The Mom in ‘Home Alone’ Is a Messy and Magnificent Model of Motherhood

Is Kate McCallister a “good mom”? That’s beside the point. Her example shows the shallowness of such standards: She loves her kid. She proves it.

Before the pandemic, I was a mom with a strict no-screens-on-weekdays rule, whose kids ate veggies as a snack while I cooked dinner and played board games or read in the evening, and plenty of childcare to make that possible. After the harrowing newborn days and screech-filled toddler years, I finally had kids who could put on their own shoes before heading to school. I’d figured it all out.

Then, in March 2020, we started out with a whiteboard schedule that outlined which portions of the day were for Zoom kindergarten, which were for crafts or long walks or outdoor playtime with friends. It took only a few weeks for the whole thing to collapse into a morass of screen time; my kids’ Roblox obsessions were interrupted only by Netflix shows or movies. Soon enough, while the expert moms on Instagram were teaching their kids phonics and practicing math by scaling recipes for homemade bread, I was crying behind my sunglasses on our walks or hiding in my bedroom while they whined. And that’s how I found myself sitting on the couch in our TV room, buried under a stack of sticky little-boy legs, watching Home Alone in springtime.

At our house, Home Alone is now an all-season favorite. My kids love the slapstick violence of it, of two would-be burglars falling victim to a young Kevin McCallister’s ingenious domestic defenses: Marv’s head struck with a bucket, socked feet pierced through with nails, a flamethrower igniting the black cap on Harry’s head. But it’s Kevin’s mother, Kate McCallister, who makes the movie for me. As portrayed by Catherine O’Hara, Kate is the platonic ideal of a ’90s mom with bangs and muted lipstick and shoulder pads. She’s calmly finishing her packing, still wearing a tan pantsuit, while a whole pack of kids whirl through her house, unflappable in the face of it all.

As the movie begins, the extended McCallister family is having one last chaotic dinner before an early morning flight to Paris the next day. Kevin, the youngest, has been alternately teased and ignored by his siblings and cousins all day, and he comes down to the kitchen to find that no one’s thought to save him a slice of plain cheese. When his oldest brother, Buzz, pretends to barf up a piece for him, Kevin loses it, barreling toward his brother and knocking a gallon of milk across the countertop. While his dad scrambles for paper towels, his miserable uncle calls out, “Now you’ve done it, you little jerk!” The family all turns to glare at him, and Kate orders him up to the attic to think about what he’s done.

Standing at the foot of the stairs to the attic, Kevin attempts a half-hearted apology. When that doesn’t work, he yells that he doesn’t even want a family. In response, Kate tells him, “Just stay up there. I don’t want to see you again for the rest of the night.” Because he’s a true youngest child and just doesn’t know when to quit, Kevin yells back, “I don’t want to see you again for the rest of my whole life! And I don’t want to see anybody else either!”

At this, Kate pauses and looks at him levelly. Her eyes soften just a bit, but she doesn’t relent and she doesn’t reach for him. Her voice dips just slightly as she responds, “I hope you don’t mean that. You’d feel pretty sad if you woke up tomorrow morning and didn’t have a family.” But Kevin doubles down on his declaration, saying that he doesn’t need any kind of family. Kate doesn’t wilt. She says, “Then say it again. Maybe it will happen.”

In that moment—that refusal to bend to her son’s manipulation, that steely-eyed insistence on the rules—I saw my own mother. I saw my mother as she was during my childhood, her single-mother years, her self-proclaimed “flaming-feminist” years, the years during which she insisted that “girls can do anything” and then showed us how to do it. What I love about Kate McCallister is what I love about my own mom: She’d do anything for her kid, and she won’t take any of his shit.

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Like Kate, the moms I knew best growing up—my own mom and her sister, both single moms for much of their kids’ childhoods—did everything themselves. They had to. My mother and her sister, my Aunt Martha, were children of the ’50s and of a conservative Irish Catholic family. As they grew up, they followed the rules and expectations they were given: college, marriage, a career, then children. In their thirties, they found themselves someplace they hadn’t planned for: Both were divorced and raising daughters on their own.

When my parents divorced, my mom knew she needed to earn more money, so she went back to school at night for her MBA. Sometimes, when babysitting fell through, she brought my sister or me to her finance classes, where our coloring books kept us quiet and occupied. We moved from State College, Pennsylvania, to Pittsburgh, where she bought a little ranch house near my Aunt Martha and her daughters. The four of us kids were so close in age that, at our after-school program, they called us just “the cousins,” and sometimes on Thursdays, when my mom worked late, we slept sideways—so we could all fit—in Martha’s king-size bed. They hadn’t planned to raise us on their own, but they were instrumental in shaping my ideas about what a mom is and what she’s capable of.

They dropped us off at day care, then drove to the park-and-ride lot and took the bus into town to save the cost of monthly parking at the garage in their building downtown. They sliced carrots and celery and served them with ranch dressing. They cooked us Hamburger Helper and fish sticks and pot pies from the recipe on the back of the Bisquick box. They used cottage cheese instead of ricotta in the lasagna because it was cheaper—and who could tell the difference anyway? If we complained, they told us, “This isn’t a democracy; it’s a benevolent dictatorship.” They waited until the blouse at Talbots got marked down twice before even trying it on. They rearranged their business trips to make our dance recitals. At bedtime, they sang, “I’ve got my girls; who could ask for anything more?” It was only years later that I learned those weren’t the actual lyrics, that they’d swapped in girls for man, switched their daughters for the men gone elsewhere.

