In Bad Mother, author Ayelet Waldman encourages women to aspire to be “not bad” mothers and resist the pressure to meet the extremely high standards of success that society has for women and motherhood. Waldman wants women to stop trying so hard and just be. She argues that mothers can and should be honest, flawed, and, yes, selfish sometimes — your ability to care for your children will not suffer.
Waldman’s book is a welcome change from the usual motherhood self-help nonsense that lines the shelves at Barnes & Noble. The book deal was struck after Waldman wrote a controversial piece for the New York Times‘s “Modern Love” column a few years ago. In “Truly, Madly, Guiltily,” she wrote about loving her husband, author Michael Chabon, more than their four children. Her confession came about after observing how many other mothers didn’t seem to have as active a sex life with their husbands, a fact she attributed to their focus on being moms rather than wives.
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