Bonkers Page 19

  It turns out that this is the bravest face of all!

  In the meantime, if you happen to see a grown woman and a tiny human dressed in leopard print absconding from the local school gates and heading in the direction of the nearest swing set – please look the other way or feel free to join us.

  MY TOP FEARS OF RETURNING TO WORK

  Despite my fears and anxieties about returning to work for the first time after having my first tiny human, I found that by the time I was due back, when she was ten months old, I was starting to look forward to it. To having a slice of life back that was mine, independent of my role as mum and wife. Add into that the very idea of being able to drink actual hot coffee and think only about myself, and all of a sudden being back at work a few days a week didn’t seem so awful. However, like the rest of the mums returning back to work, I still had some major concerns and genuine fears. Therefore, with a dash of ‘how the hell am I going to pull this off’ humour, I’m hoping that sharing my tongue-in-cheek list of fears below will bring a smile of recognition to every mum currently gearing themselves up to get their head back into the game of work.

  1. Will there be coffee? And will it be HOT? Oh, and can I drink it without someone hugging my kneecaps and slamming their head into my fanny?

  2. Will I be lonely going to the toilet on my own? Who will babble at me, sit on my lap and cover me in dribble and shredded pieces of sucked and spat-out toilet paper?

  3. Will I remember that my name isn’t actually Mum? Dammit, how will I know when someone is actually talking to me unless they are using the m-word? In fact, what is my name?

  4. How will I cope with the silence? I wonder if they would mind playing a mashup of CBeebies in the background accompanied by the sounds of cats being strangled on repeat, just so I can concentrate?

  5. How will I handle being clean ALL day? I wonder if I could get John from Purchasing to pebbledash me with spat-out cheese sarnie on his lunch break? Or would that be too much like bordering on a weird sexual act that’s not appropriate for the workplace?

  6. If I don’t have a gazillion bits of plastic crap to hurdle over, pick up or tread on with bare, unsuspecting feet, how will I ever get in my exercise quota? I’ll tell you what, I’ll ask Sally from HR to go and empty a multipack of drawing pins and paperclips around my desk with a few open-mouthed staplers for good measure. Yes, that should do it. Oh, and if every time I attempt to approach my desk someone could jump on my back, wrap their arms around my neck in a chokehold whilst shouting ‘Giddy up, mummy,’ that would be awesome!

  7. What the hell will I talk about? It’s been so long since I had an actual adult conversation that didn’t centre around wiping bums, sleep schedules and how much wine is really too much. Shit, what do people even talk about now? I must make a note to try and stay awake tonight and watch the news for the first time in eighteen months.

  8. In fact, what the hell do people even wear these days? Will leggings pebbledashed with porridge and worn out at the knees, and anything resembling clean (ish) thrown over them, pass the work wardrobe test?

  9. Oh shit, do I really have to go back?

  THE STAY-AT-HOME MUM

  I went back to work, but things change, life happens and sometimes, no matter how much you need to return to work to help with family finances or follow your own personal career ambitions, other stuff just gets in the way and makes it impossible. For me and for us as a family, once we’d ventured down the one-way path of two tiny humans just eighteen months apart and two ongoing battles with PND and postpartum psychosis, it became clear that returning to my high-flying cushty career in Geneva was a dead end. I was just not well enough to deal with the emotional strains of keeping my mental shit together, whilst planning the childcare logistics of two under two and keeping a global client happy and convinced I was still up to the job.

  Something had to give, and I wasn’t prepared for it to be my mind. So I became a stay-at-home mum for the first time. I have to admit to you that pre-motherhood, I thought the role of a stay-at-home-mum was easier than going to work. I had rose-tinted visions of what it meant and what it would look like: spending hazy sunny days hanging out with my tiny human, enjoying endless walks, belly giggles and daytime TV. No sign of a dirty nappy, mountain of washing, sleepless night or a feeling of loneliness and lack of fulfilment. And if I’m honest, after years of loving and thriving on my busy and creative career, I found that I was looking forward to having a break from it and having my role be that of ‘mum’.

