Dirty Little Secrets: MotherTalk Book Tour

Judging by, oh, every single conversation I've ever had with another mother, including the ones that take place in passing at the supermarket checkout, most of us have a Nice Mommy in our heads. Sometimes she looks like us, in shiny veneer form, but usually she's crossing her arms and shaking her head at us. Sometimes she admits to a martini by 6 p.m., after a day spent watching our bumbling maternal shenanigans, but you know, most of the time she's belting something clear straight out the bottle.

The bottle is plastic. It has a handle.

In other words: Most mamas worth talking to have Dirty Little Secrets -- we lead secret or not-so-secret lives of sloppy mothering, lick-and-a-promise housekeeping, not to mention lick-and-a-promise wifey-ing. (That dirty little joke is heterocentric. So's the book, kiddies. Just FYI.) When I saw that a mother in the book confessed to letting her kids (spoiler alert!) eat Milk Bones from the box, I felt an upwelling of kindred spirit. Or maybe it was just the roiling scotch. Anyway. I had to read it.

Each page contains one secret, ordered (arbitrarily, far as I can tell) from dirty to dirtier to dirtiest. Some were familiar to me already (Dear Milk Bone Lady: I buy the organic pet food...not so much for the pets, if you catch my drift), and some struck me as terribly good ideas ("I take like four showers a day. Because showers are allowed." And they are, you know. You can let your child watch six hours straight of PBS while rolling in a heap of Veggie Booty if you are taking a shower. Everyone knows that). Those secrets don't strike me as particularly dirty, though maybe I'm just crazy liberated. Or openly sloppy. One of the two. Anyway, others were a little more interesting, less funny -- mothers afraid to spend more than an hour or so with three kids, alone -- because they comment quite handily on the state of mothering in our culture (going to work is sometimes preferable to mothering? Well, I don't see why not. America don't make it easy on us). Whether funny or illuminating, about half the Secrets were fun as heck to read.

A good handful of them veered off into Dirty Little Wifely Secrets, though. I didn't enjoy those nearly so much, not least because I couldn't figure out what they were doing in the book. Secretly ogled the "hot handyman"? "Hate the way (your) husband chews"? All well and good (or not so), but not a thing to do with mothering. Husband Gripes is a tedious game, especially when we could be "listen[ing] to hip-hop in the car with [our] kids in the back," swear words and all.

There's one dirty little secret in there that's a little bit dirtier than the rest, and that gave me pause when I read it. "I've never admitted this to anyone else," says the anonymous mother, "but I have pinched my daughter's arms so hard I leave a mark." Look, we all make mistakes. I have had the good fortune to do so on a busy street while surrounded by strangers and friends with typepad accounts.* But I'm hoping this was a one-time thing, with this anonymous mama -- although the phrasing does not reassure me. I wonder what editors Ashworth and Nobile were thinking when they put that one in.

That said, I do like very much the idea of coming clean about the shortcuts we take and the subterranean thoughts we harbor. Partly because it's funny -- who doesn't love a "three-year-old girl (who) keeps going up to complete strangers and asking, 'Do you want to see my penis?'" -- but also because it keeps us from falling into the trap this anonymous mother describes: "I look at every mother and I assume that they're a much better mother than I am." Let's not knock ourselves down, mamas. The rest of the world is only too happy to do it for us.

To that end: MotherTalk is hosting a contest. Share your own dirty little secret by May 1, and maybe you'll get $25 to spend on Amazon (for the Grand Prize winner -- three others can win a free copy of Dirty Little Secrets). Just promise you won't spend it on kids' books. 

*In case you are curious: I was bitten hard on the back (kid in backpack) and swatted at her leg in a "get it off me!" gesture. While yelling. Judge away.

Comments

[SarcastiCarrie]

This is no secret...the whole world knows: my child wears pajamas to school (because really, I choose my battles). So what if he's the only kid in the class photo (in MAY) in Halloween jammies.

Oh, and for 4 months of his life, I drove him for 6 minutes every day to get him to fall asleep for nap (and then transferred him to his crib...later we just sat in the car in the garage without turning it on and he fell asleep). My name is SarcastiCarrie and I wasted gas.

[Franay]

I routinely lie to my son about where his Spongebob video went. I hate it so much that I hide it in places he can't reach.

I also occasionally let him have cereal for lunch because I don't feel like making him real food.

[Franay]

I routinely lie to my son about where his Spongebob video went. I hate it so much that I hide it in places he can't reach.

I also occasionally let him have cereal for lunch because I don't feel like making him real food.

[amy]

I occasionally read blogs while my 4 yo daughter pesters me to play with her.

Did I say "occasionally"? Right. "Occasionally."