It is a well-known fact that I prefer to read YA and would probably be just fine if I never got to read another “grown up” book again. When I do read “grown up” books, they tend to be of the self-help variety, more often than not about parenting. Despite my fiction preferences, I have a couple of kids I need to raise and would like to do it well! While I will occasionally read serious parenting books — like Beyond the Sling and Cinderella Ate My Daughter — I prefer to read parenting books that serve up parenting advice and epiphanies with a side of snark — like Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures and If You Give a Mom a Martini. This book, if you couldn’t tell by the title, belongs to the latter group!
One of my favorite things about this book was how easily I could fit it into my busy life. At bedtime, while I wait for my kids to put on PJs and brush their teeth, I usually try to sneak in a few minutes of reading on my own. I sometimes read magazines because a lot of books are so involved that they’re not conducive to short bursts of reading. Fortunately, this book made it easy to squeeze in a short chapter, or at least the “Mommy Confessions” that come before the chapter (collected from the Scary Mommy website — http://www.scarymommy.com/confessions), whenever I had a little time to spare. I have to admit that more than a few of the confessions had me laughing out loud, though some of them were just sad. Overall, I think the book does a great job of helping moms see that they are not alone in the struggles they face or the self-doubt that plagues them. From pregnancy and childbirth to sibling rivalry and anxiety, this book covers a large portion of what moms handle and worry about on a daily basis. Now that I’ve finished this book, I’m looking forward to exploring more of the Scary Mommy website and reading another of Jill Smokler’s books, Motherhood Comes Naturally (and Other Vicious Lies)!