Are all Mothers Saints? No Effing Way!
Did you know that every time a baby is born a mother sprouts angel wings? And that for every baby that crowns, a mother receives a golden one of her own and automatically gets sainted? No. Of course not. I’m lying.
The only Holy Mother that has ever been perfectly pure is Mother Teresa and she doesn’t count, for obvious reasons. So here are 5 ways society thinks of mums (and the truth).
1. We meet other mums for coffee and a chat
No, we meet up for wine and a whine, while our kids run off and play. We don’t have to moan about anything specific, there are no rules, but it’s mainly about how tired we are and how useless (our actually really nice) husbands are. And we drink alcohol. Sometimes more than we should, especially if our friends live next door. Why? Because the hour before bedtime (rivers of bath water, teeth brushing stand offs, she-said-he-said hair pulling, ‘but-I’m-not-tired-sleep-is-boring’ tantrums and the countless ‘pleeeease just one more story’ call outs) is a lot easier, and sometimes quite funny, through the soft focus of two glasses of Pinot Grigio.
2. We don’t swear
…in front of the kids. But oh how we make up for it out of ear shot. It’s like taking a verbal deep breath. All those hours of unswearing builds a curse damn and, as soon as they are permitted to escape, those naughty words cascade over into a tourettes-like torrent of expletives. ‘Where’s that mother-fucking sieve, all I want to do is make a fucking shitting salad and I can’t bloody wash the fucking arsehole tomatoes without the bastard sieve, for fuck’s sake.’ That’s what dinner sounds like in my house once the kids are in bed. Just me. Alone. Muttering to myself in the kitchen.
3. We are no longer interested in sex
Really? I think someone is mistaking us with the mums in the Bible. Did the sales of 50 Shades of Grey not tell us anything…other than that most women don’t care if a book is predictable, formulaic and breaks every rule in the How To Write A Good Book book as long as the sex scenes are plentiful and detailed. Oh my! Of course we like sex, that’s what got us knocked up in the first place. What we don’t like is sex with possibly awake kids next door. Or quick spontaneous sex like we had in our late teens, because we haven’t shaved our legs in a week and never got round to replacing our maternity knickers. But give us one kid-free night with a promise of no baby-screams alarm clock before dawn, and allow us an entire bubble bath with no interruptions, then…oh my God, you are soooo gonna get it (just don’t make any jokes about getting us pregnant again)!
4. We act appropriately at all times
Yep. At work. Or at the school gates. Or when the mother-in-law visits. But when we go out, you know, that twice a year occurrence where Christmas and birthdays give us the perfect excuse to get the mums together for a night out, then we don’t do anything appropriate. And yes thanks, we know we are embarrassing ourselves. Yes, we are too old for this shit, and we know we’ll regret the three day hangover, and that little black dress doesn’t really fit any more, and men are looking at us (and not in the ‘hey, how you doin’ way they did when we were 21) and we really can’t drink like we used to. But we don’t fucking care! Because we have a whole night out where knee high people aren’t pulling at our clothes and wanting something. We are in places where people talk to us about other stuff that isn’t primary school education or nappy content. We are free, for one night, and people are seeing us as more than just mums. Except really they know we are mums, because only a group of women with twelve children between them would be so over excited by 8pm!
5. We change
Nope. Well okay, obviously our lives change. Because when we walk about for nine months with another human being growing inside of us then nothing is that normal again. When we wake up every two hours, every night, for three years, the world looks like a different place. When the clothes we wear, the places we go to, the people we see and our bodies in general are not the same as they were before we were a mum, then yes, we have changed. But beyond that, deep inside, tattooed on to every cell of our being and running through every thought in our mind is still the ‘old me’. The Only Me. And we find a way of meshing her together with the Mummy Me and we get a Super Me. One that still stands by everything we once did but now has other little people to consider. Little people that are bigger than us. Little people that fill up our whole world, take up our whole heart and are our very reason for being.
We may not be angels, we may not be saints, but to our kids we are Mum. We are perfect. And we will continue doing our very best to keep up the pretence!
