Noelle McCarthy: Parents' self-indulgent guilt wears thin

I've been thinking about bad parents this week. Aren't we all, says you?

It's true, we spend a lot of time keening and hand wringing over the desperate shame of child abuse in New Zealand. And rightly so.

It is a great shame to fail at being a country where children can grow up happy and cared for, and above all, safe from harm. But it's not so much the neglect, violence or child poverty we hear about endlessly, that is depressingly occupying me at present. Being a reader of websites like slate.com, salon.com and motherjones.com I end up spending a lot of time thinking about the cares and concerns of the American liberal intelligentsia. I suppose whether this is a good or bad thing depends on how seriously you take the cares and concerns of the American liberal intelligentsia. But that's another column.

For better or worse, my taste is such that I read about these people every day, which is how I came across the first "Bad Mommy" memoirs a few years ago.

You'll be familiar with them by now. Tell-alls about the brutishness of parenting by the likes of Heather Armstrong , author of It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margharita.

Heather writes about how bringing the miracle of new life into the world wasn't all that, really. How having a baby brought with it boredom, frustration, anger, and above all, guilt.

Now there are all manner of bad parent websites where mommies and daddies can get together to spill, share and kvetch about the myriad of anxieties that come with becoming a parent.

Ayelet Waldman is the latest Bad Mommy to hit the scene and she's been copping quite a kicking on snarky blogs like gawker.com for her columns about motherhood on salon.com and in the New York Times.

In fairness, Ayelet doesn't do much to endear herself to her audience. Her columns largely consist of banging on about how hot her husband is and how bad she feels about loving him more than their four children.

Now Ayelet's husband is the author Michael Chabon, and he is in fact, very hot indeed, but I'm not sure the self-recrimination she expresses is anything new.

The guilt and the doubt that these Bad Mommies (and Daddies) feel about everything from husband versus baby love to breast versus bottle is rampant.

I know nothing first hand about babies. Regular readers of this column will probably conclude that is a very good thing.

Presently, I am wholly unfit to look after another human being. I can't even go to the supermarket or pick up dry-cleaning on time. If, God forbid, I ever had a baby, I'd probably hide it under the bed.

But several of my friends have become parents over the past 18 months and from what I can see, they've also become instant jugglers, acrobats and magicians.

They're pulling rabbits out of hats left right and centre as they move it, shake it and timetable it trying to keep all the balls in the air.

And they are doing beautifully. Well, from what I can see anyway, but what would I know? They could be damaging their children irreparably by failing at sleep training or not weaning them on quinoa and I wouldn't notice.

What I do know though, is that all of them have made a fundamental adjustment in their priorities to accommodate the needs and wants of their babies.

That must come with a cost and for some it's an easier transition than for others.

Some don't seem to feel the change so much and others need to think about it a bit more, hold on to their old selves on occasion.

You can be a friend to both sorts, it's just the difference between having a sneaky fag and a glass of wine with them on a school night or coming round for bath time every so often.

I am uniformly proud of my friends and what they're doing though.

Undertaking parenthood might be the most natural thing in the world, but it is also the most momentous thing.

I think the truth is, probably, that no one is ready for it, apart from mad women who pick out baby names and have creepy "Hope Chests" from the age of 12.

My friends weren't ready, in the main, but they're getting on with it, and doing just fine. So I think Ayelet and her fellow Bad Mommies should probably give it a rest and cut themselves some slack. Besides, the genre is getting a bit old now.

Maybe they could stop writing about baby guilt and find a new direction?

In Ayelet's case, the trials and tribulations of sex with a hot writer might be a good place to start.

I'd sign up for an RSS feed for that in a heartbeat.