Quotes & Sayings About Bad Mothers

Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins. — Erma Bombeck

A mother is the one who fills your heart in the first place. She teaches you the nature of happiness: what is the right amount, what is too much, and the kind that makes you want more of what is bad for you. A mother helps her baby flex her first feelings of pleasure. She teaches her when to later exercise restraint, or to take squealing joy in recognizing the fluttering leaves of the gingko tree, to sense a quieter but more profound satisfaction in chancing upon an everlasting pine. A mother enables you to realize that there are different levels of beauty and therein lie the sources of pleasure, some of which are popular and ordinary, and thus of brief value, and others of which are difficult and rare, and hence worth pursuing. — Amy Tan

"Fun?" you ask. "Weren't feminists these grim-faced, humorless, antifamily, karate-chopping ninjas who were bitter because they couldn't get a man?" Well, in fact the problem was that all too many of them HAD gotten a man, married him, had his kids, and then discovered that, as mothers, they were never supposed to have their own money, their own identity, their own aspirations, time to pee, or a brain. And yes, some women indeed became bad-tempered as a result. After all, no anger, no social change. — Susan J. Douglas

It's true, Christmas can feel like a lot of work, particularly for mothers. But when you look back on all the Christmases in your life, you'll find you've created family traditions and lasting memories. Those memories, good and bad, are really what help to keep a family together over the long haul. — Caroline Kennedy

Your father doesn't like me," Charley said to Wesley later when Wesley had gotten them away from the crowd.
"Father doesn't seem to like anyone," Wesley said. "Don't let it worry you."
"But you brought me to his house. I don't like to be in the home of someone who doesn't like me."
"But my brother Skylar claims it is his home, and I believe that Skylar does like you," Wesley said. "He's Indian like you."
"Yes. We are both Cherokees. What is Skylar's clan?"
"I believe I've heard him say that it's Wolf."
"Then we are related. I'm Wolf clan."
"That's amazing, Charley. So you and my brother are related. Does that make us related too?"
"I don't think so, Wesley, because the relationship is through our mothers."
"Well, that's too bad. I would like to be your brother. — Robert J. Conley

Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women, with their little hats and their clippings, hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience. The — John Steinbeck

Good wombs have borne bad sons."
-- (Miranda, I:2) — William Shakespeare

Mothers and daughters share a special bond." "I never knew how special until it wasn't there anymore. I'm twenty-seven, and when something good or bad happens in my life, I still wonder what my mom would think. I've lived more of my life without her than with her, but it still matters. — Barbara Freethy

Admitting that this job isn't always easy doesn't make somebody a bad mother. At least, it shouldn't. We're all on this ride together. We are not the first ones to ever accidentally tell our children to shut up, or wonder - just for a moment - what it would be like if we'd never had children. We aren't the first mothers to feel overwhelmed and challenged and not entirely fulfilled by motherhood. And we certainly won't be the last. Nothing can be lost by admitting our weaknesses and imperfections to one another. In fact, quite the opposite is true. We will be better mothers, better wives, and better women if we are able to finally drop the act and get real. Who are we pretending for, anyway? — Jill Smokler

Good mothers make all kinds of choices. Making a decision that might sound selfish does not make a woman a bad mother. — Jada Pinkett Smith

The more famous an actress becomes, the less she's allowed to eat. Unless she wants to play people's mothers. And in bad clothes, yet. — Lana Turner

Because the uncomfortable truth is that no one is all bad, or all good. Not mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, or husbands and wives. Life would be much easier if that were the case. Instead, everyone - Charlotte, Willow, Mr. Rigg, even Sister Briganti - was a confusing mixture of love and hate, joy and sorrow, longing and forgetting, misguided truth and painful deception. — Jamie Ford

Tabloid discussion of bad children always blames baby-boomer liberals, careerist mothers and fashion-crazed Nathan Barley types who think it's all enormously funny. But the centre-leftish psycho-thinker Oliver James says it's all down to the Thatcher-and-after culture of turbo-capitalism, making people acquisitive and unsatisfied. — Peter York

In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones. — Louis De Bernieres

Usually bullies have severe mothers and bad fathers, and they are usually frightened of them. That is why they are bullies, I think. There is something wrong at home. I have found that with children in general and this applies to men as well. — Alexander McCall Smith

