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A Mom Hall of Fame would have to include: (From L to R) Lucille Ball, JK Rowling, Joan Crawford, Angelina Jolie.

If there is a museum to honor giant shoes, mustard and Pez dispensers, there might as well be a museum dedicated to moms. And now there is. 

If you’re in New York City, check out the new Museum of Motherhood, which opened today.

I don’t want to tell them how to do their jobs, but in case the curators are looking for some historic moms worthy of exhibits, I put together a list of women worthy of nominations for the Mom Hall of Fame.

1. Angelina Jolie-Pitt

If motherhood were a store in a mall, it went from Hot Topic to Barneys.

That’s right, before Angie we were lame and overly bedazzled, and after her, well, we were filled with obscure but tasteful designers and smelling like $90 fig candles. That’s right, Angie gave motherhood an image makeover.

In 2002, when she adopted a Cambodian refugee named Maddox, she not only changed his little life, but also transformed the entire vibe of motherhood.  Lots of kids later, she is still tattooed, thin, worldly, charitable and impeccably dressed.

2. Mother Teresa 

Okay, technically not a biological mother, but this nun did spend her life taking care of the poor, sick, orphaned and dying, so I’m going to give her a pass. Plus, do you know how hard it is to make your name synonymous with a quality, the way hers is with being selfless and charitable? I mean, I’m no Einstein, but that seems rare. Do I wish she had been more pro-contraception? Sure, but perfect mothers don’t exist; even future saints are allowed their flaws.

3. Ruth Bader Ginsburg

It’s not just that she’s the second woman ever to be appointed to the Supreme Court, but also because with her prim lace collars, understated pearl earrings and overall state of measured thoughtfulness and calm, she seems like a great mom. I wish she were my mom sometimes. I don’t know the woman, but I even kind of wish she could be my child’s mom. Who wouldn’t want to climb up on that robed lap and hear about how mom volunteered for the ACLU or learned a new language to co-author a book on judicial procedure in Sweden?

4. Joanna Kramer

This mother, played by Meryl Streep in the 1979 film “Kramer vs. Kramer,” represented the prototypical ‘70s mom. Joanna – icy, selfish and beleaguered – bails on her family to get in touch with herself in California.

With her chunky leather boots, neck scarves and patrician cheekbones, Joanna was emblematic of many moms of that era, who put a premium on “finding themselves.” This was such an important pursuit in the 70s that lots of moms, like Mrs. Kramer, were able to find themselves only by losing their kids.  

When little Billy Kramer asks, “When’s Mommy coming back?” it breaks our spirits (which were first broken by our broken homes).

5. J.K. Rowling

One day, she was a broke, unemployed and depressed single mother. The next, she was a massive creative force, the author of the Harry Potter series of books which all became films. The upshot? One mom went rags to riches and made an entire generation of kids love reading. To summarize all that is wondrous about this mom, I borrow from the commencement speech she gave at Harvard in 2008, “Rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” I’d like to throw in Joan Didion and Judy Blume since I’m talking writers who covered youth, motherhood and who overall changed my life. Is that against the rules? 

6. Joan Crawford

“No wire hangers” is as famous an awful mom line as there is. Whether or not “Mommie Dearest” is totally factual doesn’t matter now, because Joan is the subject of a kitsch classic and is inextricably linked to the campiest maternal fit captured on film. The eyebrows, the image-obsession, the succession of boyfriends Christina had to call “uncle” and the daughter-annihilating, scenery chewing meltdowns forever cement Joan in the collective consciousness as one of history’s worst mothers.

7. Florida Evans

Played by actress Esther Rolle, this fictional mother on the ground breaking show, “Good Times” kept her family together under the most trying of circumstances in a Chicago housing project. While the actress who played Florida with so much maternal fire and conviction had no children herself, she was a powerhouse, receiving the NAACP Chairman's Civil Rights Leadership Award in 1990. She was the first woman to receive it. She fought for “Good Times” to keep taking on relevant social topics, but eventually left when it became not so “dynamite” thanks to Jimmy Walker. As a child, I snuck into the TV room late at night just to catch a glimpse of her matriarchal fortitude.  

8. Dara Torres

This 41 year-old mom became the oldest swimmer to ever earn a spot on the U.S. team. Balancing swimming with being the mother of a 2-year-old, Torres took silver in all three of her 2008 events, including setting a new American record in the women's 50-meter freestyle. Now, I care about swimming.

