Two sisters stare into each other’s eyes. One drenched in blood, fragments of skin peeking through thick layers of crimson, Kensington gore spreading across the whites of her eyes. The other decapitated, strings of meaty flesh dangling from where her neck used to be, a chainsaw-sized hole in her head. Ellie, the bodyless one, looks up at Beth, a smile playing across her face. “You know, you really do look like mom.” Ellie breaks into a wide grin, the bloody chum of her brain wobbling. “And you’re going to fail miserably, just like her.” Beth kicks her sister’s head into a woodchipper. There are many things one expects from an Evil Dead movie. A parable of motherhood is not one of them.

Let’s go back a day, start at the beginning. Beth sits in a graffitied bathroom stall, her greasy black hair hanging in a sheet over her mascara-laden eyes. She chugs some water and pisses fiercely, holding the baleen tip of a pregnancy test between her legs. She waits, heavy metal music rattling the hinges of the door. She looks at the tiny plastic window, sees the double line. It’s in this moment that you decide what kind of mother you’re going to be. When it happened to me, after entire trashcans filled with ovulation strips and hairlike needles were stuck between my toes, I decided: I was going to be a Good Mom. Beth decides that she will be a bad one. But here’s the thing: When you’ve got a creepy crawly inside your tummy, you change.

Every morning I wake up hopeful. Sure, it’s 5 a.m. and yes, my daughter woke me up by launching a stuffed lobster into my face. Of course, she is screaming because my husband chose the pink cup instead of the purple, so he switched even though it leaks, and now a sticky stain of milk is seeping through my freshly washed comforter. As usual, I run out of the shower with shampoo in my hair because she wasn’t looking and ran headfirst into a wall. No, it’s not even 6 a.m. It’s fine, I don’t mind. Because I am a Good Mom. 

Ellie is a Good Mom too. When Beth arrives, seeking guidance from her older sister, Ellie is laughing cheerfully as her three kids berate her for various failures. Her teenaged daughter Bridget screams because Ellie always forgets to do the laundry. Her eldest, Danny, plays his music so loud that her reminders to turn it down are drowned. Her youngest, Kassie, steals Ellie’s best scissors to cut the head off her doll and replace its body with a wooden spike. Still, there is a tinkle in Ellie’s laugh. The warmth in her eyes never cools. An understanding sigh comingles with every breath. 

By 8 a.m. the sighs in my house hang in the air like thick Los Angeles smog. She wants to put her pants on headfirst. A sigh. She doesn’t need to brush her teeth because bugs don’t either. Another. I get the brush through three strands of cornsilk hair before it flies across the room. The sighs begin to pitch in my throat. Soon they’ll turn to screams.

An earthquake tears through the family’s apartment complex, cracks becoming caverns in the ground. With the typical brilliance of a teenage boy, Danny lowers himself into a cement tomb, hundreds of crucifixes dangling from above. Within it, the Necronomicon. Unfazed by the pointed teeth that form the book’s binding, he curiously fingers the pages made from human flesh, and decides to play through the giant speakers in his room the Latin incantation that releases a demonic force from The Book of the Dead. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Meanwhile, Ellie descends into the basement; she’s finally remembered to do the laundry. Suddenly, she’s thrown against the wall. The lights flicker. A voice calls to her from nowhere. An earring is ripped from her lobe. Elevator cables snake around her limbs, then bend them backwards, cracking all the bones in her body. Ellie’s screams wrench the air. 

My daughter wants eggs for breakfast, always does. For the millionth time, I explain why she isn’t allowed to crack them herself, and she runs through the house screaming SALMONELLA! I splay my fingers, cradling the marigold yolks as the viscous whites drip into the pan. While they bubble and spit, I chase after her, trying to lasso her into an apron – I finally got her shirt on and there’s no chance of another. I get her in her seat and lay the teal blue plate she chose and then immediately despised onto the table. Her favorite grapes are cut in half (vertically, never horizontally), a crustless slice of bread sits next to her egg whites (never touching). She places the tip of one tiny finger onto the egg and yells HOT!!! I rush the plate to the freezer, holding the door open a little too long, pulling the cloudy freon into my lungs. I try again. The plate falls facedown onto the carpet. She’s worried I forgot. Forgot to remove the yolks. The scream is right there, pressing against the backs of my teeth. I have never once forgotten.

