I ran to the basement to rifle through Gwendolyn’s storage closet. Five minutes later, I was back in the living room in one of Gwendolyn’s old ball gowns, in full character as a Disney princess. The babies had, of course, not noticed, but the mothers were impressed, and cell phone photos were taken and uploaded to Facebook. Gwendolyn spent the entire next day scrolling and counting the likes and comments, which she read out loud to me. The moms called it a “throwback party” and apparently thought Gwendolyn now the coolest mom ever.

  That Facebook attention was good for her self-esteem, but Pinterest was even better. I’d never heard of it, but Gwendolyn’s husband had mentioned that there was this website that had just been blocked by IT at his work because his younger female employees were spending up to three hours a day on a website that was just . . . pictures? It pissed him off, but it also smelled like an opportunity, and he’d been an early investor. He never talked to Gwendolyn about business, but he did talk around her about business, and while he slurped down his dinner one night, standing at the kitchen counter, she overheard him shouting into his Bluetooth headset.

  “It’s crazy!” he said. “The referral traffic from this site is absolutely insane. It’s where women go to create their dream lives. And once an image is on Pinterest, it’s everywhere. This is the democratization of taste-making.” He’d smacked his lips. “Anyone can be important now.”

  That night, Gwendolyn had signed up for an account. She’d stayed up until three AM, scrolling and pinning images to digital boards. Her husband was right, this was exactly like creating your dream life. Gwendolyn created boards for everything from the garden to the living room and filled them with beautiful images. It was addictive. And she wasn’t alone. Sitting alone in the glow of her laptop, she watched her list of followers climb. A few dozen at first, and then a few hundred. By morning, she had ten thousand people following GwendolynJamesStyle.

  At first it was a hobby. Then it was a habit. And then it was like a sickness that took over our life, and their house. Gwendolyn spent hours “curating” perfect boards of the ideal home, the ideal dinner menu. But the ideal Gwendolyn didn’t just want to be sitting on her MacBook compiling inspirational photos posted by other women. She wanted to be the inspirational woman. She wanted to be making the perfect photos, the perfect homemade bread. She wanted dads to want her, and other moms to want to be her.

  The problem, of course, was that she had no talent. Like, none. I mean, anyone can throw a pack of pizza rolls in the oven and call it dinner, but not everyone knows how to make kale look like more than just a pile of leaves. But I do. I learned it from my mother, who learned it from her mother. When you grow up poor, you learn how to make something out of nothing. That’s why I could spend an hour every morning making dinosaurs out of fruit for Blair and Gandhi, or look into the fridge that Gwendolyn thought was “so empty” and pull together a decent meal for our dinner.

  I’m not stupid. I knew that everything I did and wrote and made ended up on Gwendolyn’s blog. I didn’t care that Gwendolyn got all the attention, either. It was actually cute how nervous Gwendolyn was the first time a stranger had pointed her out in public. We’d been pushing Blair and Gandhi on the swings at the park when a mom who’d been staring at us from over by the slides walked over.

  “I follow you!” she announced. “I’m, like, obsessed with you! Those fruit dinosaurs are incredible . . . so creative!” My ears had burned, but Gwendolyn had pretended as if nothing had happened. The moment passed, and a sort of understanding formed. G was the face, and I was the brains. That Friday, G handed me an envelope of cash. It was three times my weekly salary. And every week, the same envelope would appear. It was a good arrangement, until Gwendolyn turned into an asshole.

  “Whatcha working on over there?”

  I recognize the woman sitting on the couch next to me in the mother’s lounge. She works at the spa, and I sometimes see her napping in here. Now, though, she’s peering over at my laptop, which I’v
e been staring at for the past three hours while Gwendolyn got acupuncture and a massage and then left without me so I could “buckle down” on writing her next eCourse. I don’t even care about meditation, or motherhood!

  “Oh, just . . . you know . . .” I trail off, shutting the laptop and rolling out my neck.

  It’s not like I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to rat G out, but when this spa lady asks me about my work, I can’t stop talking. It’s been a while since anyone asked about me. Since anyone has been interested in me. Even Gwendolyn, who used to tell me I was like the little sister she never had (she does, by the way, have a little sister), only talks to me when she needs me to make content or run her errands or get her a glass of lukewarm water with a pinch of Himalayan sea salt and a squeeze of lemon. I’ve been pretending to be Gwendolyn for so long that I forgot I even exist. But this Carla lady is nice, and she gave me a cold washcloth soaked in cucumber water to put over my eyes while I take a break from the screen. I lay down on the couch and breathe in the essential oils Carla is spritzing around me.

  “Let me get this straight,” she says after I’ve finally stopped talking. “Gwendolyn had been a regular mom, and other moms made her feel bad, so then she took your skills and used them to make other moms feel bad?”

  I nod. That’s pretty much it.

  “One last question, and don’t fucking lie to me, either. Did she put that pot in Jane Mitchell’s locker?”

  “Of course not!” I sit up, and the washcloth falls from my face. “Gwendolyn would never do something like that. She made me do it.”

  38

  Carla

  Kiki’s Bad Day Banana Bread is good, I’ll give her that. But banana bread isn’t going to put a bitch like Gwendolyn in her place. Actually, I take that back: a gluten-filled, dairy-filled slice of banana bread would probably destroy Gwendolyn.