I love guest posts. I mean, you don't want to hear me go on and on all the time about how wonderful motherhood.
Because I don't.
Motherhood... yeah, it's hard work.
And sometimes... I do NOT enjoy.
And so it was really quite fabulous to read my friend Laury's version of motherhood - realistic, hard work, not quite what she expected/prophesised about before she had kids.
It's everything I love about honest mothers who admit that sometimes, you know what... it's just... shite. Read on:
BAD MUM'S CLUB
"I have just
spent the morning with my daughter in a children’s play-centre, and whilst
there I had an epiphany. I did not like
it. Not that I don’t like spending time with my daughter, I do, I love her
to bits. It’s just other kids I’m not that keen on. Basically, apart from the
fruit of my own womb, and a select few of my friends’ offspring, I do not like
children much. There, I said it.
I realise that
this is not a very PC view, and certainly not one that any mother should
express, but there it is. I’m just not maternal, not really even with my own
child, and that has come as a huge shock to me. When I was pregnant I was the
most annoyingly blooming mother-to-be in the universe. I developed a major
attachment to my bump, documented every stage of my pregnancy, had a cast-iron
(or so I thought) log of things I would and wouldn’t do as a parent.
For example, I
would never let my child eat McDonalds. I would spend at least 3 hours per day
finger painting/potato printing/reading to my child, I would only feed my child
organic food, I would not enter her to daycare until she was at least 3 years old, as everything I had read said it was beneficial to have one-to-one contact
with the primary caregiver until that age. I would never let my child sleep in my bed, my routines would be cast-iron.
Fast forward
three years and my daughter has been in daycare since 15 months, and what’s
more she loves it. And so do I. I
love the hours of my life that it gives me back, some days I am counting down
the minutes till nursery drop-off time. My daughter sleeps in my bed with me,
but mainly because I am too exhausted to embark on yet another battle of wills.
Plus I need the sleep. So if she sleeps, and I sleep, in my bed, I figure, what
the hell, happy baby, happy mother.
I rarely feed my
daughter organic food, largely due to the cost, and sometimes, I will confess,
if she’s a good girl she’ll get a Happy Meal as a treat. I see absolutely
nothing wrong with this. I feel like I am giving my daughter an appreciation of
all different types of food, and to be honest, though the moral majority may
disagree, it’s just a friggin’ Happy Meal. I’m not feeding her whiskey in her
bottle at night. Chill the hell out, I say.
As for the
finger painting and potato printing, well what can I say? This caper just don’t
come naturally to me. Sometimes I am so disappointed that I have not turned out
to be the type of Earth-mother I expected to be. I even bought a Cath Kitson change-bag
for God’s sake. But you are who you are, and who I am is the type of mother
that adores my child, but also has a strong sense of self that is separate to
her. And whilst I love my baby, I don’t always love being a mum.
There, I said it,
shoot me. I am a fully paid-up member of what Sophie Heawood described recently
as the Bad Mums’ Club. I find finger-painting boring. I can’t abide the mess
that potato prints create. But what’s more I find the kind of Middle-Class
Mummy kitted out in Kitson an absolute snoozefest. If I have time with my
girlfriends I don’t want to spend it talking about whether little Betsy is
toilet trained or Casper is eating his carrots yet. I couldn’t give a sh*t to
be honest. I can barely muster up the enthusiasm for this stuff with my own
child, let alone anyone else’s.
I’m more of the
school of thought that if I’m at a party the kids can play together while the
parents (supervising them obviously) get to be adults, get drunk, swear and smoke.
And yes, I smoke too. Tut tut. More boxes ticked on my Bad Mum rap-sheet. Well
you know what, I don’t smoke around my daughter and as long as I’m not sharing
my Cutter’s Choice with her and teaching her to roll I don’t feel an ounce of
guilt. Back in the old days all the Stepford Mums were on Mogadons and Valiums,
so I reckon I’m doing pretty well with the odd fag as opposed to say, a
prescription drug problem.
And this is the
thing with Middle Class Mummy Syndrome, with their Monsoon clothes and Stokke
buggies and organic food, and raised eyebrows at hotpant-wearing Bad Mums like
me; they bleat on about how their world’s are child-centric. How everything
must be ‘fair trade’ and PC, how we’ve lost our sense of “community”, that mums
that aren’t completely obsessed with their offspring should take a leaf out of
the books of the women in the Third World – where community is everything,
where child-rearing is priority.
Well let me tell
you ladies, I have lived in Africa, and the women there ain't that much
different to me. You won’t find them sitting around finger painting. You’ll
find them out in the fields grafting, going
back to work, sometimes days after giving birth. The women in such
communities are just like the working class mothers here, they work, usually
through necessity, they have no time or use for the luxury of ‘child-centric
parenting’. And community is all, but
the children fit into the existing communities and learn to become valuable
members of it. They do not have their noses wiped at every sniffle by
over-zealous mummies with painted on smiles and vacant eyes.
One day our
babies grow up and fly the nest and what they leave us with if they have been allowed
to dominate that nest is the mother’s total sublimation of self. They leave
behind a mummy bird with broken wings, totally unable to fly, or even remember
what the wide blue open feels like anymore. A decimated identity is not an easy
thing to repair. Me, I have no worries on that score, I’ll still have my
hotpants and my Cutter’s Choice, a box of rosé and a foul mouth that
could rival any tradesman!
Here’s to all
the bad mums out there: Long may they reign!"
What do you think of Laury's piece? Agree? Share your stories below (so Laury and I don't feel so bad).
To read more of Laury's work, go here.
