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"  Here it comes, the backlash to the &amp;quot;Bad Mommy&amp;quot; backlash to the &amp;quot;Perfect Mother&amp;quot; backlash to the &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t Be a Mother&amp;quot; backlash to the &amp;quot;You Have to Be a Mother&amp;quot; backlash to the\u2026 where was I? Oh right, the Salon article burning up my Facebook feed these days, titled &amp;quot;The tyranny of the bad mother: Slacker moms are just as intimidating as perfect ones.&amp;quot; Elissa Strauss writes about the persona of the &amp;quot;Bad Mother,&amp;quot; which has colonized the world of mommy blogs: &amp;quot;Born in the sanctimommy&amp;#039;s shadows, the bad mother is everything the perfect breast-feeding, plastic-avoiding mom is not\u2026 But then the bad mothers started getting a little judgey themselves.&amp;quot; Could it be that the real problem is that we have become addicted to labeling ourselves as mothers? And how has this happened? Let me digress briefly here to say that I personally exist with a foot in two different parenting cultures. I met many of my original mommy friends in the fancy-pants, BPA-free Brooklyn neighborhood where I used to live. These friends are the ones with anxiety about screen time and nutrition and early-childhood education philosophies. They have more opinions about breastfeeding than you knew existed. I fully admit that I share these anxieties, and to be honest, I&amp;#039;m glad we are being thoughtful about this most important of missions: Mission Raise a Good Human. That said, this year my daughter started public school in our current, very ethnically- and socioeconomically-diverse neighborhood. I love the new mommy friends I&amp;#039;m making, and/but they seem to think I am out of my mind when I confess that I feel guilty about the amount of processed food my kids eat, or the amount of screen time they&amp;#039;ve this winter. These are not bad moms. They are terrific, devoted moms, many of whom started having kids very young and have a good quantity of them. Significantly, these are not women who are chafing against the title of &amp;quot;Stay at Home Mom,&amp;quot; or itching to get back to their Real Career. They have other concerns, to be sure, but I don&amp;#039;t think any of them would ever say, &amp;quot;Oh, I&amp;#039;m totally the worst mom ever!&amp;quot; When out of habit I say things like this, they look at me with real concern, trying to discern what on earth I could mean. So from where I stand, it seems that this &amp;quot;slacker mommy&amp;quot; zeitgeist has little to do with actual parenting. I think it has more to do with our modern-day obsession with achievement. We all want to be the best mothers, because we want to be the best everythings: the best 20-something, the best bride, the best career girl. But striving to be the best is scary, because you&amp;#039;re inevitably going to fail, and it&amp;#039;s simply not possible to do all of these things.  So you build in a cushion for yourself. &amp;quot;I am so not the best X, but it&amp;#039;s okay because I&amp;#039;m not even trying. If I were really, really trying, well, of course I could be.&amp;quot; Isn&amp;#039;t this what we are all doing with our social media personas? Trumpeting our successes by posting our Pinterest-perfect baking projects, our most photogenic of family moments\u2014while building in excuses for our own potential failures, with Erma Bombeck-esque tweets about our failures in asepsis? And by we, of course, I mean me? As Strauss herself writes, &amp;quot;The issue with all this bad mothering, besides the culture of reverse bullying it has created, is that it doesn&amp;#039;t do much to undo the good mother myth that it was set up to squash in the first place.&amp;quot; Yes, exactly. Maybe we should all just worry less about What Kind Of Mother One Ought To Be, and just like generations of mothers before us, do the best we can.   Amy Shearn is the mother of two small children and the proprietress of Household Words, a blog about babies, books, and Brooklyn. She also writes for Oprah.com and MommyPoppins.com. Amy is the author of the novel How Far Is the Ocean From Here (Shaye Areheart/Crown 2008) and a new novel about, what else, a Brooklyn mother, called The Mermaid of Brooklyn. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/life/mom-kids/news/a17140/bad-mothers/>