On Writing One Bad Mother

By Megan Williams

I started writing my memoir One Bad Mother when I was applying to the Philadelphia Police Academy. It began as journal-like entries on my computer. I couldn’t believe some of the stuff I encountered and I wanted to make sure that I didn’t forget any of that craziness. Stuff like being told I had failed the polygraph because the test said I was a drug-dealer; almost failing the reading comprehension test as a Ph.D. in English.

These were purely personal entries. I never thought about sending them out in the world. I also had a very very limited time to write—sometimes just a half-hour after the latest Academy test—because I was a mostly stay-at-home mother of twins who had been born prematurely.

The book itself encompasses the two years of tests to get into the Academy. As I kept writing, however, I found myself more interested in describing my struggles as a “bad” mother than I was in the Academy.  I looked for myself—for all my perceptions of failure and for all the cultural criticism I felt—in literature, and I couldn’t find myself.  There were a few exceptions: Rachel Cusk comes to mind right now, but these exceptions were few and far between. I couldn’t find myself in books, and I couldn’t find myself in my real life. I felt as if I were surrounded by women who were experiencing a different kind of motherhood than I was. I didn’t always love motherhood and all the women around me seemed to be ecstatic and glowing.

Once I confronted the shame that comes with saying I didn’t love being a mom all the time, I started to think about what I had written as a book. I wanted that message to get out in the world. As a braided-memoir, the tests to get into the Academy became the scaffolding for the true story I wanted to tell. Ultimately, if I could reach one woman who felt that she was failing as a mother and make her feel heard, my book would be a success.

I started by going the traditional route and pitching to agents. I got some bites, but mostly people told me they wanted me to change something non-negotiable about the book. Things like taking the parts about motherhood out, etc. After a few years of pitching, I put the book in a drawer. I couldn’t find a framework that fit both threads of the narrative. 

One day, I was complaining to my husband about this. I remember exactly where we were. It was summer, and we were running on the interurban trail in Belligham, WA, where we live. He always likes to run in front of me, and we are super competitive with each other, which is why this whole thing is funny. “Tests,” he told me as I struggled to catch up. “Structure the book around the tests to get into the Academy and the much more difficult tests that motherhood presents.” I don’t think I beat him that day, but a new structure was born. And, for some reason, I was quite confident in this structure, in a way that I hadn’t been in previous drafts.

 I’ve learned that for me as a writer, I really have to let things percolate. For a long time. Like years. I had a manuscript due in May for another memoir coming out with High Frequency Press about Maine. I went back to it in April, thinking I wouldn’t have to make any changes to it. It had been a final draft when I finished it a few years ago. Well, that was a not so happy surprise. I realized it was a piece of crap. But that’s fine. The good thing about writing is it can always get better.

Back to One Bad Mother.  Once I had this new framework, I came across Sibylline Press which publishes the work of women over fifty. I loved this concept, submitted, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Before I finish, I want to say one thing about the title. My kids are now teenagers, and they have listened to me do readings. They’ve asked me if don’t like being their mom. I have been very clear, I hope, in the book and in my talks with my kids and with other people that this isn’t an issue of not loving my children. This is an issue of not always liking the JOB of being a mom. When my kids were younger, I used the analogy of having a dog. My kids love our rescue mastiffs. But they don’t always love picking up their poop. I asked them to imagine if the whole world was then telling them that they had to love cleaning up after dogs. How that would make them feel. That’s the difference. Or at least that’s the difference on an elementary school level.

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Megan Williams is the author of two memoirs: One Bad Mother: A Mother’s Search for Meaning in the Police Academy (2024) and The House That Jack Built, a memoir about Bar Harbor, Maine, that will be published by High Frequency Press. After graduating from Haverford College, Megan received her Ph.D. in English from Temple University and taught at Lafayette College and Santa Clara University. She has moved across the country—never landing in the middle—three times in twenty years. She now lives in Bellingham with her husband, who runs Blue Dog Bakery and keeps their teenage twins, rescued cat, horse, and mastiff full of treats.

ONE BAD MOTHER

After her six-year-old daughter puts a hammer through a wall, Megan Williams decides to abandon a career as an academic and become a police officer. 

It’s not lost on her that she may have applied to the Police Academy to escape the realities of mothering twins born via IVF at twenty-nine weeks. As the twins grow and test her endlessly, she feels she is failing. She needs a win.

During a grueling application process, Megan measures herself against the other candidates and confronts the normative notions of what it is to be a good mother. The paralyzing fear that she is a bad mother looms large in her head, as does the real possibility that she might not make the cut at the Academy. With its intertwined narratives of police recruitment and motherhood, the memoir provides an unflinching journalistic view of big-city law enforcement, set atop a personal journey during which Megan learns gratitude and makes peace with a motherhood far different from the dream sold to her by our culture.

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Category: On Writing