9. Lucille Ball

It may seem insignificant today, but in 1952, Lucille Ball battled executives who wanted nothing to do with showing a pregnant character on “I Love Lucy.” Scripts weren't even allowed to use the word pregnant, instead referring to Lucy Ricardo as "expecting."  The episode in which she gave birth was so widely viewed, some say it overshadowed the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower.

10. Eve

According to religious texts, Eve was the first earthly woman. She endured the pain of childbirth without “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” She reared her children without any Yahoo mom groups or disposable diapers. Eve had a life filled with wonderment, but also one dripping with sadness and suffering. And her kids never got along. And so it began.

This is just my personal hall of fame: Who are your picks?

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning television writer, a two-time Los Angeles Press Club Columnist of the Year and a multimedia personality. She is the author of a new book, "Exploiting My Baby," the rights to which have been optioned by Sony Pictures. 

Want more of Teresa Strasser on TODAY Moms? Here ya go:

This raising kids thing is taking forever
Log on, lash out? Why I fear the mommy masses
The fate you can't escape: Embarrassing your kids

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A homeless woman is attempting to break into the locked parking lot of baby gymnastics.

Teresa Strasser with her son, who will probably find this photo embarrassing one day.

She wears a giant, red, tie-dyed T-shirt with several dancing bears. Her hair is stringy, with stripes of gray. She wears a brown men’s windbreaker with the logo of a long-ago sales conference of a pharmaceutical companyand stained gray sweatpants..

Mothers pull their children closer.

The woman tries again to get into the gate. Parents herding their toddlers into gymnastics try to be cool because this is the East Side of Los Angeles, hipster haven, and we try to be accepting and listen to Rage Against the Machine. Still… she’s kind of creeping people out., No one is quite sure what she’s doing there. No one, that is, except me.

That’s my mother.

I only wish she were actually homeless, because I could write a bestselling book about how, despite my mother living at a shelter, I made my way in an uptown world. No, this is a story as old as time, as inevitable as gravity or the second law of thermodynamics. This is a story about how my mom embarrasses me, and how, as sure as a photon moves at the speed of light, I will embarrass my own child.

My mom’s wardrobe has been dressing me in shame since I was conscious.

Back in her day, when she was single and hot, she would pick me up at Hebrew school in long fringed suede vests, low-cut Capezio leotards and leather satchels more pocked and puckered than James Coburn eating a Sour Patch Kid.

That era was followed by a decade of great and swirling flow, when every outfit was long and linen, the patterns loud, the caftans often sleeveless and vaguely tribal. Did I mention she has never shaved her armpits?

If the floor-length, flowered muumuu  didn’t get your attention, the Dodge Dart surely would. There’s nothing like a rusted out Dart in drab green that only starts when mother and daughter push it, from behind, before jumping into the moving vehicle.

Every mother finds a way to embarrass her child. My mom’s look is a manifestation of who she is, someone who doesn’t conform and isn’t conventional. And of course, conforming and being conventional are of paramount importance to children, or at least to children of “free spirits,” or at least to me.

No doubt, in my efforts to defy nature and not shame my kid, I will over-correct in terms of wardrobe. There is a good chance this will lead to me shopping close to forever at Forever 21. Maybe he'll cringe when I order every sauce on the side. Perhaps he'll want to disappear like Hilary Clinton in an Orthodox Jewish newspaper when I get overly chatty with cab drivers and dry cleaners. 

Because of my career in media, I can embarrass him more publicly than some moms. His friends can find clips of me on the radio crying, storming out, arguing, taking things way too personally, tuning out - and I'm just talking about this morning between 5-7 a.m. I'm sure it's going to be a hoot when my child's buddies discover YouTube clips of "Teresa Strasser's Thighs" (a montage from a deep cable talk show that featured me in mini-skirts on a very unforgiving couch). It's not hard to Wikipedia me and find out I let a sexual pervert into my apartment thinking he was a Strip-o-Gram guy. Long story. Look, I'm proud that I went from being a mechanic's daughter to having a mostly irrelevant career - but a career nonetheless - as an artist. Still, the first thing my kid may punch into Google after my name is "how to fake own death."

Parents cannot escape the laws of embarrassment. Say your mom wears ironed slacks and pearls and looks like a CEO. Her brand of embarrassing you may be snapping at cab drivers or warning people about your lactose intolerance. Maybe your mom is a chronic table mover. (“There’s a draft here, and we’re too close to the kitchen.”) Maybe your parents have inappropriate boundaries. (Joe Simpson discussing his daughter Jessica’s boobs, for example.)

