08/17/2026
You're a parent... It's ok to make mistakes, to have a bad day, to need to start over, call in help, to take a break. You're human, and you're doing your best.
Postpartum doulas are great helpers (reach out to the Calgary Doula Association https://www.calgarydoulas.ca/find-a-doula-1).
Also read the book There Are Moms Way Worse Than You by Glenn Boozan, to yourself, your babies, kids, spouse. You might just feel a little lighter and have a good laugh 😂. You got this!!
My daughter is alive.
She has all her limbs. She has eaten today, not well, but something. She has not been used as a distraction gr***de by a fleeing predator. She has not been embedded in my back. She has not been consumed by a sibling while still technically in the womb.
By the standards of the animal kingdom, I am Mother of the Year.
I did not know this before I read "There Are Moms Way Worse Than You" by Glenn Boozan.
I know it now. Deeply. With my whole chest.
Glenn Boozan is a WGA Award-winning, Emmy-nominated comedy writer who spent what I can only assume was a profoundly disturbing amount of time in the natural history section of the internet, found the most catastrophically bad mothers in the entire animal kingdom, wrote them into sixty-four pages of cheerful rhyming couplets, and had them illustrated by Priscilla Witte with the straight-faced energy of someone who has looked directly into the abyss of natural selection and chosen to draw it as something adorable.
The result is the most aggressively comforting book currently available to any mother alive.
And it starts with the cuckoo.
The cuckoo has never raised a single one of her children. Not one. In the entire history of the species.
She lays her eggs in other birds' nests and leaves. Permanently. With no forwarding address, no handover notes, no carefully packed bag with their favourite snack and a note about their sleep routine. Some poor confused sparrow wakes up one morning with a massive cuckoo chick twice her size screaming for food and the cuckoo is on a sun lounger somewhere having the time of her life.
You feel guilty when you use a babysitter for four hours and spend the entire time checking your phone. You always come back. You always come back with snacks and residual guilt.
The cuckoo has never come back.
Then there is the giant panda that gives birth to twins.
Looks at both of them and makes a decision to pick one.
Just - selects a favourite, right there in the delivery room, with the confidence of someone choosing between two nearly identical items on a menu. The other one just sits there. She has moved on. She is already focused on the chosen one. Baby number two can work something out.
You have two children and you love them equally and you have maintained this fiction across years of birthdays and school plays and arguments about whose turn it is in the front seat. By panda standards you are performing a daily miracle of diplomatic neutrality that deserves an award.
And oh, the giraffe gives birth standing up.
Her baby's first experience of life is falling approximately six feet and hitting the ground. The giraffe considers this fine.
You have agonised over which pram provides sufficient head support. You have read seventeen reviews of car seats. You have spent more time thinking about head protection than the giraffe has spent thinking about anything.
Finally, before I let you go buy the book, there is the black eagle that lays two eggs.
Watches them hatch and then watches calmly as the stronger chick attacks the weaker one.
Does nothing.
Could intervene. Chooses not to. Has decided that this is a family matter and the children should sort it out between themselves.
You have separated your children mid-argument approximately nine thousand times. You have refereed disputes about things that do not exist yet, things that happened three years ago, and things that are nobody's fault but have somehow become everyone's problem. The black eagle has never once done this.
She is very well rested.
Priscilla Witte illustrates all of these animals with faces of complete serenity. The cuckoo looks delighted. The panda looks decisive. The giraffe looks like someone who made a perfectly reasonable architectural choice.
The smiling cuckoo on a sun lounger is the one I think about most.
She has genuinely never felt guilty about a single decision she has made.
She is, in the worst possible way, an icon.
Over three hundred thousand mothers have read this book and felt the same thing on the final page.
Relief.
Pure, uncomplicated, scientifically supported relief.
Because whatever you did last Tuesday- the screen time, the cereal for dinner, the birthday cake that came from the supermarket and was presented as if it did not - you did more than the cuckoo.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3SbWyX5
