Damien Galeone

Sunday is Mother’s Day. And if you didn’t know that, then you are not on Facebook or you are just a bad child. Anyway, most of you – hopefully – bought flowers, cooked dinners, made phone calls, or remembered that your mommy carried your lazy ass around for nine months, ruined her uterus bringing you into this world, and then put up with your shit for two decades.

Now, my mom rocks. She brought up four kids who have become somewhat reasonable adult human beings. She was a working mom, who cooked, cleaned, mediated, troubleshot, put out fires (sometimes literally) and yet didn’t once stab any of us. If you have met me or any of my siblings, you know that this last bit of restraint entitles my mom to breakfast in bed, a box of cookies, a Law and Order marathon, and a massage every day for the rest of her life.

No doubt your mom does too. Well, maybe not Law and Order, but you get the gist: our moms deserve a lot more than one day of recognition.

But that’s Sunday, what about Monday? Since Monday is the most-hated day of the week, I am assigning it Bad Mother’s Day, for those mothers throughout history who just shit the bed in one way or another.

Here are some bad mommies.

Katherine Knight is probably not as bad a mommy as she is a wife, but wow does she get points for originality. The Australian mother of two decided that she had had enough and so she killed her husband, decapitated him, made soup out of his head, baked his ass and served it to her kids for dinner.

Um. What?

Once, when I was a kid, I threw a fit after being served a bowl of soup with mushrooms in it. It did not contain my father’s head. And if I’d been told I had just eaten his ass, I’d have joined the circus and disappeared forever.

Throughout the middle of the 19th century Mary Ann Cotton had twelve children, every one of which she killed for insurance money by poisoning them with arsenic. Fortunately she was caught and hanged, though the fact that it took twelve kids for the police to figure out what was going on doesn’t exactly sing the praises of 19th century law enforcement.

They really shouldn’t have executed her, they should have forced her to work in a nursery for problem kids for the rest of her life.
Just lock up the medicine.

Jocasta is the less famous half of the Oedipus affair. Her whole life is like an episode of Jerry Springer. She conceived her son Oedipus during a drunken shag with her husband. And years later, after Oedipus killed his father, she married him and (presumably) shagged him too. When Oedipus figured out what had gone wrong – I mean not just wrong, but wrong wrong, like apocalyptically wrong – he ripped out his eyes and Jocasta hung herself.

Was Jocasta really the bad egg in all this? Well, that’s debatable. But she is one of the few (God willing) women in history who can compare her husband and her son’s bedroom skills. Plus, she’s a good part of the reason we have had the phrase Oedipus Complex shoved down our throats for the last two hundred years.

Oprah Winfrey is not a mother, but she is on this list. Why? Because she was a pain in my ass. Oprah is known for covering hard-hitting, sensitive, and sometimes taboo issues. Sometimes these issues dealt with some aspect of life in the average domicile. And that meant my mom, which in turn meant me.

Like any teenage boy, whenever my mom told me she wanted to talk, I groaned. Whenever she followed that up with “I was watching Oprah…” I wanted to jump out the window, because it was about to get Ben Stiller uncomfortable.

Highlights of these talks include:

Are you in a gang? (NB: I was nine years old and the only gang I knew of was the Shirt Tales)

You bought oregano, are you smoking pot?

Don’t strangle yourself when you jerk off. (I actually followed this advice…for the most part)

So, if you ever feel like giving your mom a hard time, just look at what she isn’t and be thankful. She never fed you your father’s ass, she never poisoned you, and she’s not Oprah Winfrey. You have nothing to complain about.

And if you have any oregano, stop by my place.

Any other bad moms out there?