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    Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
    Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
    Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
    Audiobook6 hours

    Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace

    Written by Ayelet Waldman

    Narrated by Mia Barron

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Best-selling author Ayelet Waldman delivers a humorous, encouraging look at the nearly impossible-and often thankless!-job of mothering. "This is not only a wonderfully written book, but I think it may also be a book of great salvation for many women." -Elizabeth Gilbert, best-selling author
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJun 12, 2009
    ISBN9781440756344
    Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace
    Author

    Ayelet Waldman

    Ayelet Waldman is the author of the memoir, A Really Good Day, as well as of novels including Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. She is the editor of Inside This Place, Not of It: Narratives from Women's Prisons, and with Michael Chabon, of Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation and Fight of the Century. 

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    Reviews for Bad Mother

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Searingly honest in many places, hilarious in others. I wasn't prepared for all of Waldman's intimate confessions of her "crimes", and sometimes she does cross the line and reveal what feels like way too much information. (Though some of this easily could be my own prudishness.) But she writes eloquently and clearly, and for me there were enough light, ruefully funny anecdotes to balance out the darker moments.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting book. It certainly comes from a particular and personal perspective. However, if like me, you're the kind of person who struggles with anxiety and being harder on yourself than others are... this is a great read!
    • 4/5
      I didn't agree with all of her opinions, but her writing style is engaging. I'm a sucker for memoir, especially parenting essays (odd, since I'm not even sure if I want kids), so this was a worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      Novelist Ayelet Waldman writes of her experiences as a mother of four children, humorously detailing how every mother is sometimes a bad mother even while doing the best she can.
    • 4/5
      Searingly honest in many places, hilarious in others. I wasn't prepared for all of Waldman's intimate confessions of her "crimes", and sometimes she does cross the line and reveal what feels like way too much information. (Though some of this easily could be my own prudishness.) But she writes eloquently and clearly, and for me there were enough light, ruefully funny anecdotes to balance out the darker moments.
    • 2/5
      I started reading this book as part of my desire to read about motherhood. ugh, bad choice. It's not that Waldman is saying anything wrong--she's just so unbelievably irritating and smug while saying it that it ruins her point. She's like your crazy, annoying aunt who pushes you in a corner every Christmas and tells you waaaayyy too much information about her personal life. I think the only reason Ayelet was able to publish this book had to do with the controversy over her New York Times article where she said she loved her husband more than her children. Again, i didn't have any issue with her point, it's just that you have to wade through so much whining and unnecessary detail to get to it. She could have summed up this entire book with one well-constructed paragraph.

