Welcome to bad-mom culture, in which women don't just own up to their maternal shortcomings -- they flaunt them. Moms have been publicly admitting to their mixed feelings about motherhood at least since 1976, when Adrienne Rich compared herself to a monster in the feminist classic Of Woman Born. Erma Bombeck and Roseanne Barr made high-profile careers out of their domestic naughtiness -- Bombeck as a columnist in the 1970s and 1980s, Barr with her TV sitcom in the 1990s. The "momoir" genre took off in 1994 after Anne Lamott published Operating Instructions, a diary of her parenting mistakes and triumphs during her son's first year. But with the advent of confessional culture and the ascension of blogs and virtual message boards, bad-mom culture and its gleeful impropriety have flourished.
The new mommies
Or, perhaps, we're simply understanding the old kind much better.