Confessions of a Scary Mommy

I hate whiners.

It was with some trepidation that I opened “Confessions of a Scary Mommy: An Honest and Irreverent Look at Motherhood: The Good, The Bad, and the Scary” — a companion piece (?) to Jill Smokler’s wildly popular mommy blog. After all, how much bitching and moaning about motherhood can another soldier in the trenches take?

Turns out, you can take a lot.

Here’s the thing — for as much as I hate whining, I also recognize I am just a pot calling a kettle black. I don’t know a single mother who doesn’t occasionally wish for something other than a Teletubbies-less morning, Cheerio-less afternoon, and a homework-less night. I love my kids more than life itself. I’d give them anything and everything and then some more. But I’ve also had more than my share of moments when I wonder “WTF was I thinking?” when I was desperate to get pregnant. So there’s something akin to relief in reading Smokler’s “confessionals” — anonymous posts to her website where, the thing you were thinking but would never say? Yeah, someone said it.

The book definitely skews toward the younger years of parenting, but it’s well worth an afternoon read at the beach, or the coffee shop in between the preschool drop-off at 9:15 a.m. and the ensuing pick-up a whopping 1 hour and 15 minutes later. Short chapters allow for the expected picking up and putting down you’ll do — who has any time to read, anyway? And you’ll feel a sense of camaraderie and may even find inspiration to continue fighting the good fight — parenting that next generation of ankle-biters.