      Waldman is married to Michael Chabon, one of my favorite writers, and I'm hoping she hasn't ruined him for me!
    • 3/5
      i liked this book and i enjoyed reading about her life and her children (she and michael chabon have four kids). but at times it surprised me by veering off into a too-indulgent memoir. she makes some very excellent points, however, as she argues that we are all way too hard on mothers, who expect and are expected to be perfect. i liked her call to embrace and allow for "good enough" parenting. i thought she was really right on when she mentioned the berkeley parents network and how extremist and judgmental the attachment parenting people can be. when she was bottle-feeding her baby pumped breast milk, a stranger approached her to inform her that "breast is best". she points out that it seems to be one of the only approaches/philosophies that is characterized by proselytizing. (in other words, parents who use cribs, strollers, bottles, playpens, disposable diapers don't tend to have that attitude of superiority and try to convince others that their way is right.) and even though we co-slept and used a sling and i am all for attachment parenting, she is so right! for some reason, certain believers can take it too far, to the point where they believe other parents are doing it wrong. and that is representative of the larger problem waldman explores. as she says, if we can't accept & respect other parents, we should at least go back to the days where we kept our opinions about the personal lives of other people to ourselves.
    • 5/5
      Every woman should read this book. We judge each other harshly, but judge ourselves harshest of all. We need to ease up on ourselves and fellow moms. This book is brutally honest and beautiful. I enjoy Waldman's writing and this is no exception. Examining her faults and her strengths, this book will strike home to anyone with kids.
    • 4/5
      Bad Mother is not a book about a bad mother. It simply is a book about motherhood in the way it is experienced by author Ayelet Waldman. Waldman, mother of four children, started a controversy not too long ago by saying that she loves her husband more than her children. She talks about this statement in her book. In addition, she reveals many things about her role as mother. I found her book to be brutally and bravely honest. This makes for good reading, but it also reveals the author’s skills as an essayist. I previously only thought of her as a novelist, although I admit to never having read any of her other books before.Two chapters struck the deepest chords with me. The first was a chapter about abortion and choices that Ayelet Waldman and her husband, author Michael Chabon, made in more than one instance as to whether or not she should carry a pregnancy to term. The second was a chapter about bipolar disorder and how this family illness affects her role as a mother. I don’t want to reveal too much as I thought that much of what she had to say about motherhood was so intertwined with who she is as a person. With a new appreciation for this author, I will now seek out her novels.
    • 4/5
      I wish I had had Ayelet Waldman living next door to me while I was raising my children. She is thoughtful, witty, and insightful, and I know we would have gossiped about some of those other mothers - the ones who are all self-righteous about the "proper" way to give birth and care for your baby. (Attachment parenting, man. Crazy zealotry.)Seriously, Waldman's essays on motherhood really spotlight what every mother knows, even if we don't all articulate it: that in this culture, there is simply no way to mother a child without feeling like a "bad mother." Staying home with your child? You're a useless mouth, contributing nothing to society, and your child will suffer because your brain is rotting, you are dependent financially and you're not setting an example of creativity and productivity for her. Working outside of the home? What a terrible mother you are, abandoning your little one, leaving a nanny to raise him. While Waldman does not resolve every mother's dilemma, she does make a sincere plea to stop the "mommy wars." I agree.One thing I really liked about Waldman's essays was her excellent grasp on the concept that a parent actually creates the world that the child lives in. Perhaps it is her profession that makes her see this so clearly; after all, as a writer, she is used to creating worlds using only her words. But this is a thing that all parents do, and, I think, few recognize that they're doing: they translate the world to their children and can , by words and actions, form a dangerous, insecure place, or a warm and nurturing place, or some mixture of the two.Also, this review would not be complete without a separate mention of Waldman's terribly sad essay "Rocketship," about the baby that she aborted. For sheer poignancy, this ranks with Marjorie Williamson's essay about not living to see her daughter grow up, written two days before she died. ("The Woman at the Washington Zoo.") Waldman's heartbreaking essay is a timely reminder that, pro-life or pro-choice, motherhood is often a matter of choosing the least bad of two terrible options; and of suffering forever for whichever choice you make.
    • 4/5
      Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace is a book I started with suspicion. Of course I had heard about Ayelet Waldman’s article about loving her husband more than her children. I thought she was either lying or rubbing our noses in the fact that she is married to a very successful novelist, is a published novelist herself--and lives in Berkeley. At least other women in her situation have the good grace to live in Manhattan or on a multi-acred bucolic estate somewhere so that we can’t relate--at all. (I’ve never read any of Michael Chabon’s novels, and I wonder if that’s so I don’t have to be even more jealous by finding out how great he is.) So I was prepared to feel smug and superior and sorry for her children, except this book shows Waldman is actually a very good mother; and now that I am on husband number four, who seems like a keeper and with whom I have logged thirteen years, I can actually see her point. I used to think husbands were the people you left behind, while your children would always be there to look after you in your old age. Now I see the opposite is true--a good mother allows her children to feel responsible only for their spouse and children. As for old age, I hope this husband outlives me. If he doesn’t, I’ll try to save enough money to take care of myself with the help of an exorbitantly costly old folks’ home. That’s what I thought Waldman’s book would be about. Ironically, it’s instead about being a good parent.I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to like Waldman. While I really cared for only the first of her Mommy-Track Mysteries--the premise got old fast--I really liked her two other novels: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits and Daughter’s Keeper. The maternal voice in those two books was evident in Bad Mother. It’s clear Waldman gets it that child-rearing is the most important job a parent can do, even if it is not always the most rewarding. I say this because she is so honest about her children, and honesty is the only way one can mould another being’s character to the extent that any parent can. It’s great to be as starry-eyed about one’s spouse as Waldman is about Chabon, but that’s what marriage is about--acceptance of another grown-up who is already pretty much formed by the time marriage rolls around. Your children, on the other hand, are dependent on you for their health, education, and daily environment. If you allow your own fallibilities to get in the way of what your kids need, you will be subtracting from, not adding to, their life experiences.Waldman’s surprising candor shows how aware she is of the foibles in her upbringing and brain chemistry that could scar her children permanently. Bad Mother shows the difficult, and in the case of her abortion, heroic choices she’s made to render her maternal influence as positive as possible. This is how memoirs like Bad Mother should be--instructive because they are unflinchingly honest. I didn’t find there was Too Much Information (TMI) as some other readers did. What they thought of as TMI was what keeps the book from being preachy, in my view. And I don’t think it’s simply because two of my grandchildren are growing up in Berkeley that makes Bad Mother so relatable; I think it’s Waldman’s willingness to take on the hard issues without trying constantly to justify her herself. She says she’s thick-skinned enough to stand up to Berkeley’s particularly tough criticism. I say it’s that she good enough to know her critics are more than likely wrong. After all, anyone who uses the correct term “suffragist” instead of the unthinkingly belittling “suffragette” about our foremothers deserves to be read with an open mind.
    • 5/5
      Love, love, loved this book. There really are parents out there like me.....
    • 5/5
      I love this book! If everyone were as honest about themselves as Ayelet Waldman the world would be a better place. I like how she discusses how women are always judging each other. If we all take a good look in the mirror we are all not nearly perfect or happy for that matter. Very cool book.
    • 4/5
      OverviewSubtitled "A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace," Bad Mother is a warts-and-all look at Waldman's experiences as a mother. (She has four children.) These types of books are like catnip to me. What mother doesn't want to learn that she is not alone in her misgivings about her mothering skills?Waldman writes openly and honestly about a wide variety of topics, including:* pursuing a career versus staying at home (Waldman gave up a high-powered career as a lawyer to stay-at-home ... only to find herself often bored out of her mind! HAHA! Don't I know it!)* balancing household chores and sex roles with your partner (Can we ever really break through the "this is woman's work" and "this is men's work"?)* breast-feeding (more on this below)* judging other mothers (more on this below) * the mother-son relationship and how it affects the relationship with your mother-in-law (I still don't quite measure up to how my husband's mom used to take care of him ... especially when he is sick.)* dealing with your children's homework (where do you draw the line?)* projecting your own fears and hopes on your children (Waldman writes about her outrage and subsequent attempt to ban dodgeball in her children's gym class ... but her children loved it. She was fighting a fight from her own childhood.)* dealing with daughters and sex issues (Waldman explores her own sexual history ... and how she hopes her daughters don't make the same choices she did.)* having an abortion for a child who might be born with genetic defects (This chapter, entitled "Rocketship," is easily the most heart-breaking and difficult to read.) * arguing in front of your kids (They are listening ... don't fool yourself that they are not.)* how honest to be with your kids (Just how do you handle the sex/drug talk if you want to be totally honest about your past but impart a "do as a I say, not as I did" message?) * being a different mom for different kids (In other words, how she wasn't the same mother she was for her first-born as for her last-born.)* handing down a genetic legacy to your children that is less than perfect (Waldman writes about her own bipolar disorder and fear of passing it to her children.)* parenting a child who might be gay (This felt like the least genuine chapter to me; it felt more like a political essay than a personal one.)* baby lust (Those tiny baby feet will get you every time!)* wanting to protect your children from the ugliness of the world (This is an issue that Mr. Jenners and I struggle with. There is a fine line between keeping your children safe and making them "street savvy" and scaring them into thinking the world is an unsafe, bad place.)