None of this should be that bad, but because it’s your parent, it reflects on you in such an intrinsic way as to make you deeply, often physically, uncomfortable.

As I punch in the gate code for my mom, I wait for the usual feeling that someone has poured battery acid on my retinas to take hold. Nothing. A passing parent realizes she’s just a grandma and says, “Cool shirt. My daughter would love that.”

Of course, I think. Because she’s 3.

My mom, windbreaker and all, is here. In fact, she moved to my neighborhood to help with the baby in the early mornings, when I’m co-hosting a radio show. She’s in the trenches, making sweet potatoes, changing diapers. Suddenly, the negotiation between her outside and my inside has changed absolutely.  Her love for my son has overwhelmed her quirks -- not just the crazy T-shirts, but everything else that’s crazy. It can’t hurt me anymore.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy Award-winning writer and radio host in Los Angeles on KABC. Her memoir, "Exploiting My Baby: A Memoir of Pregnancy and Childbirth," was optioned by Sony Pictures and is available now. Dr. Phil says it "will make you laugh until you're sick, I swear." Check out her blog at ExploitingMyBaby.com for more information.

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So, childless people want to enjoy restaurants and air travel without screaming kids? So do parents, trust us. One mom of an 18-month-old suggests that "separate but equal" might be the solution.

Teresa Strasser and her son -- who we're sure is an absolute angel at restaurants.

By Teresa Strasser, TODAY Moms contributor

This might be upsetting, but I have to be honest. I’m all for segregation.

Certain people should have their own seating areas, restaurants, parks and airplane flights. They shouldn’t be allowed to mingle with the general population. They are a menace, often filthy and carrying germs. They're loud, unruly, even dangerous.

I’m talking about children.

Lots of folks want sticky, screaming, jam-handed, germ-infested, seat-kicking, endlessly word-repeating, chicken-nugget-flinging little pipsqueaks to be segregated. Families should have their own facilities, which would be totally separate, but equal.

A Facebook page called “Airlines should have kid-free flights!” says it all. I’m surprised they don’t have more fans, because I agree. Kids are indeed a “constant and annoying disturbance,” as the page says. In fact, Qantas settled a lawsuit from a woman who said she lost hearing after being seated near a screaming child on a 2009 flight.AirTran kicked a family off a flight to Boston after the family’s 3-year-old daughter was, well, a constant and annoying disturbance.

A Skyscanner poll found that 59 percent of fliers support segregation or, as they would put it, reserving a section for families only.

As a new mom, someone who has only recently crossed over from eye-roller to the lady getting the stink eye, let me explain that being a parent doesn’t inoculate you against the sound of crying or the feel of kicking. No, being on a plane near a baby, even your own, can be a fleeting but fiery little slice of hell.

You think you got screwed, being seated next to or behind a baby or toddler in the air, where there is no escape and no peace? Well, if you’re in a hostage crisis, so are we parents -- only our yellow ribbons are never coming off and no former president, or even Lisa Ling, is showing up to liberate us.

Now, I don’t expect you to feel bad for us. We chose to have kids, and we chose to take them on a plane or to a restaurant or to Target or wherever. But know this: We also have ears. And we have nervous systems. And on top of the grating sounds and smells and harassment our kids provide you, we also have the incredible guilt, fear and shame that we ruined your good time, or even your trip to the regional sales conference. Excluding those of us who are tuned out or just downright selfish, we feel terrible about our terrible kids, or our good kids who are understandably terrible because their crayon dropped or the air pressure dropped or both.

Personally, I avoid air travel with the family for this reason, and I try to stick to family-friendly restaurants. I steer clear not just to avoid the theatrical sighing, passive-aggressive arm-crossing, neck-craning and actual moving away of non-parents, but because it’s the right thing to do. If you are on a date at a fancy Italian restaurant, you deserve the right to stink-eye me before stage whispering, “This is NOT Chuck E. Cheese's.”

Believe me, when it comes to dining, we moms know every joint in our neighborhood that welcomes us. Restaurants that stock crayons, paper placemats and high chairs and have changing tables in the bathrooms. We know exactly where you are, shining beacons of other jammy-handed tots shrieking and tossing forks.

