The Brag Hag

“How has Punky been?” she asks with a false smile after greeting me and smoothing the legs of her capris. She doesn’t bother waiting for a response. “And how are you?” she continues.

“We’re both fine,” I say, smiling thinly. “Just, you know, enduring repeated viewings of The Neverending Story. I guess Punky is taking the neverending part literally.” I laugh weakly and Carol waits. And waits.

“Uh, how are you guys?” I say finally. That’s when it begins.

“Well,” Carol says, smacking her lips with glee, “Max has started reading. He insists on reading the newspaper headlines to us every morning! Can you imagine? He’s loving soccer, of course. Scores an average of five goals per game. And his latest thing is ancient Egypt. Seriously! We’ve been reading up on the pharaohs, and the next thing I know, he’s created his own hieroglyphic alphabet.” She laughs indulgently. “It’s the strangest thing,” she says, shaking her head in fake bemusement. She gives me a sly look. “Is…Punky doing anything like that?”

I meet her gaze with my own deeply weary one. “No,” I say shortly. “She’s not.”

“Hmmm,” Carol breathes, touching her clavicle. Her eyes sweep the playground for Max, whom she spies seated at the bottom of a slide, shoving fistfuls of mulch into his mouth. “Max!” she squeals, rushing off to clean out his mouth with a wet wipe.

“Wow, that is one smart kid,” I mutter softly, rolling my eyes. “Freaking brag hag.”

Brag hags really are the scourges of mommy society, mostly because there’s a bit of a brag hag in all of us, particularly the rookies. Take my first playgroup, which consisted of 10 babies crying, drooling and completely ignoring each other while their mommies sat in a big circle and bragged, week after agonizing week.

“Jaeden was sitting up by himself at just four months!”

“Oh, that’s great, Margot! It’s funny you mention it…. We couldn’t believe it, but Chloe was sitting up by three months!”

“Well, Palmer sat up the day he was born! I swear! My obstetrician has a picture of it in her office!”

Around and around we’d go, our claims ever louder and more outrageous until the kids were wailing from sheer aural agony. I’d return home secretly convinced my tiny daughter was doomed to be a female Forrest Gump, since she had neither pooped solid gold nuggets nor cooed out “Ave Maria” at six months like the profoundly gifted progeny of my “friends.”

Not surprisingly, this particular playgroup imploded—I mean disbanded—after less than a year. Despite this, I found that I couldn’t escape brag hags, even in the privacy of my own home. “Brag boards” proliferated on most of the babycentric websites I visited, offering die-hard brag hags a chance to compete at the national level.

“My daughter finished the first two boxes in the Hooked on Phonics set in 2 weeks,” the mother of a 5-year-old reported in a typical opening parry on one online forum.

“My son’s memory never ceases to amaze me,” another brag hag countered. “At 26 months old, he is so eager to learn. His latest trick is counting to 10 in Spanish!”

Oh, puke.

To shed some light on this supremely irritating phenomenon, I looked up Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, a Los Angeles-based comedian and author of Naptime Is the New Happy Hour. Stefanie told me she believes most brag hags are overcompensating to atone for their secret parenting sins.

“If you let your kid eat a cupcake for breakfast,” she explains, “the guilt festers until you can find a mom to tell you that your kid just learned the Spanish word for every color in an afternoon.”

“It may sound cliché,” she continues, “but the best way to deal with a brag hag is from within yourself. Just know that the brag hag is insecure and that’s why she has an insatiable need to annoy you.”

And that’s what I’ll tell myself the next time I’m forced to endure Carol. Poor Max is probably at home right now, tossing around rusted Matchbox Cars on the floor and eating stale Cheetos while his mommy lies on the sofa and watches Days on TV.

No wonder she has so much excess braggage.