Bad parents bare all on Bad Mom websites

By Chrisopher Noxon

LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) - It was, when she looks back on it, a fairly routine disaster. Late one Sunday, after a busy weekend with three kids, working mother Romi Lassally was staring down at a pile of her son's vomit in her hallway.

"I left it there. I hoped the dog would eat it," she said.

But when the dog failed to oblige, Lassally was left cleaning up and with a feeling that she'd sunk to a new maternal low so she did what she often does when mortified -- picked up the phone and called a girlfriend.

"She was amused and disgusted," she says. "I felt better right away. At that moment I knew I was on to something."

That "something" was True Mom Confessions (www.truemomconfessions.com), an online posting board for momsto share their worst mistakes, misdeeds and misgivings.

Since starting in April, more than 100,000 women have contributed confessions, from one-line gripes about in-laws, to intimate accounts of diminished sex lives.

"It turns out we're all riddled with guilt and ambivalence and regret," she says. "We've bottled this stuff up for too long. Now it's time to unload."

Parents are unloading like never before. Whether trading horror stories at birthday parties or penning "momoirs," more parents are finding comfort in swapping tales of their woes.

Parenting books once dealt primarily in sweet sentiment and motherly resolve. Now they're filled with tales of supermarket tantrums and strained marriages, each a supposedly more intimate expose of the ugly underbelly of family life.

SIPPY CUPS NOT FOR WINE

The titles say it all: "Mommies Who Drink," "I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids," "Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay."

Lately, what began as an all-mom gripe-fest, has grown into an web-accelerated airing of grievances from moms and dads.

"Fathers came late to the party, but I think we've finally realized that there's no real honor in decorum," says writer Steve Almond, who chronicled his paternal missteps in an essay titled "Ten Ways I Killed My Daughter Within Her First 72 Hours of Life."

One dad got big laughs recounting how he nearly gave his daughter a concussion carrying her through a doorway. Another confessed leaving his toddler in a car seat for two hours during a school basketball game.