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

If you’re ever feeling badly about your abilities as a mom, your failings, your inadequacies, your insecurities and guilt, a simple solution is to take a look at some really sucky moms in movies. And suddenly, you won’t feel so bad about yourself. In fact, you’ll start thinking what a charmed life your kid is leading and how lucky they are to have you for a mom. That is, until the next screw up that causes the guilt to creep in again…But then that’s why there’s more than one movie on the list.

So grab the clicker, a glass of Chardonnay and wash that guilt right outta your hair! (And click on the title for the link)

MOMMY DEAREST – one the best worst movie moms in history. This biopic of actress JOAN CRAWFORD, as told by her adopted daughter Christina, shows us what a really bad mom is. When Crawford flips out about the wire hangers in the closest, we suddenly don’t feel so bad for yelling because the toys haven’t been picked up.

ANY DISNEY PRINCESS MOVIE with a stepmother – here’s a fun one because you can watch it with your kids. So not only are you feeling better about yourself because at least you’re not locking your kid up in an attic or sending them out to be killed in the woods by a huntsman, but your kid is also subsconsciously learning just how dang lucky they are to have you for a mommy.

SYBIL – The tale of a young woman who suffers from multiple personality disorder as a result of the horrific abuse she experienced as a child at the hands of her mother. We’re talking insidious horrible abuse here. Watch this one ONLY if you’ve had a particularly bad guilt ridden MONTH. Actually it’s a toss up on this one if it will make you feel better about yourself as a mom, or if you’ll just suffer from nightmares. View only in dire situations of overwhelming guilt and feelings of inadequacy. And then only under the influence of a cocktail or two.

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE – while this story about a struggling Hollywood actress (played by Meryl Streep) trying to get out from under the shadow of her superstar mother (played by Shirley MacLaine) might be a tad difficult for us regular moms to relate to, we can still appreciate the horror  the daughter feels at the behavior of her mother. And we can always make ourselves feel better knowing that we never got drunk at our kid’s birthday party and twirled our dress above our hips revealing that we weren’t wearing any panties. Bad mom! Bad! 

LOSING ISAIAH – Here we have Halle Berry as a crack-addicted mom (all crack addicts should look so good) who abandons her newborn baby in an abandoned building to go looking for a fix. Pretty freaking bad. The baby is saved and adopted by white, affluent Jessica Lange. Halle redeems herself when she cleans up her act and fights to regain custody of the child she lost while out of her mind on drugs. And even though Halle turns out to be a good mom, we can still feel good about ourselves knowing we’ve never tried to parent while under the influence of anything stronger that Anaprox and the occasional martini.