Movies with really, really bad moms that make us feel good about our less than perfekt parenting skills.  

It’s been a while since I posted one of these but if you recall this is where I list movies featuring mommies in movies who are SOOO BAD, that they make us look like the Mother Teresas of mommydom. Cuz no matter how sucky we think we are, we can NEVER be as bad as these moms. Hence, the VINDICATION!

 

PRECIOUS – This movie about a horribly abused, obese, teenaged black girl from the slums named Precious, features a mom (played by Mo’Nique) who is soooooooooo bad that well, I’m not sure if she makes me feel better about myself as a mommy or worse about myself as a human being because I actually belong to the same species as her. This mommy allows her husband to start sexually abusing their daughter when she is only 3. And instead of feeling sorry for or helping the child, she grows jealous and resentful of her. Know why? Because over the years the dad actually prefers sex with his daughter than his wife. Lovely. And as a result, he gives his daughter two babies (one with Down’s Syndrome) and also infects her with AIDS. The mom grows increasingly resentful of her Precious and treats her like a slave. She is verbally abusive, beats her and in an attempt to make Precious less appealing to her father, the mom forces Precious to overeat so she becomes hugely obese.  To keep her welfare checks coming, the mom pretends to be caring for Precious’ Down’s Syndrome daughter when in reality the child is being cared for by her grandmother. And when Precious comes home from the hospital with her second baby from her father, her mother throws the baby across the room and then tries to kill Precious and the baby by throwing her TV down the stairwell at them. And yet this is supposed to be a feel-good film because Precious is a survivor. I dunno. But after this movie all I wanted to do was close my eyes, click my heels and get the hell home. Even Mariah Carey playing a counselor in a bad wig couldn’t take the edge off for me.

I think you’d have to feel like you screwed up pretty bad as a mom for this movie to make you feel good in any way. But if you’ve done something THAT bad, like forgotten your kid’s birthday or purchased straight-up corn flakes instead of the frosted kind, then by all means take a gander at this film. It’ll make you feel like Mommy of The Year. In theaters now.