Tuesday, July 25, 2006
the christmas card photo this year
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
the working mother's guide to guilt, chapter 1
Crazy thoughts run through my head on a fairly regular basis. I tend to chalk them up to sleep deprivation, hormones, or a combination of the two. For example, I was watching a report on obesity in Britain and I remembered my recurring fear of seeing my wobbly abdomen in one of those incidental shots of fat people they always show in reports like this. "Today, British people are gaining at an alarming rate." [shot of obese person in a crop top and tracksuit bottoms, man with an exposed beer belly, and me shopping unawares in Tesco wearing a particularly unflattering pair of skinny jeans.]
What was I on about? Right, crazy thoughts. Anyway, so this morning I noticed that Jack was slightly grubby but we were running so late that I couldn't give him a bath. Then I wondered if the workers at the nursery would notice and if they would think I'm a bit of a Bad Mum for letting my child get grubby. Not that the other children there are pristine, mind you; most of them have permanently runny noses. Still, I sometimes wonder if my intermittent laziness is detectable by others.
The manager of the nursery rang me today and wanted to know when Jack last had a poo. The funny thing is, I don't even flinch at stuff like this anymore. I knew where she was going with this because he was straining with all his toddler might yesterday and today. So then I started feeling bad for sending my son to nursery when he's in a constipated state, and then I started feeling bad for not being there to hold his little sweaty head in my arms. I abandoned my slightly muddy, scrambled egg-covered, poo-filled son for work. Bad Mother.
For all the posts I write about my dispair with the "Yummy Mummy Syndrome" (i.e. the inability of society to accept the fact that most of us are fat, tired, and not at all interested in Stella McCartney's latest line of thigh-high vegetarian boots), I often fall victim to my own feelings of guilt. Because being a mother, if anything else, is mostly about guilt: either experiencing it yourself or inflicting it on your children at a later date.
So here I sit, waiting for a phone call from someone to let me know if Jack managed to squeeze out a poo or if I need to take him to see the doctor. If anyone thinks the life of a working mum is glamorous, they are sorely mistaken. Yummy Mummy, my arse.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
newsflash: real pregnant women get fat
So I was flipping through my weekly supply of high brow popular literature and came across an article about Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice). Accolades were given for Geri's fabulous post-baby body, a mere four weeks after giving birth! She's in her size 8 (that's a US size 6, kids) skinny jeans already. Nancy wossername who's married to Vic Reeves is also incredibly thin after giving birth days ago to - wait for it - twins! And apparently Katie Holmes has hired a personal trainer in a desperate bid to return to her pre-pregnancy figure for her wedding. Aren't they fabulous?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
For the love of water retention and fat stores for breastfeeding, please stop publishing articles like this. Women have a distorted sense of body image as it is; we don't need the media to tell us that fat is bad even after just giving birth. What normal woman has a perfectly flat tummy less than a month after giving birth, particularly after a c-section? Where are our priorities when our biggest concern as a new mother is getting back into skinny jeans?
There's been a recent magazine spread showing a certain celebrity in all her pregnant glory, but she's been airbrushed within an inch of her life. Surely even she must have stretchmarks (especially as this is her second child in less than a year) and rolls of fat. Instead she looks like she's been modelled out of styrofoam and sprayed with a fine mist of bronzing powder. You can't even see her c-section scar, despite the shot of her in nothing but a strategically placed sheepskin. They've erased all evidence of a previous birth and edited out any signs of a current pregnancy, except for the bump. It's like pregnancy in the movies (or my personal favourite, the gravity-defying bump in "Lost") where perfect bodies strap on a prosthetic belly, and remain fashionable and gorgeous.
In reality, pregnancy is like filling your body with lumpy cottage cheese and 50 litres of olive oil, drawing a relief map of the Himalayas with a purple marker pen on 90% of your body, blowdrying your hair until it resembles burnt grass, using those comedy binoculars that leave black rings around your eyes, planting hair follicles in strange and surprising locations, inflating your hands/feet/face with a bicycle pump like a Peking duck, and boobs that skim the surface of your navel. With a bump.
I would pay big money to see that celebrity picture.