I don’t actually remember what time my kid starts school. He takes the bus. The bus picks him up around 7:42, give or take, and he goes off to school and is gone until about four in the afternoon. There are two little girls who take his bus from our apartment complex, and I’m not sure their mothers like me. This morning, only one of them was on the bus, and I could so feel her mom judging me—her kid was all dressed up in a coordinated outfit with the cutest little boots and things, and mine was stumbling along half-asleep a hundred yards behind me with me yelling, “Come on, Simon!” as we rushed to the bus stop. Today was the sixth school day of the year, and the “come on, Simon!” has happened probably three of them.

The thing is, she’s probably picturing me being played by like Charlize Theron or someone. You can picture the movie yourself. I’m not drunk yet; well, it’s quarter to eight in the morning. But I’ll probably have had at least one by the time the bus drops him off in the afternoon. (Or we’re in Washington State; maybe a different mind-altering substance.) The house is filthy. Like, infested. We’ve got a social worker. I’ve got a string of boyfriends. I could go on, but you know the story as well as I do.

If we’re on TV, it’s not as bad. But come on. Even a lot of the supposed “normal” families are a lot worse than most of the families I actually know. These mothers are often married, and often still married to their children’s fathers. But Lois (Jane Kaczmarek) has a son in military school, and Roseanne insults her kids, and don’t even get me started on Peggy (Katey Segal). Who is also the one of the three who I have always thought should just get a divorce, because that’s a marriage that’s modeling bad things to the kids.

When I was a kid, my personal parenting role model wasn’t my own mother. I love my mother, but I knew, for a lot of reasons, that I didn’t want to be like her. I knew I wasn’t going to be any of the Good Moms on TV; I don’t have the temperament to be Donna Stone (Donna Reed) or June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley). But I wasn’t going to be a wacky, wise-cracking mom, either. They didn’t seem to be very nice to their kids, and that seemed wrong to me. There’s only so Cool Mom you can be, if you’re not even nice to your own kids.

No, I figured I’d be Erma Bombeck. She’s not, I think, terribly well known now, though I think you could get a great retro sitcom out of her writing. She was played by Carol Burnett in a made-for-TV movie of one of her books back in ’78, but even when she died in ’96, she wasn’t the most in demand in Hollywood. She wrote lighthearted stuff about the travails of being a housewife in the ’60s and ’70s. And while her husband and kids drove her nuts, it was equally clear that she loved them. And while she wasn’t perfect, it was equally clear that she was a basically good person who was just doing her best.

I think most of us are more like Erma Bombeck that most other mothers I’ve seen anywhere else in media. And that kind of bothers me, honestly, because I don’t just mean in stuff about parenting. Because while I look at, say, Lois and think, “Yeah, she’s got her failings, but she’s the best mom she can be and she really obviously loves her kids,” it’s depressing how often I think, “but she never should’ve had kids.” Like, a lot of sitcom moms would obviously be happier with dogs or something.

Events with my kids meant that this article took more than a day to write. And the second morning of it at the bus stop involved us getting there on time and Simon and me playing together and giggling while we waited for the bus, because we were the first ones there. And of course Together Mom drove her daughter to school today and didn’t see it. The other girl’s dad and I reminisced a bit about when we were kids and could just send the kids to the bus stop on their own, though.

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