Yes, we could never leave the house. But being home with a toddler does something to contract the space/time continuum. I’m telling you, time actually stands still, so you really have to let us leave and join the outside world. You have to let us travel and eat in restaurants. You have to let us grocery shop. I, for one, would not mind doing these things without you hating me for it.

That’s why I’m not up in arms. My arms are up in the air, where you should be flying, in peace.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy Award-winning writer and two-time Los Angeles Press Club Columnist of the Year. Her memoir, "Exploiting My Baby: A Memoir of Pregnancy and Childbirth," was optioned by Sony Pictures and is available now. Dr. Phil says it "will make you laugh until you're sick, I swear."

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With Oscar night around the corner, I find myself rooting for the moms. Now that I’m a mother, I can’t help but feel like these women are somehow representing my home town, the place where pacifiers and nasal aspirators and spent tubes of Balmex live.

By Teresa Strasser, TODAY Moms contributor

Gabriel Bouys / AFP - Getty Images

Awww, c'mon, how can you not root for her? She's glowing!

Natalie Portman has hemorrhoids. 

I don’t know that for sure. I’m just guessing, because she’s pregnant and I’m a new mom and that makes me love Natalie Portman all the more. I totally didn’t get her before, but now I adore her and would be psyched if she won the Oscar. 

Like many celebrities, all Natalie had to do to win me over was get pregnant. It’s that easy. Where before she was just a tiny thing with tiny pores, a Harvard degree and air of remoteness, that’s all changed. Now, I’m pretty sure her anus is itching and swollen. And I like that.

Rationally, I understand that her pregnancy hasn’t categorically changed her personality (never met the woman, but like most of us, I have unilateral relationships with celebrities that toggle between snide judgment and adolescent reverence). But motherhood is such an equalizer that even the Black Swan will likely get cankles, varicose veins, unfortunate discharge, bleeding gums, gas, leg cramps and insomnia. No way she can assign any of it to a personal assistant or publicist.

Teresa Strasser is rooting for Team Mom.

With Oscar night around the corner, I find myself rooting for the moms. Why? It’s simple. Just like I’m from San Francisco and I root for the Golden State Warriors, no matter how much they blow, now that I’m a mother, I can’t help but feel like these women are somehow representing my home town, the place where pacifiers and nasal aspirators and spent tubes of Balmex live. It’s not Paris, but it’s where I live now, and I’ll buy the jersey of anyone playing for me. Get me a signed pair of Air Portmans and I’ll wear those bad boys. And it looks like, with a couple big award season wins under her maternity Spanx, she's got another one coming. But the mom bench is deep this year.

There’s also four-time Oscar nominee and mother of four Annette Bening, who plays a cool, spiky haired lesbian mom in “The Kids Are All Right.” Bening has done her time strolling and burping and Bjorning and now I want her to have an Oscar to go with her Kathryn, Benjamin, Isabel and Ella. Let’s not forget Nicole Kidman, a mother of both biological and adoptive children whose performance in “Rabbit Hole” involved losing a toddler son. (Are you kidding me? Even if it’s play-acting that’s too much for a mom with a baby.  Just give her the damn statue.) I can’t ignore Melissa Leo, either. She plays a mother of nine, including two boxers — one’s a crack addict — and seven crazy-haired, thick-accented, boozy sisters. What mother can't relate to Michelle Williams, who plays a raw and overworked mother in "Blue Valentine" and of course, is famously a single mother in real life? I’m also getting behind Amy Adams, Leo’s co-star from “The Fighter,” who totes around her adorable baby daughter in between award season appearances.

Amy’s only problem is that she’s been trumped by the mother of all mothers, Natalie Portman, who because she happens to be pregnant right now, takes the mom cake (and hopefully binges on the frosting). When she waddles glowing down that red carpet, that’s all we’re going to see. I mean, unless she wears something really tacky.  

When it comes to capturing the hearts of moms, having a kid is the best PR move an actress can make. Adopting one — like last year’s Best Actress winner, Sandra Bullock — is just as effective. Because even if you are a cold, conniving, selfish, narcissist, we will imagine you with all of the characteristics we want mothers to have —warmth, selflessness, tenderness — and maybe the dark ones we have ourselves — fatigue, confusion and moments of grief for the carefree lives we had before.

