Best & Worst Moms Ever

Oh, she doesn't have it easy. Since his retirement, Enid's husband Alfred just sits in his chair all day doing nothing. Just sits there! Her daughter Denise is divorced. One son, Gary, won't stop criticizing, and the other, Chip, has gotten fired from his job. It's only natural that Enid should nag Alfred constantly, even though he's seriously ill, and that she should tell all her friends that Chip is "doing law," even though he's doing temp work for a law firm, and that she should hound Gary into a state of neurotic depression, even though he's worked all his life to please her, and that she should be convinced that her daughter is having an affair with a married man, even though she has no real evidence to support such a conclusion.

Enid wasn't born a monster. She was born a loving, sensitive, intelligent woman, but life disappointed her so incessantly and irreversibly that she can no longer appreciate those things she still has, and she makes sure everybody around her knows it. Unlike the other mothers on this list, she isn't an outsized creation; she's chillingly life-sized and utterly plausible. Which makes her that much scarier.