  However, that’s the thing with preconceptions, they bite you in the arse – royally!

  Overnight, I went from career mum, batting off the guilt-inducing questions of ‘What? You’ve gone back to work already?’ and ‘How many days do you have her in childcare for?’, as well as comments such as ‘I’m so lucky, I don’t have to work’ to now batting off the guilt-inducing questions of ‘Oh, so you don’t work?’ and ‘What do you do all day?’, alongside comments such as ‘Wow, being at home with two under two must drive you crazy!’, ‘I bet you wish you could go back to work for a break!’ and ‘I’m so lucky I have my career to keep me sane and keep me from not feeling like “just” a mum’.

  No win-win situation, I tell you!

  THE WORK FROM HOME MUM

  Even when I mixed my role of stay-at-home mum and career mum and became a work-from-home mum, the guilt-laden and insensitive questions and comments remained. Oh, so you’re a writer? How on earth can you do that properly with the kids running around? How do you get anything done? I bet you feel like you’re not doing anything to your full potential. Are you published yet? Oh you’re not. Wow, so you’re not earning anything from your writing but you’re spending every spare minute doing it rather than folding the washing, cleaning the bath and taking proper care of your kids? God, that must be a HUGE financial burden for your hubby.

  Kill me now!

  The thing that I’ve found that increases the hurt conjured by all these questions is the raw fact that they all leave us questioning our self-worth.

  It was one day of feeling like a particularly worthless work-from-home mum, trying to juggle looking after two tiny humans under two with following my dreams of being a writer, that I wrote the following section in my journal to vent how frustrated I was feeling. I had just finished a conversation with my husband about our different roles and how they were both as equally important as each other (despite only one earning a wage), which made me realise that the only person questioning my self-worth was me – and that I had to do something about it. I had to start realising that my role is a worthy one. That what I do, despite its lack of financial reward, is of great importance. That I am worthy.

  YOU ARE WORTHY!

  I am no longer a main breadwinner. I am no longer bringing home the readies, BUT I AM OF VALUE and what I do is of GREAT WORTH. You may now be the primary breadwinner, but I am the primary caregiver. I am the fount of all tiny-pieces-of-plastic-crap knowledge. My boardroom may now be the bomb site that used to be our kitchen, my new clients may now be on the slightly younger can’t speak or wipe their own tiny arses size, but I deserve the same respect that was awarded me when I won a new account or nailed a client presentation.

  I deserve this respect because I earn it 24/7 of every goddam day. I do not begrudge the fact that I have children or the fact that I have a new role, but I do resent anyone who does not see my role as important or doesn’t see me as worthy of receiving full respect for it.

  However, as well as teaching others this, I need to teach myself to respect what I do, to be fierce about my new role and my achievements in the same ways I once was when wearing my latest office outfit and presenting strategy to my peers.

  My new role is one that has involved a complete transformation – of mind, body, emotions and life. It is a role I live and breathe, as it is one that requires me to be at work and on duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In this role, I am indispensable. The shit WILL hit the fan if I am not around
, and there is no one else who can do my job better than me.

  My payment is in smiles, kisses, tantrums, daily fails and daily wins that before now would have seemed insignificant but which now mean more than significance itself. It is a role that leaves me feeling exhausted and spent. It makes me at times feel like I am failing spectacularly and at other times like I could run the universe. It is the most important role I have ever had but it leaves me feeling that this role of such magnitude is not rewarded with the importance it deserves. The importance I deserve. Instead, it is implied that the role in itself is not enough but needs to be supplemented by other more worthy roles, jobs or successes, since this most important role is no more than a hobby. For if I am ‘just’ doing this role, then I am not working hard enough, I am not fulfilling my true potential and I am letting my real hopes and dreams fall by the wayside because of it.

