How to be a good mother or I’ll take a large helping of social pressure with a side order of guilt please

I watched a programme the other night on Channel 4 called How To Be a Good Mother. Always wanting to improve on my confused mothering technique, I tuned in, expecting to get a few tips on how to counter nappy rash without having to do nappy off and ending up skidding on a poo, spilling a hot coffee in the process. Or get a fussy child to eat more than one kind of vegetable. But rather than the how-to I had expected, it was the story of six women doing some wonderful, and sometimes downright barmy, things in the name of motherhood. And they all felt that they had got it just right. But if I’m honest, I didn’t learn anything that helped me, just that I’m kind of glad that I didn’t eat my own placenta.

By far the strangest of these women was the placenta lady. She makes placenta prints (which is exactly what it sounds like), umbilical cord charms (wrapping a portion of umbilical cord into the shape of a heart then drying it out and hanging on ribbon for people to display in their homes), and finally cooking the placenta, then drying it out and grinding it up into capsules for the mother to take every day as a kind of hormone supplement. She apparently took a bite of her own placenta and was even paid to go one ladies house straight after the birth to whip up a placenta smoothie, which the mother then downed with glee. Aside from the placenta mania, this woman has received a lot criticism for saying that those mothers who have had caesarean sections do not have as strong a bond with their children than those who have had a natural birth. She said that, as a result of being a caesarean baby, she can’t look her own mother in the eye. So she has got to this age, had two children of her own and NEVER looked her mother in the eye? I believe that everyone has a right to their opinion but this was yet another unthinking sweeping statement that does nothing but make those women who couldn’t have a natural birth feel crap about themselves, bravo lady. Seriously, well done.

There was another mother, a “continuum mum” (google it, I did), who practiced elimination communication. No nappies, just being so at one with your child that you somehow know when they want to wee or poo. Sounds dangerous to me, but apparently works if you are willing to sleep with your child (with no nappy on?), not use a pushchair (even when walking to Asda for shopping) and dedicate every moment to looking out for that telling poo face on your child. If using nappies makes me a bad mother, then I’ll take it on the chin, and the thought of carrying son number two around ALL THE TIME makes my back ache, being the solid little wriggling lump he is. This mother was also so adamant she was doing the right thing that she had a pop at working mothers, believing that any detachment whatsoever from your child is harmful. Again this woman seemed to have zero tolerance for anyone not doing things the way she did.

As always when I watch or read something about how other mothers do things I was left wracked with guilt and depression. Have I done everything wrong? Would my children be worse off for having me as a mother?

I think it’s great that some women don’t use nappies, and that some women breastfeed so long. It’s even great to eat your placenta if that’s what you want to do, I wouldn’t eat it because I don’t like offal, but that is just personal taste (and I do draw the line at the umbilical cord charm, I don’t care how pretty it is when the veins catch the light), and I certainly wouldn’t judge any other mother for the choices they make. Overall I think all mothers are brilliant in their own way. But what makes me so angry and frustrated is the way many mothers, some of these included, are so adamant their way is the right way that they slag off anyone doing it different to them.

There is no right way of being a good mum. Being a good mother does not mean breastfeeding or formula feeding, it has nothing to do with staying at home or going back to work, and just because you eat your placenta does not a good mother make. A good mother answers their children’s needs, does what she can to keep her kids and everyone around her happy, but is also flexible, in that she can adapt to the changing needs of her children, realise that she doesn’t always get it right and be open to new ideas.

We all want to do the best for our kids. We all want to be excellent mothers, but the fact is ALL mothers fuck up their kids to some degree, however “good” we think we are, it’s just a matter of how much. And we won’t know that until they grow up and look us in the eye, or not.