So come Oscar night, I’ll be sitting down with my baby, my customary tub of caramel corn and my picks. No matter how many children they have or are about to have, I’m pointing a foam finger at my imaginary team and betting with my heart, ‘cause I’m the mother of all fans.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy Award-winning writer and author of “Exploiting My Baby,” which Dr. Phil says "will make you laugh until you're sick, I swear." See her blog at ExploitingMyBaby.com for more information.

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By Teresa Strasser

Gordon Gekko from the movie "Wall Street," parenting guru? Maybe.

After months of people telling me not to feel guilty, and my deeply rooted inability to take that advice, I have a new mantra, and it’s all thanks to Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. Gordon had greed. I have guilt.

Guilt – for lack of a better word – is good.

Guilt is right.

Guilt works.

Conventional wisdom and pop psychology better duck, because Gordon and I are about to fly into your upbeat, sappy, stupid face. Guilt is seen as a waste of time, as the unresolved issue of a negative  mother who does not “let things go.” By the way, when people tell me to “let things go,” I mainly just want to let my handbag go into their testicles or jugular. Maybe holding onto things isn’t so bad. That’s right, maybe guilt is good.

Matt Beard

Teresa Strasser feels guilty... but she's OK with that.

Maybe guilt works.

In my 15 months as a mother, I’ve done a lot of whining and crying, and a lot of apologizing for whining and crying about what I know are high-quality, first-world problems with my beautiful, healthy child. Still, to me, my anxieties are heavy. I drag them around in a diaper bag of doubt, and telling me to put them down doesn’t help.

I worry that I don’t know how to play with my child, that I work too many hours, that it’s my fault he caught hand, foot and mouth disease because I took him to the germ-infested play area at the mall. I feel guilty because sometimes I look at a guy reading the paper at a coffee shop and I want to yell, “Do you know what it’s like to have the clock ticking every second? You don’t have to be at daycare in 20 minutes, do you? DO YOU, DUMMY?”

I feel guilty because when my son picks up a cell phone, he calls it “mama.” My son thinks phones are called “mamas.” Do my guilt minutes roll over?

I feel guilty when I let him cry it out at night. I feel guilty when I run in to soothe him, because I should be letting him soothe himself.

There is guilt when I drive him around to do errands, because that must suck, being all trapped in a car seat listening to people yammer on NPR, or worse, mom singing some Dixie Chicks song. There is guilt when we stay home, just staring at the same old toys without the stimulation his little brain needs. There is guilt when he kicks his feet and cries when I leave him with the sitter, and there is guilt when he smiles and beams at the sitter when I go, because he must love her more.

There are degrees of guilt, and there are colors and textures of guilt, but there is guilt for almost every parenting occasion. It’s not like I spend every waking moment doused in it, but whenever I mention that I might feel … gulp, guilty … about being a working mom, or an imperfect mom, or an impatient mom, or a un-fun mom, I get the same story. “Never feel guilty. You’re doing your best.”

This sounds so wise.

I’ve finally concluded that, at least for me, it’s not possible.

If I didn’t second-guess and approach each challenge with a pinch of self-doubt, I wouldn’t be me. And since I can’t let go of my guilt, I’m embracing the hell out of it.

Guilt makes me stop by the bookstore for two books on toddler brain development. Guilt makes me turn off the phone during playtime, while I try to make peek-a-boo fun for him and be totally present. Guilt makes me scour the web for rainy-day activities, so we find places like the automotive museum with a special floor just for kids. Guilt makes me visit a day care nine times before choosing it.

If I didn’t love that guy so deeply and so fully, I wouldn’t feel guilt. My guilt is a teddy bear I cling to when I don’t know if I’m doing any of this the best I can. My guilt reminds me I’m doing the only thing my child absolutely needs me to do: love him with the fiery intensity of a million Gordon Gekkos.

Moms who don’t feel guilty, let me be the first to say, good for you. Keep doing what you’re doing. You can skip this.

Moms who strap the guilt into the car seat every day: Are you as sick as I am of well-meaning, dodo self-help readers telling you not to feel guilty when you can’t help yourself? I’m hoping you can hear Michael Douglas whispering  to you. Stop beating yourself up over beating yourself up. Guilt is good.

Guilt is right. Guilt works.

You know who never felt guilty? That mom that left her kids starving and chained to the radiator. Okay, now I feel guilty for saying that.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy Award-winning writer and author of “Exploiting My Baby,” which Life & Style magazine calls a "hilarious first time memoir about motherhood." You can read her blog at ExploitingMyBaby.com.

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