What Is Other Mommy
Today’s question is the one everyone searches: who, or what, is Other Mommy in Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman?
Spoiler level: every section that gives away the second half has spoilers in its title. The early sections only touch the first third of the book. The later ones go as far as the final pages. The short answer is that the book never names her, and that’s deliberate.
What She Looks Like
Start with the body, because Bela describes it in pieces. Other Mommy is big, bigger than Daddo, and she has to duck in the bedroom. Sometimes she’s small and slides across the carpet on her belly. She floats. She hangs upside down in the closet. Dark hair covers the backs of her arms and legs.
Her face never stays still. Bela says her eyes are sometimes on the sides of her head and sometimes on the bottom of her face. Later they sit at the top. Her mouth can droop and stretch all the way down to the floor. The book never gives a picture, only parts that don’t fit.
Smell and Sound
Then there are the other senses, and this is where the book is cleverest. Other Mommy has a smell. Daddo notices it first and says it’s like a gas station bathroom, and then like a toilet pipe. Bela knows what it really is: it smells like the time her cat found a dead mouse covered in bugs.
She also makes sounds. The ceiling creaks. A mattress sags. In a dark living room, Bela hears the breath someone takes right before they speak. Houses creak all the time, and that’s the trap: the book teaches you to hear every ordinary noise as a warning.
The Rules (Mild Spoilers)
So what are the rules? First, she asks. Every time, the same line: Can I go into your heart? She doesn’t just grab. She wants a yes, which is why Bela keeps saying no and why saying it feels so heavy.
Second, she gets closer in stages. She starts in the closet, then comes out at night, sits on the bed, appears in daylight, and eventually follows the family out of the house. Third, she presents it as friendship. Friends, she says, give and take. If Bela says yes, they trade places, and Bela goes where Other Mommy comes from.
Reincarnation, Mispronounced
Her sales pitch is reincarnation, which Bela mishears as carnation. A carnation, to Bela, is a flower that brings friends back to life, and the word echoes through the whole book. At first it’s funny. Later you realize a child is being offered a friend’s second life in exchange for her own.
Other Mommy even promises it will be easy, as easy as slipping into a dress. And she warns Bela that if she’s left waiting, she may get mean, like the family’s old cat scratching outside a bedroom door. It’s a request that sounds like a child’s game and is actually a threat.
Who Can See Her (Spoilers)
Here’s an important rule: she isn’t only in Bela’s head. For a long time, only Bela sees her. Then, at a party, a guest named Marsha screams and describes something tall and dark blue with hair. Bela’s mother sees her sitting on Bela’s bed. Their friend Dan believes he sees Bela’s mother in his bedroom when she’s outside. Daddo, Grandma Ruth and a woman named Evelyn all see her too.
The book needs that, because it makes the haunting real. If Other Mommy were only imagination, you could read the whole story as a child coping. Because adults see her too, you’re left with a truly impossible thing, and a family unable to talk about it.
The Bathroom Scene (Spoilers)
Now the scene people search for: the bathroom scene. This is a mid-book spoiler. At Evelyn’s huge house, Bela wakes up needing to pee, and her sleeping parents can’t be woken. She goes into the hallway alone and finds the bathroom. She thinks someone is sitting in the bathtub behind the curtain, but it’s empty.
Then she sits on the toilet and feels like she is sitting on someone’s lap. She looks down and sees other legs beneath her own, with dark hair. When she falls away, Other Mommy is sitting against the wall with no face. Her face is in her hands. It is the scariest moment in the book because it uses a child’s most private, vulnerable moment.
What Doesn’t Work (Spoilers)
What can stop her? Nothing the adults try. The police find nothing. Two priests walk away. Lois Anthony’s circle of occult friends burns candles and asks politely, and one of them blows them out. A security company installs alarms and cameras. Two trained Cane Corso guard dogs growl at the stairs but can’t stop her.
Even force fails. When Bela’s parents corner her in a closet with kitchen knives, she isn’t there. A paranormal investigator named Brian touches her, and she screams with the sound of an earthquake. He leaves, thrilled. Nothing in the house can hold a thing that doesn’t live in the house.
How She Talks (Spoilers)
She doesn’t only look wrong, she sounds wrong. Other Mommy tells Bela, I can sound just like everyone you know, and she proves it. She imitates Bela’s mother so well that her real mother believes she heard her own voice. Later she uses Kelvin’s voice, and later still, Grandma’s.
That is the fear under the fear: if she can borrow any voice, no voice in the house is safe. Notice how the family keeps asking each other, is it you? A haunting that wears people you love turns every conversation into a test.
Closets and Corners (Spoilers)
Why a closet? Because a closet is the part of a house we hide things in, and the book knows it. Mommy says it plainly, in the middle of the night, to Bela: Daddo has no closets, no shadowy hallway inside him, but I do. I sometimes wonder if you should marry someone with a similar floor plan.
The monster comes out of the closet, and the parents’ secrets are in their own closets too. Even the corner where the wall meets the ceiling, where Other Mommy hides, is a place nobody looks. The house stands for people who have hidden rooms.
Not the House (Spoilers)
There’s one last twist on the title. The family tries to flee, and Other Mommy follows them to a motel, to Grandma’s, to a stranger’s house, and to a beach a hundred miles away. At the lowest point Bela thinks, our house is haunted and we tried to leave it, but we are haunted.
So Incidents Around the House isn’t really about a haunted building. It’s about a haunted family, and the house is just where the incidents happen. That changes how you read every creak.
Frank and the Present (Spoilers)
Is she dangerous? Yes, and the book shows it. During Lois’s ritual, a man named Kyle whispers to Bela that Other Mommy wants her to know she gave her a present. Minutes later, Bela’s mother arrives in tears. Frank Doherty, a man who held her hand at the party, has died. She found him in his bedroom closet, as if he had slept there.
The book never says Other Mommy did it. But Bela, and every reader, connects the two. It’s the first sign that she can act in the world, and that she may be trying to help Bela in her own twisted way. The present is a favor that must be repaid.
The Marriage Behind the Monster (Spoilers)
Here is what the haunting is really about. Early on, Mommy comes home smelling of someone else, and sits on Bela’s bed talking herself through her guilt while Other Mommy hides in the corner above her. Later, when Other Mommy copies Mommy’s voice, she says the things Mommy would never say aloud.
And at the end Mommy says Other Mommy exists because this Mommy took everything for granted. A monster that mirrors a mother’s worst secret is a clever idea. The parents’ marriage is the open door, and Other Mommy is the draft that comes through it.
Childhood Fear and Loneliness (Spoilers)
There’s a second layer, and it’s about childhood. Bela has few friends, her parents fight behind her back, and the adults leave her alone to listen. Other Mommy fills that gap. She hears Bela’s secrets. She’s the only one who seems to understand her anger, and in one scene Bela says she wanted to scream, just like her.
That’s the genius of the character. Other Mommy is frightening because she’s also the one person who is honest with a child who’s surrounded by pretending grown-ups. The temptation is real.
So What Is She? (Spoilers)
So what is she? The book gives you four options, and I think they’re all partly true. One, a supernatural entity that wants a body, which is what Lois says. Two, a creature that has been trapped in that huge dark space and wants out, which the ending suggests.
Three, a reflection of the family’s secrets and Mommy’s guilt. Four, a child’s loneliness given a face. The book doesn’t pick, and that’s why she works.
So tell me in the comments: which theory do you believe? If you liked this video, subscribe, and thanks for watching. I’ll see you in the next one.