He gave her a slow but somehow very naughty smile. Only very bad girls lie to their mothers. — Shannon Stacey

Skip ahead," Georgie said. Petunia was wet and splotched with blood. The thing in her mouth was moving. Oh, God, she's eating it. "She's eating the puppies!" Heather shrieked. She was leaning behind Georgie holding a stack of towels and three bottled waters. "She's not eating it," pizza girl said, putting her hand on Heather's arm. She held up her phone so they both could see. "It's in its sac. They're born in sacs, and the mom chews them out. It's a good sign that she's chewing them free. It says that pugs are notoriously bad mothers. If she didn't do it, we'd have to." "We'd have to chew them out?" Georgie asked. — Rainbow Rowell

They hate me because I am the worst thing possible. I am the bad mother.

But here's a secret: in America there are no good mothers. They simply don't exist. Always, there are a thousand ways to fail at this singularly important job. There are failures of the body and failures of the heart. The woman who is unable to breastfeed is a failure. The woman who screams for the epidural is a failure. The woman who picks up her child late knows from the teacher's cutting glance that she is a failure. The woman who shares her bed with her baby has failed. The woman who steels herself and puts on noise-canceling earphones to erase the screaming of her child the next room has failed just as spectacularly. They must all hang their heads in guilt and shame because they haven't done it perfectly, and motherhood is, if anything, the assumption of perfection. — Nayomi Munaweera

I'm a mother myself, and sometimes mothers get a bad rap just because they've tried to do their job. Some people have more of a knack for it than others do, but almost all of it falls to, 'My mother's suffocating me.' Whatever. — Annie Potts

The words written down are dirty, carefully and selectedly filthy. But there was something far worse here than dirt, a kind of frightening witches' Sabbath. Here was no spontaneous cry of anger, of insane rage. Perhaps that is what made me sick with weary nausea. Here was no principle good or bad, no direction. These blowzy women, with their little hats and their clippings, hungered for attention. They wanted to be admired. They simpered in happy, almost innocent triumph when they were applauded. Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness much more heart-breaking. These were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience. — John Steinbeck

Ideas about mothers have swung historically with the roles of women. When women were needed to work the fields or shops, experts claimed that children didn't need them much. Mothers, who might be too soft and sentimental, could even be bad for children's character development. But when men left home during the Industrial Revolution to work elsewhere, women were "needed" at home. The cult of domesticity and motherhood became a virtue that kept women in their place. — Sandra Scarr

Xenia was still laughing at us when her brother walked over. "Georgi, do you remember when Katerina Alexandrovna and Dariya Yevgenienva brought the kitten to the ball?"
I hadn't noticed the grand duke approaching. Dariya curtsied prettily. "Katiya's mother wouldn't let us play together anymore after that."
"I thought your mother disallowed it," I said, surprised.
"Both mothers were very wise," George Alexandrovich said, his lips pressed tightly together, almost as if he was trying not to smile. "You two are an extremely dangerous duo."
"Nonsense." Dariya smiled. "Nothing bad has happened tonight."
The grand duke was looking straight at me when he said, "But the night is young. — Robin Bridges

You need to try to find a way to humanize your villains. Genuine villains, in real life, still have mothers and daughters and sisters, and they fall in love. They don't walk around with a big sign saying, "Bad guy," on their head. They think they're good guys. If you can play that, I think it makes it more interesting. — Mark Strong

The majority of women in Welmont with children Charlie's age never miss a soccer game and don't earn special good mother status for being there. This is simply what good mothers do. These same mothers herald it an exceptional event if any of the dads leave the office early to catch a game. The fathers cheering on the sidelines are upheld as great dads. Fathers who miss the games are working. Mothers who miss the games, like me, are bad mothers. — Lisa Genova

Mothers are great. They outlast everything. But when they're bad, they're the worst thing that can happen. — Carrie Fisher

He's got the whole bad-boy-in-need-of-redemption thing going on, but the catch is, most bad boys don't want redemption. They like being bad. They like the power they get from striking fear and panic into the hearts of mothers everywhere — Becca Fitzpatrick

I find that the 'moms club' is a very, very exclusive club! It's the club of mothers who wear skinny jeans and white button-down shirts and wash their hair twice a day! I do not, and mothers who do make me feel really bad. You know who I am talking about! — Marissa Jaret Winokur

