I Don't Think My Readers Are Bad Mothers

I wanted to tell you three stories from my childhood to reiterate that I don't think a person is a bad parent just because he or she makes a mistake. My parents were great parents, but they most certainly made mistakes. We love to tell the first two stories to make fun of my dad; he gets pissy when we do.

Story #1: Before I was a year old, my dad was giving me a bath. The phone rang and he went into their bedroom to answer the phone, leaving me in the tub (considering we had a rotary phone until the mid '90s and my parents still don't have call waiting, there's no way we had a cordless phone in the early '80s). It was my grandmother on the phone and after talking to my dad for a little while, she asked where I was. He told her I was in the tub and she explained to him in her admonishing yet polite southern belle way that you can't leave a baby in the tub unattended.

Story #2: This happened during the summer of '81 so I couldn't have been more than 3 months old. My mom wasn't home, I was taking a nap, and my dad was painting the front door of the house. One of his friends called because his car had broken down. My dad didn't want to wake me up, so he left me home alone to pick up his friend, and because the door was still wet, he had to leave it hanging open.

Story #3: My family went out to eat at a pizza place. The next morning I woke up crying, but my mom ignored me because she didn't want to get up. When she finally came to get me my face was covered in dried pizza vomit.

So you see, despite those things and also playing with mercury from a broken thermometer, having my mother smoke the whole way through pregnancy and in the car on trips, getting cookies for breakfast because I wouldn't eat breakfast food, being placed on the top of the refrigerator by my dad more times than I can count, having my first cigarette in 5th grade because my mom never bothered to hide hers, knowing and liking what gin and tonics tasted like at a young age, and having my grandma pull a Britney Spears and hold me on her lap in their truck (my mom protested that but my grandma told her she'd hold on to me if they got in an accident), I'm still alive.

But, unlike Mrs. Federline, if my mom had been drunkenly carrying me and a glass of booze, she would have dropped the glass before she dropped me.