And that’s how I learned what a mom was. My mom worked long hours and tallied spreadsheets on the sidelines at soccer instead of chatting with the stay-home moms. Whenever I talked back, she told me, “No one likes a smart aleck.” She had a rule that when she got home, no one could talk to her until she’d changed out of her heels and pantyhose. She made us sit politely at the dinner table with the grown-ups long after things got boring. But when I needed her, she was always there. When I spoke, she slowed and turned her full face to me.

At bedtime, they sang, “I’ve got my girls; who could ask for anything more?” It was only years later that I learned those weren’t the actual lyrics, that they’d swapped in girls for man, switched their daughters for the men gone elsewhere.

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On the other hand, Kate McCallister, with her five kids and international family vacation, is significantly more distracted at the beginning of Home Alone. When a snowstorm overnight knocks out the power and the whole family sleeps through their alarms, she tasks the oldest cousin with counting all the kids before they pile into the vans that will take them to O’Hare. The cousin, of course, miscounts—mistaking a pesky neighbor kid for Kevin—and the family sets off for the airport while Kevin sleeps away in the attic. It’s not until they’re in the air that Kate realizes what they’ve done: Kevin’s home alone.

This point isn’t totally clear in the film, but I’m convinced that, like my mom and aunt, Kate McCallister is a working mom. You can tell by her shoulder pads, her practical hair. She has the same smooth bob and swoopy side bangs Hillary Clinton did in that era, the same haircut my own mom wore throughout the early ’90s. It’s polished but efficient, quick to blow-dry. You can clip it in a barrette if you have to, or pin it back with a tortoiseshell headband.

And Kate brings a working mom’s efficiency to the efforts to reach Kevin from the Paris airport: She delegates tasks to each kid and to her sister-in-law by distributing sections of her address book and a stack of coins. She directs them to call anyone they can think of who might be home to check on Kevin. Watching those kids, dispatched to help, I think of my cousins, my sister, and me. As kids, instead of playing House, we played Meeting, because that’s what we thought women did all day. Meanwhile, in the flurry of activity, Kate dials and redials the police back home in suburban Chicago, who transfer the “hyper woman,” as they call her, from Communications to Family Crisis—instead of just sending a cop to check on her kid. She huffs, but she keeps at it. This is a woman who’s been dismissed, who’s been called emotional and worse, and gotten the job done anyway.

(Kate isn’t a single mom, but she might as well be; her husband spends the movie offering vague reassurances and making ineffectual phone calls from his brother’s Paris apartment while the Eiffel Tower twinkles in the background.)

It might feel wild to hold up Kate McCallister as a model of motherhood. She forgets a whole kid, for heaven’s sake, and doesn’t realize it until she’s reapplying lipstick in the first-class cabin on a flight to Paris. And even before that, she doesn’t have much patience for Kevin’s feeling left out and bullied by his older siblings and his odious uncle. You’d never catch Kate McCallister singing up for a webinar about developing your child’s emotional intelligence or following Instagram accounts to learn about gentle parenting. She’s not going to spend any time on Pinterest looking up cute crafts to do with her kids, and she’ll definitely sign up to send plates for the class party, if she remembers at all. Kate doesn’t have a parenting philosophy or style. She has five kids, an overstuffed enormous house, a slightly short fuse. She doesn’t really meet any of the markers some of us might hold up today for being a good mother.

Kate McCallister is a far cry from the good mother of today’s momfluencer landscape, with its essential oils and evidence-based sleep strategies and neutral decluttered aesthetics. Can you imagine, if the movie were shot today, how beige the house would be, how bare of random crap—mannequins, old nails and tar, a life-size Michael Jordan cutout—with which Kevin could booby-trap the house against would-be burglars? A beautifully accessorized, Marie Kondo’d house just doesn’t contain enough ammunition for distraction or self-defense. Kevin couldn’t make nearly the same impact with a sign imploring the whole family to “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” or announcing “EAT” in the clean white kitchen.

All things considered, Kate McCallister probably isn’t a “good mom” by the standards of our time, or hers. But her example shows the shallowness of those standards. She loves her kid. She proves it. While the rest of the family fritters, she’s doing what I’ve always understood moms do: fighting with gate agents, snatching the last seat on a flight to Scranton after failing to bribe her way onto a direct flight with all the cash in her wallet and the earrings and bracelet she’s wearing. She spends a good bit of the movie driving across the Midwest with John Candy and his polka band in the back of a box van. There’s nothing she won’t do to make her way home to her son.

This, for me, is the lesson of Kate McCallister, of the loving no-nonsense women who raised me: Goodness doesn’t matter. You don’t have to pack all-organic, rainbow-array lunches in a bento box. You don’t have to have an Instagrammable house, or even a particularly tidy one. You don’t even have to remember every one of your kids when you set out for an international flight. (Though you should probably try your best on that last one.) You can deeply love your kids and also significantly screw up. Showing up is how you show your love.