  I would like to say on behalf of every mum out there that motherhood is not a hobby. It is not a sideline project to run alongside the main event. It is not a fun activity you can pick up and fit into your otherwise more important and worthwhile enterprises. Motherhood is the main event and as mums – stay-at-home mums, career mums or work-from-home mums – we somehow have to work out how to shoehorn our hopes, dreams, desires and careers in around it. There is no off switch, weekends off or downtime. For those of us who run our careers and businesses alongside motherhood, there is no let-up on the mothering role. It remains the same, the workload trebles and we deal with it and move on, in the best state we can. Unlike other new jobs we find we do not replace one with the other. Instead we (somehow) juggle the two, let go of some of the expectations, increase others and reluctantly learn to compromise – and then suck up the guilt that this compromise evokes. No matter what we do as mums – go back to work, stay at home or work from home – it’s difficult, challenging, rewarding, exhausting and exhilarating in its own right. However, we should never lose sight of the fact that working or not does not make us more or less worthy mums. Just because we don’t work outside the home does not mean what we do is worth less.

  We are women, we are mums, we are pioneers, we are caregivers, we are trying our damn best, we are fighting social and personal battles to triumph for ourselves and our families.

  WE, my friends, are WORTHY!

  CHAPTER 15

  POST-BABY BODY

  BODY CONFIDENCE VERSUS BODY BULLSHIT

  Right, let me be the first to tell you this little nugget of truth. You don’t have to fit into your pre-baby jeans, days, weeks, months, years even after exiting a tiny human out of your body. Hell, you don’t have to fit back into those spray-on tight, muffin-top splurging, camel toe creating garments ever again – and you know what? This does not make you a lazy, unfit, unhealthy crap mother and a disgrace to all womankind! I know, who knew, right?

  And, yes I know I’m going against the perfectly preened, honed and toned grain of the media and crazy social media world at large with their perfect images of the perfect pre- and post-baby bodies. However, another secret I’m going to dare to tell the truth about is that none of the stuff we see in the magazines and online is real anyway. It’s all a pile of airbrushed and perfectly filtered baloney to make pages of magazines, Instagram accounts and Facebook feeds look pretty. It’s Narnia, it’s Disney, its Santa fucking Claus, it’s not real.

  And you know what? As long as we keep sight of this, then we are all going to be OK … Aren’t we?

  God, it’s hard, isn’t it, to remain strong and resolute in this way of thinking, because we have been surrounded by and indoctrinated with these pictures since the beginning of our time. Pictures of a fake reality, in which everything and everyone in it is airbrushed within an inch of their lives. I mean, for God’s sake, even the dolls we played with as little girls, had a waist size that was anatomically incorrect and genetically impossible without removing three ribs. All topped off with the perfect skin, hair, a pair of perky boobs and a set of Hollywood white teeth that Simon Cowell and Rylan would fight tooth and perfectly manicured nail for.

  So, you know what, my lovely friend? I don’t blame us for looking in the mirror on one of our wobbly thigh days and, instead of feeling empowered, feeling a bit inadequate and like we don’t meet the standards that we have been expected to meet for the majority of our lives. But, please listen up, lovely, these standards are bullshit, their foundations based on an airbrushed, non-existent reality. These images have been lying to us for decades and even now as grown women, looking at these images and knowing they are not reality, that the person in the picture does not really look like this, that we should brush it off and treat it for what it is – a picture that needs to look pretty rather than real to make us buy whatever they are peddling – there is still a part in our well-educated minds and the self-conscious teenage corner of our hearts that has us wondering, no matter how briefly, ‘Why don’t I look like that?’.

  It plants the poisonous and unfounded seed in even the most confident of us that we need to exercise more, we need to make more time to look more polished, we need to be, well, more.

  This negative way of viewing our bodies and our appearances is compounded by the sad reality that after our bodies fulfil their beautiful potential and produce another human being, we are at our lowest and most insecure rather than feeling the most empowered and the most beautiful. And isn’t this just all sorts of wrong?

