Ten Ways Real Moms Are Much Better Than TV Moms

by Linda Holmes

For some reason, people really idealize TV moms. "June Cleaver" this and "Clair Huxtable" that, like we'd all be so lucky if we just had the moms people have on TV.

This attitude gravely underestimates the dark side of the TV mom. So in honor of Mother's Day, let's look at ten of the many reasons your real mom is better than a TV mom.

1. Your real mom would never encourage you to grotesquely humiliate yourself in a recording studio.

Look at this. Seriously. Look at it. Carol Brady has absolutely no compunction about standing there, bopping her blonde head, as her children commit to tape a song that will live in infamy, while wearing clothes suitable for some kind of documentary about The Unclaimed Clothing Of The Seventh Circle Of The Thrift Store.

Who bought Peter that shirt? His mom, in all likelihood. His spiteful, unfeeling mom. And what is Cindy? An eight-year-old go-go dancer? Nice boots, "Mom." (For a real-life counterargument, see Thanks, Mom at NPR's Picture Show photoblog.)

This is not to even mention how many times you would have to kill me before I would sing the line "Every boy's a man inside / a girl's a woman, too" in front of my mother. My mother and I keep that sort of thing to ourselves.

Letting the handyman hang out, forgetting about you entirely, and other things your real mom would probably never do, after the jump...

2. Your real mom would never remove your fianceé's eyebrows.

In this clip from Grey's Anatomy, Cristina reveals to Meredith that her mother-in-law-to-be, Mama Burke, has removed her eyebrows. On her wedding day. I want you to ask yourself this: When you were married (or if you get married), did your mother (or will your mother) require the person you're going to marry to do anything so radical? I thought not. Another point for real moms.

3. Your real mom would never kick you out just because you have a hook for a hand and you snore.

Really, who hasn't found himself in the occasional tight spot such as this? Isn't family supposed to be where you can go when nobody else will take you in?

4. Your real mom wouldn't turn your upbringing over to the school dietitian.

So there's Blair, Jo, Natalie, and Tootie, and as I recall, they all had moms. But their moms were never on hand to navigate their problems. Instead, they had Mrs. Garrett, who seemingly took over all parenting when they were about 14 and practically delivered them into middle age. Or at least into the arms of a very young George Clooney, as seen above. Your real mom at least would have shown up to meet Clooney and his acid-wash jeans.

5. Your real mom would never negotiate your curfew in tapered pants.

90210's Cindy Walsh is right to suspect that her daughter Brenda's new friends are potential troublemakers (Kelly will get hooked on diet pills! Donna will dress up like a mermaid! The other ones aren't real!). Still, she standing by the car negotiating Brenda's curfew while wearing those -- hey, wait. Those are Clooney's pants from the previous clip! Wardrobe departments are so cheap.

6. Your real mom would set boundaries for the handyman.

First of all, if the "daaaa, da-da, daaaa" at the end of this theme song doesn't perk up your Friday, I can't help you.

Second of all, one of the most important functions of your real mom is to set boundaries. Appropriate, inappropriate. Okay, not okay. And, of course: Handyman, roommate.

Look, Ann Romano of One Day At A Time is a great mom. A fantastic mom. But your real mom would have said, at some point, "Schneider, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

7. Your real mom would never mostly forget you were there and then only show you off during sweeps.

Remember Ross and Rachel's baby on Friends? They only occasionally did. Sure, there was the periodic "Emma-sode," where something whimsical would happen involving the baby -- as in this clip, where Rachel learned that Ross wasn't lying when he told her that Emma would laugh at "Baby Got Back."

But for the most part, Emma was the Chandler's Job of babies: only very occasionally even remembered, and mostly not relevant to the story. Even in the series finale, there was this very dramatic business about Rachel getting on a plane to Paris, and then maybe getting off the plane, and because carrying around a baby might interfere with the dramatic smooching of it all, Emma was supposedly with Rachel's mother the whole time, allegedly to be brought to Paris later.

Seriously, they might as well not have bothered: they could have shipped her to Paris in the hold of a cargo ship and seemed equally warm.

8. Your real mom would never be any of the women on Desperate Housewives.

Oh, where to begin.

If you've never fished your real mom naked out of the hedges, if you've never had to hire a defense attorney for her, if you've never discovered she was secretly keeping someone in the basement or pretending that your baby was her baby? You're ahead of the game.

9. Your real mom would never encourage Tony Danza to buy you a bra.

As always, correct me if I'm wrong.

10. Your real mom would never be so awesome that everyone will totally know that you only wish you were that awesome.

Embedding is disabled on this video of Clair Huxtable singing with the Hillman choir when she returned to campus during the third season of The Cosby Show, but if you watch it, you will see that all her kids are sitting there, transfixed, thinking, "I would be so lucky to be like that, and I will have to keep trying."

Okay, actually, my real mom is exactly like that. And maybe yours is, too.

So Happy Mother's Day to my real mom and all the real moms, and thanks for never, ever putting us all in recording studios to sing "Time To Change."