Keep it simple

The first ever grown-up self-help book I owned was purchased aged 19, when I was first venturing into the world of work and finding it hard to juggle housework, levels of “stuff” and becoming an adult and having to do things like buying my own stamps. It was a massive book, Dorling Kindersleys K.I.S.S (Keep it simple series) Organising Your Life. It was very informative, full of new and exciting ways to write to-do lists, then organise tasks according to priority and time needed, in number and letter format. The irony of such a huge tome described as “Keep it simple” containing an incredibly complicated format just to write a few things down was completely lost on me in those days. But I was reminded of that book this week after a conversation with Big Bro.

My big bro is a bit clever really. You learn a lot about someone when you grow up together, in fact he probably knows me better than anyone.  He has an admirable knack of pointing things out to me in a way that I understand, without winding me up, getting me stressed or sounding like he’s putting me down. Like when he explained to me that my thought process is like a bomb going off, sending thoughts and ideas flying off in every direction, whereas many other people think in a more logical fashion. That little nugget has helped me out many a time when I have felt like no one really gets me.

And he’s gone and done it again. In a conversation we were having where I basically had a moan and said that I don’t have enough time to get half the things done I SHOULD do, let alone those I WANT to, and generally feeling a bit overwhelmed by life, he said “Look, you have a complicated life. What with the kids, housework, your blog, your baking, cooking, working out, and now your part time job… you don’t make life easy on yourself. Just try and keep things simple. You will probably find that life is much easier.” It was a light bulb moment, or an A-Ha moment if you are an Oprah fan (nothing to do with the 80’s pop band, whatever happened to them?).

I thought my good old bro had shown me a real revelation and couldn’t wait to discuss it fully, at length and in lots of detail with BFF (because that’s what girls do). So imagine my surprise when I discovered that this idea was apparently a common observation.

“Ohmigod bird, seriously at last. I’ve been trying to tell you that for, like, ever!”

“Really?”

“Yeah don’t you remember when you were insisting on making all your own bread because it made you feel like you were really providing for your family, AND it would save you £200 a year, and you were trying to do it at the same time as making Son 1’s complicated birthday cake, and I said just pop to Tesco and buy a loaf and you refused?” [I don’t have a bread maker so making my own bread was a bit of a mission]

“Er…”

“And the time you were visiting relatives and rather than just buy a bunch of flowers on the way there like other people, you insisted you just HAD to make them some cookies AND then make a gift bag out of coloured paper with a cellophane window to present them in?”

“Yeah but…”

“And then last week when son number one was going back to school the next day, and it was the first day of your new job, you decided that on top of everything else you needed to do that day you also had time to rip out the airing cupboard in the boys room?”

Hmmmm, I have to admit she had a point. The more I thought about it the more complicated I seemed to have made my life. I had 32 clementine in my fruit bowl, slowly getting more and more dried up and I fully intended to make most of them into 5 of Nigella’s clementine cakes (Nigella has great recipes for using up old fruit rather than throwing it away). Making the clementine cakes would involve 2 dozen eggs and over a kilo of ground almonds, another shopping trip, not to mention cost, mess and time, then what the hell would I have done with 5 clementine cakes anyway? My freezer is already full with last weeks batch cooking exercise (in order to stop me from having to cook every day I had a great idea to fill my freezer with homemade ready meals, meaning that I spent 3 days chained to the cooker, creating a huge amount of mess, plus the added stress of cooking up the sixty quids worth of meat I had purchased before it went off, on top of my normal - already did I mention pretty busy - life… simple? Erm, no).

So the last few days I have been trying, as much as possible, to keep it simple. No more getting up at 6am for an hour work out before the kids get up (meaning early nights, special trainers and more washing), I’m back walking son number one to school, and now son 2 to preschool too. An hour and a half of walking a day more than makes up for that hour of exercise.

Life is complicated. And there are some things that you just can’t change. Kids need constant care and attention, as do relationships, work is essential but most everything else is just trivial complication which we don’t need. Keep it simple.

The clementine’s went in the bin. Sorry Nigella.

This was my one hundredth post! J