The darkly funny side of parenting

By LEANNE ITALIE

Associated Press

NEW YORK

These moms curse a lot, drink to excess, reveal scary truths and draw twisted little stick figures of their kids pooping and whining relentlessly. And this Mother’s Day, they’re bringing their derelict parenting to you.

The authors behind a fresh round of parenting books love their munchkins, to be sure, but there’s something about the scorched earth narrative that sells memoirish parenting books these days.

Is the goal an instructional one? Inspirational? How about some advice?

“No, there isn’t any. I don’t have anything. No advice. Nobody has any advice,” laughed Amber Dusick, a Los Angeles mother of two who brings us “Parenting: Illustrated with Crappy Pictures.”

The book’s 50 “crappy laws of parenting” include this at No. 16: “When you sneak to the pantry to eat chocolate, you will get caught.”

The f-bombs fly, the flavored vodka flows and husbands pay dearly, but what’s the point of dwelling on the smeared, sleep-deprived underbelly of life with kids? Even if it is just for a laugh.

“We’ve opened up the dialogue,” offered Nicole Knepper, who has two kids and wrote “Moms who Drink and Swear,” complete with a chapter titled, “Suck it, Santa Claus.”

“People have really found ways to be more authentic about who they are and how it affects us as parents. My mom’s generation, they did a lot of pushing down their own interests and their own personalities because they were all about the kids, and this was their job and their focus, whereas my generation (she’s 43 and lives in Plainfield, Ill.), the expectations are different. You multitask. You do it all, only nobody can do it all well.”

Jill Smokler’s Scary Mommy certainly can’t. “Motherhood Comes Naturally (and other vicious lies)” is her second spin off her popular blog and parenting community at Scarymommy.com. The first was “Confessions of a Scary Mommy.”

The 35-year-old mom of three, including boys just 20 months apart, has noticed a difference in exactly how much filth and frustration parents are willing to reveal in the five years since she first put up her blog.

“There wasn’t this acceptance about being this sort of less-than-perfect mother, but all of a sudden it feels like that is becoming the norm rather than the exception,” said Smokler, in Baltimore, Md. “There came a tipping point where everybody just couldn’t keep up that facade anymore and there was just a backlash, and here we are.”

On the dad side, Ian Frazier’s popular cursing mommy character from his columns in The New Yorker now has her own novel called “The Cursing Mommy’s Book of Days,” a diary of dereliction spread over a year of boozing, bad parenting and expletive-infused mockery of a capacitor-hoarding husband named Larry.

There’s this entry for Wednesday, April 13: “Yes, lying in a steaming tub with a bottle of Kahlua and ignoring the children’s knocks on the bathroom door all afternoon is not the most mature coping strategy. So stipulated, your honor!”

And there’s Adrian Kulp, the man-child who lost his job and turned his stay-at-home dad blog into a book, “Dad or Alive,” writing of his daughter after his wife went back to work: “All I had to do was move our four-month-old from one station to the next so she didn’t get bedsores. ... The idea of going outside seemed monumental.”

An engineering-minded dude pair, Andy Herald and Charlie Capen, have provided an illustrated primer on co-sleeping, “The Guide to Baby Sleep Positions,” complete with names for each diabolic configuration: The Stalker, the Yin and Yang and The Exorcist among them.

Dusick, whose boys are 6 and 3, began blogging nearly two years ago. Her childlike drawings lend a creepy air to life with the Crappy family, including that fateful day when they all get sick. Tempers and temperatures flare, and bodily fluids fly all night, brought alive by her hollow-eyed illustrations.

“It’s a healthy balance of being able to laugh at things and yet still reassure ourselves that this is normal and we still love our kids, and parenting is really hard,” she said.

Knepper’s kids are 13 and nearly 9. She considers it far healthier to share the grief than do what her mother’s generation likely did: “Hide their Valium and their vodka in the linen closet, where nobody could find it.”

Smokler’s blog has a “confessional” for anonymous commenters. She weaves some of their contributions into chapter starters. “I invited you into my home as a guest. And you brought my 2-year-old permanent markers and Play-Doh,” reads one. “Next time I visit you, I’m bringing your teenage daughter condoms and crack.”