Lewis says in an interview with NPR that "you do get to a place, or I have certainly, where I feel completely naturally in love with my children." But he also says that with his first child, "Before I felt the beginnings of real attachment it was probably six months and before I felt and manifested feelings that my wife recognized with approval, it was two years, maybe longer." He compares the sleep deprivation of his daughter's infancy to techniques used to torture terrorists, and says "the conditions she created in our house were like Guantanamo." He also sees the work-sharing arrangement of modern fatherhood as somewhat unfair, because men are expected to help out at home while women can opt out of work. As a 21st century father, he says, "you are left with all the responsibility your father had — the business end of the household — plus you have all this other stuff."

Of course, plenty of women aren't financially able to quit working when they have kids, and those who keep their jobs frequently find themselves doing the lion's (or lioness's) share of housework and child-rearing anyway. Working women still do almost twice as much childcare as men, and the idea that women have more attractive options for balancing work and family than men do is pretty ridiculous. But more upsetting than Lewis's nostalgia for a notional time when men just patted their kids on the head every night before Mommy put them to bed (his father boasts, "I didn't talk to you until you were 21") is Lewis's assumption that this nostalgia — and its attendant dissatisfaction with the work of fatherhood — is natural for men.

When Ayelet Waldman said she loved her husband more than her kids, she was pilloried as an unnatural and horrible mother. But although Lewis tells NPR that he worried about being perceived as a horrible person for admitting he didn't love his kids right away, criticism of his book has been more along the lines of, "he overestimates how funny kid stories are." Even in the age of Bad Mothers Anonymous, it's transgressive for moms to admit their parenting lapses, and normal for dads to.

Dads are still expected to be incompetent, confused schmoes, and Lewis just perpetuates this stereotype. He tells NPR that he is "hardwired to avoid unpleasant chores." He also says that in fatherhood, for "most men [...] the problem is a lack of natural emotional attachment." This language — the "hardwired," the generalization — underscores the essentialist attitude that still pervades modern discussions of parenting. Women are naturally nurturing, the argument goes, whereas men are natural slackers, at least at home, who need to be carefully domesticated in order to function as halfway-decent dads. This is the same argument, taken a little further, that keeps women from achieving parity in the workplace or reasonable childcare accommodations — really, they're meant to be at home, and anything else is some kind of advanced social cheat. Even Reuters's Mark Egan perpetuates this thinking, calling Lewis "an author best known for writing about more manly topics, such as business (The New New Thing) and baseball (Moneyball)" — as though parenting, even in a book about fatherhood, is a "womanly topic."

Lewis does seem to love his children, and he's not some Promise Keeper who wants his wife to stay home barefoot and pregnant all the time. But Double X's Stephen Metcalf has it right when he identifies a stark contrast between Lewis's book and Waldman's: "Apparently, moms complain and cry a lot. Dads go to the Princess Park and have fun." With dads like Lewis perpetuating the view that men naturally suck at parenting, it's no wonder moms are crying.

"Liar's Poker" author likens fatherhood to trading [Reuters]
Pssst: Author Wants Dads To Know The Real Poop [NPR]
Why Are Moms Such a Bummer? [Double X]
Home Game: An Accidental Guide To Fatherhood [Amazon]

Really, though, it's less "f&%k you" and more "go you," you being all the mothers out there who, like Waldman, aren't 100% perfect. Waldman (who, in case you didn't know, is married to novelist Michael Chabon) says herself that she's known for over-sharing — she once blogged about her risk of suicide, freaked out her son by discussing the blog post within his earshot, and then wrote a column about that experience. But in Bad Mother, with the exception of several digs at Gawker, she's on good behavior. "My children have given me permission to write this book," she writes — a relief to read, but also a kind of hedge. The book may be called Bad Mother, but Waldman really doesn't come off as all that bad.

The most interesting parts of the book are also the most heart-wrenching — Waldman's discussions of her bipolar disorder and of her abortion. She writes sensitively of her decision to continue taking antidepressants during her pregnancy with her youngest child, and of the difficulties other moms in her situation face:

It's hard enough to be pregnant or depressed, let alone both, without having to make sense of conflicting medical research and objectively evaluate the quality and seriousness of your own despair. Add to this the cacophony of condemnation from the Bad Mother police, damning you if you expose your baby to medication and if you don't, and the decision seems nearly overwhelming.

These nuanced words are a far cry from, say, the alarmist piece on antidepressants and pregnancy in last month's Vogue — or from the generally unhelpful public dialogue on the subject. Of her abortion — due to a fetal abnormality that could have caused physical problems or mental retardation — she writes that her "shame and anger" alienated the other members of her online support group. Called A Heartbreaking Choice, the group sometimes used the acronym AHC to denote the procedure that had ended their pregnancies. Waldman writes:

I made them uncomfortable — especially the many pro-life women among them — by insisting that we accept the term "abortion" for what we had done. There is no denying, I wrote in my posts, that this is what we did. We cannot hide from the fact that when Congress or the courts restrict abortion, we are the women they are talking about. [...] If we allow the language of the debate to encompass only the experience of those women who abort for what others like to call "convenience," and they themselves know as necessity, then we risk losing this precious right altogether.