* managing your expectations/hopes/dreams for your children. (I struggle with this every day, and I imagine it is only going to get worse.)As you can see, the book ranges over a wide variety of topics and delves into some deep and emotional issues. I admire Waldman's honesty and directness. She really put herself out there with this book. I suspect that if you don't share Waldman's basic worldview (liberal), you might not care for much of what she has to say or appreciate where she is coming from in life. Yet I think most mothers would find some area of common ground with Waldman, and I think her message of "let's all be gentler with ourselves and one another" is one we should all take to heart.Structurally, the book is divided into 18 different chapters, with each one functioning as a stand-alone essay. Most of the essays are very personal and specific to Waldman's life and background; yet I think she has a knack for making her personal experiences relatable.My Final RecommendationThis is a thought-provoking and honest look at motherhood that will give readers lots to think about. Waldman doesn't hold back anything, and I appreciated her candidness and openness. I've read a few books on motherhood, and I found this to be one of the most provocative. The writing is good (even if she does tend to meander a little bit), and she has a very conversational writing style. She is often funny and flippant, which balances out the more emotional moments. If this is a topic of interest to you, I would categorize it as a "must read." However, Waldman's views come from a more liberal, feminist angle so if this doesn't mesh with your worldview, this book might not be the best choice for you. I'm giving it 4 stars.
    • 5/5
      Raw, wrenching, funny, tragic, deeply personal. A book that will change you.
    • 4/5
      The perfect book to read while your child mindlessly watches cartoons (I kid, I kid.) While reading, I kept nodding, yes, yes. True, she gets a bit whiny and defensive at times, but really, by the time I was done I wanted to go hang out with Waldman and have some coffee, which is exactly what you want to feel with a book like this.
    • 4/5
      Bad Mother is a collection of eighteen essays that chronicle, according to the subtitle, “maternal crimes, minor calamities, and occasional moments of grace.” It is a modern woman’s progressive take on marriage, partnership, parenting, and tough decisions. And why is it called Bad Mother? Well, because this is a book “about the perils and joys of trying to be a decent mother in a world intent on making you feel like a bad one.”thoroughly enjoyed this collection of essays and Waldman’s candid voice, smart humor, and wry observations, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to readers looking for a new perspective on marriage, parenting, and some of life’s toughest decisions. 4.25 out of 5.Read my full review at The Book Lady's Blog.
    • 4/5
      It's tricky to review a book whose author regularly discusses how mean people on the internet are about her writing... This book was unusually all over the place for me, in terms of my reaction to it. There were chapters that I really enjoyed (including the last one) but also some that drove me up the wall. A lot of that is personal preference and expectation, though. I was hoping for more general discussion of parenthood and less memoir. My TMI threshold is very very high for memoir and Waldman is an enthusiastic sharer. I also thought there was something annoyingly gimmicky about treating her mental issues as a late-breaking big reveal. The chapter on abortion, however, was particularly valuable, making points that don't come up nearly often enough. I didn't really disagree with any of her parenting points/philosophies (although I've never had kids of my own), except for whether she was likely embarrassing her teenaged kids with assorted revelations. She is very Berkeley; a tolerance for that is necessary.
    • 5/5
      I really liked this book. I picked it up after reading the interview on State of the Thing, mildly interested. I am also a mother of 4, now grown and 3 of them beginning parenting themselves. Still I found some reassurance from reading Waldman's brutally honest account of mothering. I saw myself over and over and, strangely after all these years, felt lighter and better. I was able to let go of some of the guilt. Guilt I maybe didn't even know I was hanging on to
    • 5/5
      I can relate to this book more than any other book on the planet, and so can most of my friends whether they are brave enough to admit or not. I love that even as Ms. Waldman writes about the unfair expectations on women/mothers she still struggles to meet them. And while she knows the only opinions about her mothering that count are hers (and secondly her husband and children) I have a feeling she is almost as affected as myself when I feel judged. Having this book on the best seller list gives me hope a more honest discussion of motherhood and raising a family and that I am not as bad off emotionally as I might have thought I was. I haven't finished this yet, but plan to savor it, use it as a reference for the rest of my life and buy a supply to give as gifts this Christmas.
    • 4/5
      First off, let me say I am not a mother and have no plans to be a mother, so it may seem strange that I picked this book to read. My best friend has 4 children and I have lived with her since the oldest was 3 years old. I have been their secondary caregiver and their only babysitter, sometimes I feel like their mother, sometimes their favorite aunt. This book sounded interesting, since I am around my best friend alot, I am also around other mothers (they tend to congregate I've noticed), being an 'outsider' gives me the opportunity to observe, a lot. On to my review.In her book 'Bad Mother', Ayelet Waldman discusses many things:, society's perception of what makes a good mother versus a good father; the 'bad mother police', and confrontations with them; how she personally has felt at times she has failed her children and feels she is a 'crappy' mother; her children and herself's disabilities and failings. Finally, the realization that she is not a crappy mother. That society's expectations of mother's is unrealistic. This book is funny and insightful. Ayelet has a quick wit (there is a chapter on that) and for the most part is brutally honest.
