The Inept Mother

By Kris Williams

A full-time working moms journey through life with kids, managing relationships and other random shit. This is an attempt to show what's behind the filter and the captioned stories. Where we try to get to the bottom of why moms feel so f*cking inept. If cursing is your love language, mom-guilt is your reality, and you find yourself at times comp

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kristin Williams
• Release date: Jun 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986382708

Kris Williams

Kris Williams is an author who first dipped her toes into the non-fiction world, but also writes fiction. She grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and now raises her daughters there alongside her husband.

Book preview

Preface

I’m going to make one thing clear: I love being a mother. I’ve dreamed of being a mom as long as I can remember. I wanted to fall in love, get married, and have babies! It didn’t have to be in that order—although it did happen that way. I constantly daydreamed of my future husband and our life together. I took French class in high school because I envisioned my future husband might be a French Canadian, who loved to vacation on the shores of my favorite beaches in Maine. Turns out, he was not that fantasy character. My actual husband grew up a few towns away from me.

Regardless, being a mother was my one absolute in life. I met my husband when he was seventeen and I was twenty. In 2013, we made it legal and had a big shindig, which is still to this day one of the best parties I’ve ever been to. The day we got home from our honeymoon, we adopted a dog. Two months later I became pregnant. In 2014, we welcomed our first daughter—we now have three—and that, my friends, is when I learned the glorious truth about being a mother. While it is my most rewarding life accomplishment, it has been and still is so fucking hard.

Some of these chapters are long, some are short, and some are in between, which I feel is a pretty accurate description of what parenthood feels like when you’re trying to figure it out. Nothing is approached the same way twice.

The Inept Mother is me extending an olive branch to all the weary, frustrated, and fake-it-till-you-make-it moms trying to do their best and feeling disappointed in what they see. Envision my hand reaching out to yours, a parlay—if you’re into pirate code. This book provides a soft place to land, a sympathetic voice of camaraderie for those times you are overly critical of yourself for not being perfect. There is no perfect. There is only your best. No one was honest with us! Let’s face it: motherhood is much harder than any of us imagined.

Welcome! We have plenty of room at our table.

1

Chapter 1 - Badass Superheroes . . . Who Are Only Sometimes Bad

In my defense, she was wearing a float.

Let me confess . . . I nudged (pushed) my kid into the pool.

It genuinely sounds as bad as it felt for me at the time. I was also thirty-four weeks and four days pregnant with my third daughter—god bless her little wildfire heart—and my hormonal balance was not exactly stable.

She had been attending swimming lessons, and today we had to practice. So for forty minutes, she jumped into the pool toward the safely of my waiting arms. She was so excited to show Daddy. Except Daddy took a solid hour to come outside and swim with us while he finished up working beyond when he should have. When she wouldn’t jump for Daddy, my frustration got the best of me. The combination of her not showing him and me thinking, If he would just come out of the house and be the kid’s dad for a goddamn second instead of working after-hours at home after just returning from a work event, leaving me to take care of the kids solo for a whole day and evening! was the perfect storm to create the perfect shitshow. I most definitely pushed her too hard while trying to encourage her: See? You did it! It’s not that bad. Which is what we did while she was jumping toward me. That did not happen though. She cried. Then I cried and screamed, I’m tired of my entire family acting miserable when all of you get every single thing you want!

I got her out of the pool, dried her off, and sent her into the house with her older sister to get changed. I tried