After seven years of raising kids, Amy Wilson has an overriding daily thought: she sucks at being a mother. She feeds her kids dinosaur chicken nuggets. Three times a week. She lets hand washing after using the toilet slide, as long as it was just Number One. This was not the kind of mother Wilson thought she would be—after all, what mother sets out to be merely mediocre?

And so, in her hilarious new book When Did I Get Like This? The Screamer, the Worrier, the Dinosaur-Chicken-Nugget-Buyer, and Other Mothers I Swore I’d Never Be, Wilson explores the considerable backslide between her noble ambitions and her daily reality. Wilson quickly discovered after having children that things don’t always work out according to plan. For most mothers, that creates a nagging sense of self-doubt, which Wilson first explored as the creator and star of the one-woman off-Broadway show Mother Load.

With every step a mother takes these days, she is told that there is only one right and true path to follow: a “better” way to feed her baby. A “best” birth. Any mother who wants what is best for her child—and what mother doesn’t?— can soon, despite her best intentions, find herself on a fruitless and losing quest for perfection. Wilson finds great humor in her own journey, first to achieve what she is told is “best” for her children, then to ignore those same voices once she realizes that is not the mother she wants to be, either.

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Excerpt from the Book

When Did I Get Like This?

"Much has been made of the alleged "mommy wars" and how judgemental mothers are of one another. The media portrays us as living in a mom-eat-mom world, bitterly divided into breast versus bottle, stay-at-home versus working, day care versus babysitter versus attachement parenting. But I don't really think I'm alone in feeling this way. Most of us mothers are far too wrapped up in our own guilt to judge anyone else, too certain that everyone else is doing better than we are to look askance at a neighbor's choices. We are sure other mothers are judging us because, well, they must be, when we suck so exceptionally. But we are our own worst enemies. If nearly all of us have these daily moments of doubt, these nagging fears of failure, the ones we are hardest on are ourselves."