Some parenting memoirs set out to teach you something. Ann Walton’s Screaming Teddy Bears: True Tales of Motherhood, Mischief, and Mayhem sets out to make you laugh until you have to put the book down, and it succeeds spectacularly, lesson or no lesson.
From the very first chapter, Walton makes it clear this isn’t going to be a gentle, Instagram-filtered account of motherhood. She traces her own gleefully dark sense of humor straight back to her father, a man born in 1924 who apparently treated pranks as a competitive sport. The story of his WWII “red ink in the bathtub” stunt, pulled on an unsuspecting roommate the night before his Army physical, has nothing to do with parenting whatsoever, and it’s one of the best stories in the book anyway. That’s the trick of this memoir: Walton understands that the best family stories don’t always stay on topic, and she lets them wander exactly as far as the laugh requires.
Where the book really shines is in how specific and lived-in every incident feels. This isn’t vague, “kids say the darndest things” material. It’s the 53-hour labor with Amy that left Walton glaring at her own newborn and thinking, “You’re gonna be trouble.” It’s baby Carl’s dramatic hiccup emergency, complete with a terrified new father shouting “CODE RED” down a hospital hallway while a veteran nurse calmly yells “BOO” to prove nothing’s wrong. It’s the legendary thirty-minute monologue in which Walton invents an entire fictional animal called “veal” just to torment her husband, Dan, all the way to his mother’s front porch. Each story is rendered with such precise, escalating comic timing that you can tell these aren’t just memories; they’re stories Walton has clearly told and refined around dinner tables for decades.
What makes the book more than just a collection of punchlines is the warmth underneath the chaos. The crib-escape chapter, where toddler Amy engineers her own nightly jailbreak like “a baby Navy SEAL,” is very funny, but it’s also clearly written by a mother who is still a little in awe of her daughter’s ingenuity, even now. The same is true of the Disneyland prank, where Walton cons her two small children into thinking they’re flying to Grandma’s house, only to reveal Disneyland at the end. It’s sneaky, it’s a little manipulative, and it’s also one of the sweetest passages in the book. Walton has a gift for letting you laugh at her kids’ antics while never losing sight of how much she adores them.
Structurally, the short, self-contained chapters are perfect for the way people actually read these days. You can knock out “Is Brat-hood Hereditary?” during a coffee break or get through the jury duty chapter while waiting in the school pickup line, and each one lands as a complete, satisfying story on its own. But be warned: these chapters have a way of demanding to be read aloud. More than one reader has confessed to reciting the “veal” scene to a spouse or the Uncle Ted incident to a book club, whether anyone asked for it or not.
Screaming Teddy Bears doesn’t try to be a tidy, universal guide to motherhood. It’s something better: one woman’s unapologetically specific, wildly funny, occasionally unhinged family folklore, told with enough heart that you’ll finish it wishing you’d been invited to Sunday dinner at the Waltons’ all along.