Ellie walks into the kitchen, her mottled blue feet dragging across the linoleum floor. She lifts a hand to the stove, her blackened fingers wrapping around the handle of a cast iron pan. I’ve got the very same one. A wire basket SQUEEEEEALS against the counter before she dips grimy fingernails inside, pulling eggs out one by one. She smashes them, uncracked, into the pan, scraping a metal spatula against the bottom, stirring the inexplicably bloody yolks into shards of shell. Her kids stand behind her, quiet, paying close attention. This is a strategy I haven’t tried. She turns to face them, and in a shuddering, inhuman voice, announces: 

I had the most beautiful dream… We were together, sitting in a tall forest. The wind was clean, and the birds were singing the sweetest melodies. It was the perfect day. And all I could think about was how much I wanted to cut you open and climb inside your bodies so that we could stay one happy family. 

I used to whisper to my husband as we lay in bed, hours after we’d woken up, drinking tea and coffee, falling back asleep in turns, “I love you so much I want to crawl inside your body.” Sweet nothings, a yearning for a closer kind of closeness. This was, of course, before the kid. I thought I’d feel this way about her too. And I suppose I did, at first. I’d stare at her pudgy little cheeks, the creases at her wrists, the plump bulge of her upper arms. I’d wrap my teeth around her milky skin and press, carefully, so very carefully, because I knew I wanted more. I never have this feeling anymore, for either of them. I do feel the desire to cut them open though. Most days, every day if I’m honest, I just want to kill everyone.  

Ellie implores Bridget, “What’s happening to me sweetheart?” Bridget responds, through tears, “I don’t know mom.” Ellie laughs. “I do. I’m free now. Free from all you titty-sucking parasites.” She cuts Bridget’s face open, nearly pulls off Kassie’s arm. You might be asking yourself, what’s going on with Beth? The reluctant mommy-to-be has had a change of heart. Now that her sister is hellbent on killing her own kids, Beth has a renewed sense of purpose. Ellie is now the Bad Mom, which means Beth gets to be the good one.

This shift is perfectly natural, Beth will learn. When my husband finally starts to lose his shit, my blinding rage falls away like pulling back a curtain. I chuckle as I pick dinosaur noodles out of the houseplants. I join in my daughter’s howling laughter and offer her another ride on my aching back. I rub hers as tears roll down rosy cheeks from that day’s fifty-seventh tantrum, and whisper in soothing tones that everything will be okay, Mommy’s here. This gets us through to bedtime. Then we all lose our fucking minds.

Ellie runs around with a pair of scissors sticking out of her face. Bridget pulls a cheese grater over the smooth flesh of Beth’s outstretched leg. Danny stabs his sister through the heart with a kitchen knife after she vomits black goo and maggots into his mouth. Bridget and Danny, now possessed just like their mom, tear into her body with bloodied fingernails and bite through her stomach with sharpened teeth, cutting her open and climbing inside to form a three-headed monster. I know, I’ve got to be careful; it’s so easy to pass this down. 

Beth has been careful and so far, she’s managed to save her baby and Ellie’s. She lifts a blood-soaked Kassie into her arms and runs, desperate to escape. But of course, she can’t, she never will. The rage is nipping at her heels. Kassie turns to Beth, terrified, and asks, “Is what happened to Bridget and Mom going to happen to us?” Beth is resolute. “I’m not going to let that happen, I promise.” Kassie smiles. “You’d be a good mom someday Auntie Beth… You know how to lie to kids.” She doesn’t understand, won’t until she has one of her own. Being a Good Mom isn’t about lying to your kids. It’s about lying to yourself.

It’s remarkable. Every single night, after wrenching the drain cover out of the tub, and stabbing the toothbrush into my wailing daughter’s mouth, and pretending to be delighted when she suggests we read the same five books we’ve read every night for two years, I put her into bed, and sing her a song, and tuck her in, kiss her cheek and close the door. I settle into the couch and swipe through my phone. The tightness in my chest begins to loosen. My sighs return to breaths. And then I start to miss her. Tomorrow, I am certain, will be better.

The Good Mom and The Bad Mom face off. Beth, drenched in blood. Ellie, decapitated. “You know, you really do look like mom. And you’re going to fail miserably, just like her.” Beth kicks Ellie’s head into the woodchipper. That’s what it is, to be a mom. Every night, you kick your rage and hate and resentment into the woodchipper, and a fine red mist sprays the inside of your brain, washing it clean. You stand victorious, dripping in blood, reborn. A Good Mom. Until tomorrow.