THERE ARE MOMS WAY WORSE THAN YOU

Review

SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation Glenn Boozan's illustrated humor book opens with a premise that many mothers have quietly entertained but rarely said aloud: maybe the bar for 'good enough' is lower than the parenting-advice industry has led them to believe. The vehicle for making this case is the animal kingdom. Boozan compiles species after species — pandas, cuckoos, rabbits, hamsters — whose maternal behavior would, by any human standard, constitute neglect, abandonment, or worse. The joke is the argument: if a panda mother routinely ignores one of her twins, and the species survives, then the mother who forgot a permission slip or snapped before school drop-off is not the catastrophe she fears she is. The book's intended audience is mothers in the grip of perfectionist self-criticism, and it speaks to them in a register of conspiratorial warmth rather than therapeutic instruction. It is a short book designed to be read in an afternoon, given to a friend, and remembered the next time maternal guilt spikes at 11 p.m. SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created**: The book rests on a quiet but real affirmation of human dignity by contrast. By showing how much worse non-human maternal behavior can be, Boozan implicitly argues that human mothers are oriented toward their children's good in ways that are genuinely meaningful — that care, attention, and guilt itself are signs of a person who recognizes the child as mattering. This is a thin but real acknowledgment of the imago Dei premise: that the human mother is not just a biological function but a person in relation. - **Fallen**: The target of the book is not moral failure but disordered guilt — a specific wound of the Fallen state in which concupiscence turns inward as scrupulosity about performance rather than outward as vice. The mothers this book addresses are not neglectful; they are over-self-condemning. Boozan does not name this dynamic analytically, but the entire structure of the humor — 'you are not as bad as you think' — is a pastoral response to it. - **Redeemed**: The book's consolation is real but thin as a Redeemed resource. Laughter and relief are genuine goods; the tradition has always recognized eutrapelia — Aquinas' virtue of fitting play — as restorative. But the book offers no account of how a mother moves from relieved laughter back into the actual work of formation. Consolation is a beginning of healing, not its completion. - **Prudence (domestic wisdom)**: The book does, however, perform a modest act of domestic prudence by helping mothers recalibrate their internal standard of judgment. Aquinas describes prudence in part as correctly estimating one's situation before acting; a mother whose guilt is miscalibrated is prudentially impaired. Releasing her from false standards is, in a small way, an exercise in restoring that capacity. - **Justice (gratitude and friendliness)**: The book's social function — it is clearly a gift book, passed between friends — enacts the virtue of friendliness as Aquinas understands it: genuine goodwill communicated through pleasantness. That it also implicitly invites mothers to feel grateful for what they do manage is a secondary moral good, even if the book never frames it that way. SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon Gabor Mate[^1], writing in *In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts*, insists that 'our best is circumscribed by our own issues and limitations' and that a blaming attitude — directed at parents, including mothers — is 'an entirely useless commodity'; Boozan's book arrives at a similar destination by a comic rather than clinical route, using animal comparison where Mate uses neurological and attachment science to make the same case against maternal self-prosecution. Where Mate illuminates the generational transmission of parenting patterns as a structural phenomenon that dissolves individual blame, Boozan works at the emotional surface without tracing those structural roots, which means readers come away comforted but not necessarily better equipped to break the patterns Mate describes. Jordan Peterson[^2], in his lecture on Cain and Abel, observes that dysfunctional family dynamics can build 'like a vicious circle that just expands and expands' partly through the mother's own anxious patterns — a darker reading that Boozan's book, by design, cannot accommodate, since its entire rhetorical strategy is relief rather than scrutiny of how maternal anxiety shapes children over time. Steven Hayes[^3], in his ACT work, argues that 'our children have wisdom within that will help them' if parents can step back from an overly judgmental, analytical mode of self-monitoring — a point that sits close to Boozan's implicit invitation to mothers to loosen the grip of perfectionist self-evaluation, though Hayes grounds that loosening in values-based psychological flexibility rather than in humor. ## References 1. Mate, Gabor (n.d.). *In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts*. — 'our best is circumscribed by our own issues and limitations' 2. Peterson, Jordan (n.d.). *Cain and Abel* (lecture). — 'you get a terrible dynamic building across time that is like a vicious circle' 3. Hayes, Steven (n.d.). *ACT and RFT videos* (lecture). — 'our children have wisdom within that will help them'

✓ Strengths

• ✓The book implicitly affirms the dignity of the mother as a person, not merely a functional role-holder, by refusing to reduce maternal worth to performance metrics — a move consistent with the CCMMP's insistence on personhood preceding function.
• ✓By cataloguing animal mothers whose parenting is objectively chaotic or violent, Boozan creates a comparative baseline that releases human mothers from perfectionist self-condemnation, indirectly addressing disordered guilt as a form of concupiscence turned inward.
• ✓The humor-as-relief mechanism the book deploys functions practically as what Aquinas calls eutrapelia — the virtue of fitting play — offering mothers a form of restorative levity that the tradition recognizes as genuinely good for the soul.
• ✓The book's implicit thesis — that 'good enough' mothering is real mothering — resonates with the CCMMP premise that the Fallen state does not nullify the Created goodness of the person; imperfect love is still love, not its absence.
• ✓The work gestures toward the communal dimension of the Created state: mothers are not isolated performers but members of a species-wide, cross-generational practice, which grounds solidarity across difference.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The book's therapeutic frame is largely horizontal — relief comes from comparison with other creatures rather than from any vertical source of grace, forgiveness, or transformation. Healing by means of 'at least I'm not a sea horse' is a thin anthropology when set against the Redeemed state's resources.
• ⚠Humor as the primary vehicle risks flattening genuine maternal suffering into comedic material, potentially short-circuiting the deeper self-examination that growth in domestic prudence actually requires.
• ⚠The absence of any account of how disordered patterns are broken — not just laughed at — means the book stops short of the Redeemed arc; it consoles without forming.