What if I don't want to be a yummy mummy? - C

Rarely do I return to a submitter and ask for clarification. Mainly because although we dress it up in many forms - crunchy, attachment, tiger - we’re all thinking the same thing: Am I doing it right? So I went back to my questioner and said,

‘Wait, do you actually feel pressure to be a yummy mummy?’ And she said,

‘Yes! Don’t you?!’

So I had a little ponder, first of all I had a think about what this yummy mummy creature actually is. I’m thinking she has the sort of figure that says anything but ‘mother’ maintained through some mysterious, undisclosed process. She may or may not work but she doesn’t have to work. She’s always groomed; she never seems tired. Her children are neat, well behaved and well fed. Her home is tidy and organised. She never eats cold pizza or stays up late watching ‘Don’t Tell The Bride’.

I can say in all honestly that I feel no personal pressure to emulate such a creature. For a start it makes no sense to desire something that sounds like hell on earth. Not the results, yes I’m partial to a beautiful interior and stylish exterior but not when the effort it takes to get there sucks the joy from my life. Look, I sometimes catch a tennis game and I’ll see Serena Williams rocketing around the court and I know how impressive she is but I immediately recognise the years of training and sacrifice it took to get there and I don’t got time for that.

If you don’t want to be a yummy mummy please pat yourself on the back because what you’re saying is, I don’t want to sacrifice things important to me to achieve largely superficial results, and that makes you a great mother. This yummy mummy thing is related to another fallacy that follows women around like a bad smell –  we  can have it all. I’m telling you now that you cannot. Not only can you not, you shouldn’t want it all. Dudes do not sit around worrying about having all of the things like some hyperactive toddler cramming all their teddies into a back pack. They think about having a few really nice things and ignoring the other stuff. This is why they can’t put their dirty clothes in the laundry basket. It’s really very clever. You see for a very long time women had nothing, in many cases women had less than nothing. So we fought and fought and fought some more and eventually society went, okay look have everything if you want it and like fools WE TRIED TO.  

Of course there will be some woman somewhere that effortlessly glides though motherhood looking beautiful and stylish and taking stunning unfiltered Instagram photos and more power to her but if she exists she will never know how wonderful it feels to be offered support from other mothers; she’ll never understand the glow of achievement from setting a goal for your health and body and achieving it; perhaps she’ll never know what it’s like to be so tired that all you want to do is snooze and snuggle and sneak M&M’s into your mouth and just how lovely that feels.

I don’t know about you but I feel kinda sorry for her.

For some tips on doing just enough sign up for my free webinar, ‘The Lost Art of Stay at Home Parenting’ on Monday 3^rd August. If you do you can enter the competition on my last post! Don’t forget to come chat to me about how you feel about yummy mummyness on The Twitter.