15/04/2026
The Book Therapist 📚💛
My friend handed me this book at my birthday dinner with a straight face and said, "I think you need this." I looked down at the cover. A picture book. About animal mothers. I looked back up at her. She was already laughing.
I read it that night. And then I sat on my bathroom floor and cried in a way I hadn't in months.
There Are Moms Way Worse Than You by Glenn Boozan is technically a picture book. Rhyming couplets about terrible mothers in the animal kingdom, a giraffe who kicks her newborn until he walks, a koala who feeds her babies her own p**p, a panda who looks at twins and quietly decides that one is simply enough.
It is absurd and hilarious and I don't think I've ever felt more seen by anything in my life.
1. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be better than a hamster.
The hamster, by the way, sometimes eats her babies. Boozan writes it as dark comedy, and I laughed until something that had been sitting on my chest for three years finally got up and left. Because that's what this book does; it finds the impossible standard we've been quietly measuring ourselves against and replaces it with something human.
You fed your kids cereal for dinner. You raised your voice this morning and saw their face crumple and wanted immediately to take it back. You locked yourself in the bathroom just to have three minutes where nobody needed anything from you. None of that makes you a bad mother. It makes you a person doing one of the hardest jobs that exists without nearly enough sleep or credit or honesty from the people who've done it before you.
2. The sacrifice was never supposed to be total.
There's a page about the octopus mother who stops eating entirely while guarding her eggs, for months, sometimes years, slowly disappearing until her babies hatch and she is gone. Boozan plays it for laughs. I sat with it for a long time. Because that's the unspoken contract, isn't it? Disappear into motherhood completely. Erase the person you were before.
And if you dare to want something for yourself, a thought that lasts longer than eight seconds, a morning that belongs to you, a version of yourself that exists outside of someone else's needs, you are selfish. This book quietly, gently calls that lie out. You are allowed to remain a person. Your child needs your presence, not your disappearance.
3. The worry itself is the proof.
I've never said this out loud but some days I don't like being a mother. Not my daughter, I love her so much it sits in my chest like something physical. But the act of mothering. The endless negotiations and messes and needs arriving before you've finished your first thought of the morning. Some days I resent it. Some days I miss my old life with a longing that feels dangerously close to grief. I never said it because saying it felt like a confession of inadequacy.
But this book reminded me that the mothers who never wonder if they're doing enough are not the ones trying the hardest. The worry is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of love that takes itself seriously.
Most parenting books I've ever read told me I was doing it slightly wrong. This ridiculous, beautiful picture book about animal mothers is the first thing I've encountered in seven years of motherhood that told me I was okay. Not perfect. Not optimal. Just okay. And I didn't know how desperately I needed to hear that until I was sitting on a bathroom floor at 11pm, laughing and crying over a hamster.
I walked into my daughter's room after I finished it. She was asleep, one leg hanging off the bed, hair stuck to her forehead. She'd had chicken nuggets for dinner. I'd raised my voice that morning. Tomorrow I'd probably find some new way to feel like I'd fallen short.
But I was there. I was trying. And I was categorically better than a hamster. For tonight, that was everything.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/3NRa8xd