    • 5/5
      Bad Mother is a book of essays written by Ayelet Waldman, an author who became (in)famous when she wrote that she loved her husband more than her children. The essays in this book are candid, honest, and well-written, and while I may not totally agree with her everything she's written here, several of the essays in this book struck a chord with me.As a mother of 3 boys, ages 8 and under, I have often thought of myself as failing to live up to the "good mother" standard that is put forth by the media--and yes, us mothers ourselves--today. I yell at my kids more than I should, I don't make it to every school function, and I'm a working mom with a full-time job who has not once desired to be a stay-at-home mom. I have felt guilt, anger, sadness, despair over the choices I've made. But reading Ms. Waldman's essays have made me realize that I am not a "bad" mother - I am a normal mother, a good-enough mother, and my kids are doing just fine.In so many of the essays in this book, I saw myself. I've been through the same things, felt the same feelings, made similar decisions. I want to thank Ms. Waldman for voicing what many of us keep hidden away, and making it OK to feel the way we do. All mothers should read this book, whether they be working moms or stay-at-home moms, married moms or single moms. If you are raising children in today's society, please read this book! Whatever your situation, you will feel so much better after you spend time with Ms. Waldman! Highly, highly recommended!
    • 3/5
      I'm not certain what exactly I thought this book was going to be when I heard the description but somehow it didn't enter my conciousness that it would be essays rather than a memoir or even fiction. Don't know why I didn't think of essays but because I didn't, it took me a bit of time to readjust my reading mindset. Even once readjusted, I didn't love this look at mothering, how we demonize or sanctify perfectly normal parenting acts, and some insight into Waldman's own life as a mother/wife/author (not necessarily in that order). It really left me feeling so-so despite me wanting to like it a whole lot.Waldman addresses the need we seem to feel to point out the "bad mothers" who make the rest of us look like "good mothers." She uses examples from the media--and ironically I was reading this as it came out that Madlyn Primoff made her two bickering daughters get out of the car and then she drove off. Not only did this turn into a prime example of what Waldman was arguing about, it made me examine my own reactions to examples like this (and incidentally, I would totally have done that to my two older kids--also 10 and 12--if I'd thought of it so I'm clearly already the Bad Mother of the books' title). Now hypotheticals are not all Waldman writes about, sharing moments in her life (besides the famed loving her husband more than her kids moment) that might or might not qualify her as a bad mom, mostly not. Well, really, all it qualifies her as in my mind is a human mom. And perhaps that is my biggest trouble with this book. None of the things that Waldman has written about seem egregious to me. They seem average, the sorts of things I do on a daily basis and which, therefore, I don't really need to read about. But I suspect there are moms out there who need the reassurance that they aren't going to break their kids if life isn't one hundred percent perfect all the time. There are some very moving essays in here, such as when Waldman discusses her decision to abort after discovering a terrible chromosomal abnormality. The pain she must have faced and the grace with which she writes about this experience is fantastic. However, this is just a glimmer of what the whole book could have been (although I do rather question including the recounting in a book called Bad Mother but I guess that's a personal choice) and wasn't. The book is also very loaded with current touchstones, which could make for a very dated book even two years down the line. In some ways that's good as it showcases how we don't even manage to retain the names of the demonized "bad mothers" for terribly long but in other ways it didn't work for me.The writing is strong but sometimes the topics of the essays seem questionable in terms of the over-arching theme. This left me with rather mixed feelings and a vague disappointment over what could have been.
    • 4/5
      I tackled some of my stack of unread books recently and in stack was Ayelet Waldman's memoir Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occiasional Moments of Grace. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Waldman is the author of a series of murder mystery novels, The Mommy-Track Mysteries. Lately, she has turned to more emotionally serious topics, and drew extensive criticism for her essay Truly Madly Guiltily, which was published in the New York Times, in which she stated that she loved her husband more than her children. This article lead to a savaging of Waldman on the internet forum community and blogosphere. What I didn't know until a few chapters into the book, is that Waldman is married to the famous prize-winning author, Michael Chabon.This book is a collection of essays surrounding the topic of motherhood. These essays are Waldman's own thoughts on family and children. While some are light-hearted, others are more serious and even heart-breaking. Her writing style is direct and engrossing and the pages turn themselves. While I could not say that I agreed with her point of view all the time, I was impressed by her honesty and I believe that overall she is doing a good job as a mother.