Mom confessions: It's no secret why moms head online to confess all

I have a confession to make. I spent most of last night delving into other moms' secrets — the kind of secrets that moms don't even tell their closest friends.

In case you haven't heard, click-and-go confessionals, like True Mom Confessions, are taking advantage of the Internet's ability to serve up connection and anonymity at the same time.

You'll find sex-related confessions ("I take the kids to my lover's house") as well as the standard mom-confession fare:

• Things-I-can't tell my mother-in-law ("I hate it when my kids get toys as gifts that turn out to be junk.")
• Things-I-can't-tell-my-husband ("I hate how if I am having a bad day then I am a bitch but you can be a complete jerk for no reason and it's completely okay.")
• Things-I-feel-most-guilty-about ("Every day I start the day wanting to be a better mom than the day before. By 9 a.m. the fighting and crying is about to drive me up the wall and I've already screwed up the day's resolution.")

True Mom Confessions doesn't have a monopoly on the mom confessional. Her Bad Mother's Basement  is also meeting the need for online confession, but in a way that feels more like a good-for-the-soul bitch session in a girlfriend's basement than scrawling graffiti on a washroom wall. The site, which launched in early 2006, features a loyal community of posters who drop by to offer support to anyone who chooses to post their confession, anonymously or otherwise.

So why don't moms feel like they can express these feelings openly as opposed to spilling their guts to perfect strangers? After all, we're constantly being told that we no longer have to aspire to be perfect moms, perfect wives and perfect homemakers.

Frankly, talk is cheap. You only have to look at what happened to Jessica Seinfeld last week to see how quickly the implication that someone is a bad mother can be used as a weapon when someone wants to question someone's credibility or launch an attack on someone. I'm not going to get embroiled in the stealth vegetable debate (we've talked about that here before) or who might have cribbed whose recipe for spinach brownies, but I do think it's worth pointing out that the brownie backlash goes a long way towards explaining the popularity of sites like True Mom Confessions and Her Bad Mother's Basement. After all, if a cookbook war can lead complete strangers to speculate about what kind of mother you are, imagine how vicious the comments could get if you did something truly dastardly, like showing up late to pick up your child at a friend's birthday party?

Now over to you. Have you ever been slammed with that most damning of labels: "bad mother"? Do you read or post to the online confession sites for parents? Why or why not?

Related links:

• Truedadconfessions.com (the truth about sex, work, money and how he really feels about being "a wallet and a taxi service")
• Truebrideconfessions.com (a strange mix of sweet nothings and marital meltdowns in the making)
• Trueofficeconfessions.com (things you dare not even whisper around the water cooler about the people you spend most of your waking hours with)
• Truegreenconfessions.com (confess your recycling sins and engage in trash talk to your heart's content)