The Bad Mother

The Bad Mother
Esther Walker

A hilariously honest, and rather sweary, book about parenting from the author of The Bad Cook.From play dates to potty training, from weening to whining or whether to have two, or three, or more! Esther Walker focuses her unique humour on the art of parenting.Fans of Esther’s blog and journalism, or her bestselling Bad Cook book, will not be disappointed. This is every bit as funny, sweary and just plain honest as you would expect.Esther offers up her occasional successes and many failures as examples to parents everywhere: look, this is what happens, you’ll just have to deal with it!Harassed mums and dads will read this and smile, as well as sighing with ‘it isn’t just me’ relief.

THE BAD MOTHER

Esther Walker

Copyright (#u3a374917-23c4-5987-abe8-264086c1b025)

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

This edition published by The Friday Project 2015

Copyright © Esther Walker

Esther Walker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007524747

Version: 2014-12-11

Dedication (#u3a374917-23c4-5987-abe8-264086c1b025)

For Mamgu

Contents

Cover (#u97735979-9af4-54aa-a250-89f9bae5e6a9)

Title Page (#uc68ae813-eb13-55c6-ba0b-93ac975716f3)

Copyright

Dedication

Intro

Sleep

Eat

Play

Routine

Sick

HELP

Sun

Us

Two

Poo

Motherfucker

Three?

Light

Temper

You

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Intro (#u3a374917-23c4-5987-abe8-264086c1b025)

Of course I’m not a bad mother. Neither are you. I’d go so far as to say that there is no such thing as a bad mother. Sure, there is lazy, neglectful, idiotic and wrong parenting, but that doesn’t make you a bad mother. If you psychologically torture, beat or starve your children, that makes you a criminal – being a bad mother doesn’t really come into it.

But it has become fashionable recently to put a hand to your forehead and declare, ‘Oh God, I am such a bad mother.’

I never say this. I do not think I am a ‘bad’ mother, or really a ‘good’ mother. I try not to think about it in those quantifiable terms because it would probably send me crazy. I am a mother to my children and that is that. Sometimes I exercise good parenting and sometimes I exercise poor parenting, in the same way that sometimes my house is clean and sometimes it is a horrible dump, sometimes I do a really good piece of work and sometimes I file a load of old shit and hope my editor doesn’t notice.

You need to know more about me.

When I was eight, my little sister was born. There were no sisters in between me and her. There were two sisters above me, then nothing for a long time, and then a baby.

My mother was forty-nine. I didn’t have any sense at the time of what that meant, beyond the fact that everyone made a huge deal out of it, but knowing what I know now, it seems a perfectly insane and demented thing to do – to have a baby when you are nearly fifty.