  I’m not saying I was or am immune to this hell. I’ve brought into this perfect body charade since as long as I can remember. I brought the magazines, flicked through the glossy pages adorned with glossy hair and skin, feeling nothing but awe and a burning desire to one day look like that, to have a figure like that, skin like that. And when I finally did look like that, I would finally be … be what? Feel what? Happy? Accomplished? Like I’d finally made it? And had proved myself?

  Hand on heart, I have looked at these magazines over the years and made myself all of the following soulless promises.

  By the time I was twenty-five I would be a comfortable size 8 (not just a fluke size 8 because I’ve had a bug for the last week). By the time I was thirty I would have a six pack and arms like Jennifer Anniston.

  And these promises seeped out and carried themselves forward into my pregnancy and motherhood. I will have toned legs and arms throughout my pregnancy, I will not get stretch marks, I will get into shape as soon as I can post-baby, I will not let myself go, I will be back into my jeans before you know it, I will look like those mums I’ve seen in the magazines, on social media feeds and on bright, shiny parenting blogs. These mums are obviously doing a fantastic job, they are owning motherhood. These mums are what mums should look like … these mums are happy and together.

  I brought into the fake reality and pressure following the birth of my first tiny human, desperate to prove to myself and the world at large that motherhood hadn’t changed me. I needed to look like those mums I’d seen and read about so much. Because, God forbid, if I didn’t, the whole world would think I was not coping, I was not cut out for the game of motherhood.

  I really put an emphasis on ‘bouncing back’. I realise now it wasn’t so much about the actual pounds lost, but rather was intermingled and tangled up with the desire to bounce back, to snap back into the old me, my old life, to bounce back and bounce back as quickly as possible. It was almost like it was a race, a test to see how quickly after growing a tiny human I could get back to normal, fit back into my old life, get back my old body and fit back into those godforsaken pre-baby jeans – a symbol that I’d arrived.

  We all feel a bit like this, don’t we? Even despite towing the rational line of thought in front of others, and insisting that ‘of course we realise it’s going to take time to shift the baby weight, we’re not going to do anything too soon’, there is that little voice in our head goading us to go and try on our pre-baby jeans just so we can gauge just how long our bounce back is going to take.

  Well, I am here to tell you that we all need to stop th
is shit right now. We need to back away from the scales, the skinny jeans and the ridiculous images of what we are told a ‘perfect’ mum looks like, because you know what? You, me, and every other mum out there are already enough. We are already perfection personified with our stretch marks, thread veins, slighter softer edges. We are beautiful. Take a look at your beautiful self. A long good look and remind yourself that you are already enough.

  MY PRE-BABY JEANS CAN GO F*** THEMSELVES

  (To be read when you can’t even fit your big toe let alone your leg into these goddam mofos – aka your pre-baby, I ain’t ever getting my arse into them bastards again so pass me a biscuit jeans.)

  Look at you, hanging there, looking all fabulous, not a seam out of place. All neat and sexy, acting like the queen jeffing bee. All elongated lines and unstretched to perfection waistline, taunting me and making me feel like I never even knew you, let alone was once able to wear you out in public.

  What is it about our pre-baby jeans that drive us so goddam, batshit crazy post-baby? Six weeks – yes, ladies, SIX ridiculous weeks after pushing a tiny human out of my vagina – I was trying to push my swollen elephant calves and bits into my pre-baby jeans. There they were, taunting me from the back of the wardrobe, making me stupidly think that if I squinted at them with one eye closed, whilst standing at a feng shui angle at the other side of the bedroom, they would actually still fit me, no problemo. The evil seed was planted and before you know it, there I was, ripping off my maternity leggings and trying to coax my postpartum body into my pre-baby skinny jeans. What the hell was I thinking and what the hell was I trying to prove?