Many mothers make the mistake of forever looking for the bad in the child, trying to ... uproot and drive it out. This is like trying to eject the darkness from a room without opening the shutters and letting in the light. As John Newton said, 'I cannot sweep the darkness out, but I can shine it out.' — Orison Swett Marden

I think it's bad for fellas when they lose their mothers. Mine was such a character. Oh it was sad, really sad. And, with her gone, the family home was gone, so what was left of any roots I had were completely dug up. — Paul O'Grady

One of the darkest, deepest shames so many of us mothers feel nowadays is our fear that we are Bad Mothers, that we are failing our children and falling far short of our own ideals. — Ayelet Waldman

Mothers are likely to have more bad days on the job than most other professionals, considering the hours: round-the-clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year ... You go to work when you're sick, maybe even clinically depressed, because motherhood is perhaps the only unpaid position where failure to show up can result in arrest. — Mary Blakely

The way Hollywood portrays mothers - you're either all good and saint-like, or you're all bad. And I think the real honesty of motherhood is not given a voice in movies. I miss that as an audience member. — Ellen Barkin

Mothers seem to have an infinite capacity to withstand hurt from their children. All they see is their pain and I think they feel responsible for it, as if it is their fault that the child in question is feeling so bad and acting so selfishly -- and thus the very least they can do is take it. — Belinda Jones

There appears to be a disturbing trend in this nation to try to force single moms to choose between their children and their careers. If they take their careers seriously, they are labeled as bad mothers. If they spend time with their children, they are labeled as people who can't be serious about careers outside the home. This is a sexist double standard. No such guilt trip is imposed on men, who are generally not forced to choose between their children and their jobs. — Gloria Allred

I'm going to be in a better place. I'm going to see Daddy. But you are going to help people. You are the helper, Sophelia, the one who will take all the bad and ugly and make it what it was supposed to be in the first place. You will bring this world to its knees one day." I opened my mouth to say ... something. "I - " "One day you'll get to fly, Soph, just like Pan and Wendy. Fly away home to a better place where everything is brighter, boys are never lost, and mothers don't ever leave. But right now? Don't mourn me," she whispered. "I love you and I planned this. All is as it should be. One day, you will understand. — Shelly Crane

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers. — Joyce Cary

The right wing of the Republican party
which controlled the White House from 1980 to 1992, crucial years in the evolution of motherhood
hated the women's movement and believed all women, with the possible exception of Phyllis Schlafly, should remain in the kitchen on their knees polishing their husband's shoes and golf clubs while teaching their kids that Darwin was a very bad man. Unless the mothers were poor and black
those moms had to get back to work ASAP, because by staying home they were wrecking the country. — Susan Douglas

Alice wondered if her mother was aware that she wasn't the only one in town who'd come down with a bad case of Blueberry Fever. — Sarah Weeks

She told me that women who wore makeup had bad values. Putting on makeup would have been a statement - a rebellion. I didn't try it. I grew to feel guilty for wanting to feel attractive. — Aspen Matis

I do so love my witches and wicked queens. I find myself drawn to feminine archetypes that previous generations have found threatening or dangerous: crones, oracles, madwomen, Amazons, virgins who aren't helpless, bad mothers. I love to give the vagina dentata voice. It so rarely gets to speak for itself. — Catherynne M Valente

Unpleasant questions are being raised about Mother's Day. Is this day necessary? ... Isn't it bad public policy? ... No politician with half his senses, which a majority of politicians have, is likely to vote for its abolition, however. As a class, mothers are tender and loving, but as a voting bloc they would not hesitate for an instant to pull the seat out from under any Congressman who suggests that Mother is not entitled to a box of chocolates each year in the middle of May. — Russell Baker

Most sexism is down to men being accustomed to us being the losers. That's what the problem is. We just have bad status. Man are accustomed to us being runners-up or being disqualified entirely. For men born pre-feminism, this is what they were raised on: second-class citizen mothers; sisters who need to be married off; female schoolmates going to secretarial school, then becoming housewives. Women who disengaged. Disappeared. — Caitlin Moran

Because life is robust,
Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism,
Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it,
So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back the commons,
O you dark pools of money and law and quantitudinal stupidity, you oversimple algorithms of greed, you desperate simpletons hoping for a story you can understand,
Hoping for safety, hoping for cessation of uncertainty, hoping for ownership of volatility, O you poor fearful jerks,
Life! Life! Life! Life is going to kick your ass. — Kim Stanley Robinson

