My teenage daughter handed me a wrapped book on Christmas morning with a smirk that should’ve been a warning.
“You’ll like this one, Mom.” Was all she said. And in teenager talk, that must mean: “This is about to roast you, and I’m here for it.”
She was right. Glenn Boozan’s “There Are Moms Way Worse Than You” became my favorite thing all holidays. I spent Boxing Day on the couch in my rattiest pajamas, leftover pie crumbs on my shirt, absolutely howling. My husband walked by twice asking if I was having a breakdown.
I wasn’t. I was reading about the quokka.
You know the quokka? That impossibly cute Australian marsupial that looks like it’s permanently smiling? The one that shows up on Instagram looking like a living stuffed animal? Yeah. When a predator comes, mama quokka will chuck her baby directly at it and run for her life.
Not metaphorically. LITERALLY. Just full-on yeets her infant like a distraction grenade “Here, eat this instead!” and bounces off into the sunset.
I read this out loud to my daughter, who was watching me with immense satisfaction.
“See?” she said. “You’re really not that bad.”
Thanks, sweetheart. What a touching Christmas moment.
But here’s the thing – she’s right. This whole book is just page after page of nature’s worst mothers making you feel like Parent of the Year by comparison. Boozan pairs these adorable illustrations with the most unhinged parenting in the animal kingdom, and it’s exactly what every exhausted mother needs.
The cuckoo bird? Doesn’t even raise her own kids. Just lays her eggs in some other bird’s nest like depositing a baby at a stranger’s doorstep and vanishes forever. Some poor confused sparrow wakes up one morning with this massive cuckoo chick screaming for food, twice her size, and cuckoo mom is halfway to Ibiza.
The panda? Sometimes has twins and just… picks one. Straight up chooses her favorite and pretends the other one doesn’t exist. “Sorry, Baby #2, I’m only doing one of you. Work it out.”
And the hamster? Oh, the hamster. THE HAMSTER EATS HER BABIES. When she’s stressed. Just casually munches on her offspring like they’re trail mix.
Boozan’s writing is so perfectly deadpan it makes everything funnier. She describes these maternal horror shows with the cheerful energy of someone narrating a baking competition:
“The black eagle gives birth to two chicks and calmly watches them fight to the death! Could she stop it? Sure! Does she? Absolutely not! You got annoyed about wet towels on the floor? GOLD STAR FOR YOU.”
“The harp seal nurses her pup for exactly twelve days, then wanders off and never comes back. No forwarding address. No ‘love you, stay in school.’ Just peaces out completely. Meanwhile you’re over here cutting sandwiches into fun shapes and wondering if it’s enough. IT IS.”
And Priscilla Witte’s illustrations; oh my god! These animals are drawn SO CUTE, which somehow makes their terrible parenting even more devastating. Sweet little bunnies with captions like “Eats babies when mildly inconvenienced.” Elegant octopuses with “Dies immediately after giving birth, offers zero childcare.”
I lost it at the octopus. Just fully dies the second her eggs hatch and leaves them completely orphaned from birth. Doesn’t even stick around long enough to say “good luck out there.”
I showed my husband that page and said, “I MADE IT THROUGH THE NEWBORN PHASE WITHOUT DYING. WHERE’S MY MEDAL?”
By the end of the holidays, I’d read sections out loud to basically everyone who came over. My sister. My mom. The neighbor who dropped off cookies. Everyone needed to know about the quokka.
Because here’s what this book actually is: it’s permission. Permission to stop drowning in guilt over things that don’t matter. Permission to be imperfect and human and occasionally very, very tired of small people asking you where their shoes are when you JUST watched them put them on.
You’re not a bad mom because you hid in the bathroom for five minutes of peace. You’re not failing because you bribed them with screen time to get through the grocery store. You’re not inadequate because sometimes you fantasize about a hotel room, alone, with nobody asking you for snacks.