The Big Life

Mother’s day is coming up — and well, you probably have a nice gift for your mum, or, well, reading the first part of the sentence has just reminded you. Not being your sibling, I’ve no idea why your mom is the best; there is, however a means of comparison by contrast. From childhood, we’ve heard tales of stepmothers making the children miserable — and, reading a couple of these evil moms will make you appreciate your parent a hundred million times more, if only your mom wasn’t that great already! (Thinking about it, were these tales crafted to give better appreciation for moms?)

The mother/stepmother from Hansel & Gretel – Married to a poor woodcutter, she coaxed her husband (h & g’s parents) to leave them alone in the woods. The kids overhear and leave pebbles along the path to find their way home. If that wasn’t enough, she tried the plan again, emptying the children’s pockets this time — when the kids tried leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Animals ate the trail and they got lost. Of course this is the part where they stumble upon the witch’s candy house. How bad of a mother do you have to be, to leave your kids to the mercy of the forest, almost getting eaten?

The stepmother queen from Snow White – (Plus her magic mirror) So what if being born with skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood is a genetic miracle? Being really, really vain means getting your daughter banished from the castle, tricked into eating a poison apple, and well, generally tormenting her life with the 7 dwarves ‘til she croaked. She had a “Highlander” mentality — there must be only one. Would you have someone killed just because they were prettier than you are? That’s just vain to the nth degree.

Rapunzel’s Enchantress Stepmom – Normally you adopt children out of love, but this enchantress was different — in exchange for a cure to a poor man’s wife, she would then receive his pregnant wife’s offspring. She adopted the child and named her Rapunzel, then shut her out of the world in a tower with no doors, and, instead, she put poor old Rapunzel’s scalp on the line whenever she’d use it as a climbing rope.

Queen Narissa from Enchanted – From last year’s Disney movie, featuring the latest Disney Princess, Princess Giselle. This spiteful queen didn’t want to step down of her being queen, therefore the union between Giselle and Prince Edward must not happen to her. Not content to banishing her out of Andalasia, she used her dark magic to chuck her through a portal to a totally different dimension. If that wasn’t enough, by the end of the film, she turned into a dragon and totally wanted to eat Robert Phillip and Princess Giselle!

Queen Hera – Now for the baddest of them all, of fictional characters, no one was as hardcore as Hera. Not only is she the mother of the god of war, (Ares) out of jealousy for Zeus apparently giving birth alone to Athena, she gave birth to Hephaestus, an unsightly offspring, of which, Zeus didn’t approve of, so he was thrown out of Olympus with Hera not saying anything. If that’s not enough, check out her Wikipedia entry, under Hera’s jealousies for more stories of her deception towards her children. I’m guessing Lucille Bluth was based on her!