So the real question for me as an educator is, if I go out and tell people that I think they are eating too much sugar, if I go out and tell mothers I think they should stop their kids from eating so much sugar because it is bad for them, am I going to get flak from the scientists? Or am I going to be allowed to make that statement without travail, on the grounds that even though we do not have hard evidence to link sugar with a specific disease, we do know that a dietary pattern containing considerably less sugar, in which sugar is replaced by a complex carbohydrate, would be a much healthier diet? JOAN GUSSOW, chairman, Columbia University nutrition department, 1975 I — Gary Taubes

Of course she's right. How bad are things when your clinically insane mother is more rational than you are? — Susan Ee

In my experience, Marines are gung ho no matter what. They will all fight to the death. Everyone of them just wants to get out there and kill. They are bad-ass, hard-charging mothers. — Chris Kyle

It took me years to stop feeling the guilt she made sure I kept feeling about what happened with him. He is a sick person that molests children, but I felt so bad about it for so long. I couldn't talk to a single person about any of this. No one. And she made me feel so bad about it all that I felt I shouldn't talk about it, even if there was someone. I felt ashamed and thought I was an awful person. Sometimes I still do. My mother abandoned me in the worst ways possible. — Ashly Lorenzana

When mothers warn their daughters about all the cold nasty men out there who will only break their tender little hearts, I'm the one they've got in mind because I'm the one who broke their hearts when their mothers were warning them. — Nenia Campbell

I think there's a tremendous amount of guilt that goes on between mothers and daughters, no matter how good or bad their relationships are. — Ellen Page

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior. — Anne Lamott

I don't know when love became elusive
what i know, is that no one i know has it
my fathers arms around my mothers neck
fruit too ripe to eat, a door half way open
when your name is a just a hand i can never hold
everything i have ever believed in, becomes magic.
i think of lovers as trees, growing to and
from one another searching for the same light,
my mothers laughter in a dark room,
a photograph greying under my touch,
this is all i know how to do, carry loss around until
i begin to resemble every bad memory,
every terrible fear,
every nightmare anyone has ever had.
i ask did you ever love me?
you say of course, of course so quickly
that you sound like someone else
i ask are you made of steel? are you made of iron?
you cry on the phone, my stomach hurts
i let you leave, i need someone who knows how to stay. — Warsan Shire

In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country. — Diana Trilling

what's really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it's a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening. — Judith Warner

I've grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains - good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn't necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn't qualify either). I'm talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don't tell me you don't know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves - to the point of almost parodic encouragement - we've left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids. — Gillian Flynn

As I believe I have said, everyone in prison is an innocent man. Oh, they read the scripture the way those holy rollers on TV read the Book of Revelations. They were the victims of judges with hearts of stone and balls to match, or incompetent lawyers, or police frame-ups, or bad luck. They read the scripture, but you can see a different scripture in their faces. Most cons are a low sort, no good to themselves or anyone else, and their worst luck was that their mothers carried them to term. — Stephen King

Images of African Americans as bad mothers, ineffective mothers, and matriarchs...conceal and justify the difficult conditions in which they work and raise children. But oddly enough, these same women, who are said to run amok in their own communities, are thought to be entirely competent at parenting the children of the elite-as mammies during slavery, as domestic workers during segregation, or as child care workers today. — Leith Mullings

However,
when given the chance, many people choose cocaine over love. I wouldn't say that's a
bad choice. The endorphins released during infatuation are similar to heroin. OxyContin,
"the cuddling hormone," most often found in new mothers and newlyweds, is like ecstasy;
every touch tingles. I think I read that somewhere. Love exists in powder. Love exists in
pills. We are all addicts. — Pete Wentz

Some people aren't great with babies, or they're not great with a smaller child - it's not that they're bad mothers. — Cara Buono

It's interesting that people always want to ask me and a lot of working mothers, how do you do it? And it's like well, just like everybody else. It proves it's a bad question. — Amy Poehler

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. Quite true. And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up? We cannot. Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. — Plato

'I am a bad mother.' Every Christmas, this is what I think because the holiday season fills me with such anxiety. I'm sure that other mothers are happily baking cookies, decorating trees, and finding perfect gifts for everyone. — Tess Gerritsen