Waldman is a conflicted mother, sometimes an exasperated mother, and, yes, a mother who happens to have mental illness. But the "maternal crimes" she mentions in the book's subtitle are all pretty small — she momentarily forgot her baby in an ice cream parlor, she sometimes argues with (and yes, fucks) her husband within earshot of her kids. When she took Celexa during her pregnancy, she was assured by a Swedish study that it was fine. The fact that she thinks these things warrant a visit from the Bad Mother police shows just how vigilant these police actually are — see for example the recent furor over Madlyn Primoff.

But the relative tameness of Waldman's anecdotes also shows that we may not be really ready for a truly honest mothering memoir. For one thing, confessing your darkest thoughts and feelings about motherhood — which Waldman doesn't actually seem to do in Bad Mother — can be harmful to your children. For another, the idea that mothers even have truly, deeply, dark and ambivalent feelings — or that mothers who are otherwise decent people may commit really upsetting lapses — is more than a lot of people can accept. It's still not particularly popular to admit that maternal behavior, like all human behavior, is more of a spectrum than a simple good-bad binary. In fact, one of the only places where it's easy to see this spectrum is the internet, where moms can remain nameless. On Bad Mothers Anonymous, one poster confessed this cute infraction:

My kids think their grandma is a witch. They were playing with her broom and I told them to stop. My son asked why? So I told him that was grandmas witch broom , and she rides it at night when everyone else is asleep.....Needless to say they never dis-obey her! LOLOLOLOL Grandma didn;t appreciate it much cause the kids still believe it..lol

Another wrote:

Im just really mean to my kids cant stop yelling at them and i just dont know how to change i wanna be a good mom just dont know how to be I didnt have one.

When everything from innocent white lies to heart-wrenching family conflict makes you a Bad Mother, maybe it's time to retire the term — and to find a way to help moms and kids that doesn't involve so much value judgment.

Bad Mother [Amazon]
Living out loud — online [Salon]
Bad Mothers Anonymous [Official Site]
I'm Tempted To Take Up Mountain Climbinb. [Bad Mother]

Related: Ayelet Waldman: Bad Mother, Good Husband-Banger

The book is called Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak by Writers Famous & Obscure, and it includes such gems as "My life's accomplishments? Sanity, and you" (Elizabeth Gilbert), and "It's just a matter of luck" (Ayelet Waldman). What do you think: six word fad — cute or over? [USA Today]

For those of you unfamiliar with her work, Ayelet Waldman is the wife of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, and was famously excoriated by the blogosphere and Oprah when she wrote a Modern Love about how she loves her husband more than she loves her children. Today, she is ostensibly writing about Abraham Briggs, the bipolar teen who broadcast his suicide online, but actually she's writing about her own experience with admitting suicidal thoughts on the net.

Like Mr. Briggs, I suffer from bipolar disorder, but while his online "community" failed to act to save his life, my own stepped in to save mine. A few years ago, I kept a blog called "Bad Mother," on which I pontificated about issues as diverse as the inequities in the federal sentencing guidelines and the pink catastrophe of my 4-year-old daughter's bedroom. One night, alone in the house with my children, and in the throes of the worst depression of my life, I wrote on my blog, "It does not help to know that one's mood is a mystery of neurochemistry when one is tallying the contents of the medicine cabinet and evaluating the neurotoxic effects of a Tylenol, Topomax, SRRI and Ambien cocktail." Within hours of my scary blog post, a woman whom I'd met and become friends with online read it, called me and refused to hang up until I telephoned my psychiatrist. I have no way of knowing whether, without that phone call and without the dozens of supportive comments that soon afterward began to pop up on the blog, I would have followed through on my implied threat, but when my cyberfriend called, I was holding enough pills to kill myself.

It's wonderful that Waldman got the help she needed, and of course, destigmatizing mental illness is incredibly important. But I can't imagine what it would feel like to be her child and read, in real time, about how my mother was trying to kill herself. Which brings me to Margaret Robison, the mother of Augusten Burroughs, who has written extensively of Robinson's many suicide attempts. And whaddya know? According to the Observer, she's shopping a memoir. Robison says that she doesn't hold Burroughs's book against him, but that she has quibbles with some of his accounts of his harrowing childhood.

Mary Karr's account of her mentally ill mother and dysfunctional Texas childhood, The Liar's Club, is one of the best memoirs of the past quarter century, and it would be a literary tragedy if she had not written it for fear of hurting her family. But when does airing familial dirty laundry cross the line between art and mass destruction?

My Online Community Saved My Life [NPR]
Augusten Burroughs' Mother Margaret Robison Shopping A Memoir [Observer]