Muddling Along Mummy

I think men might be cleverer than women…

Muddling Along — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:56:21 +0000

I think it might be time to concede victory in the intellectual stakes to the male half of the species.

Reluctantly I think we need to accept that men have got one over the fairer sex and have outwitted us fairly and squarely.

Simply put the evidence is that men stopped wearing high heels.
Yes, we can have a carve out for the platforms of the 1970s and the cowboy boots but, despite both halves of the human race having worn heels a few hundred years ago, men saw the light and realised that wearing heels is a crazy idea and opted out.

Because it is utterly nuts.
Yes, they do sort of make your legs look longer, can make your bum appear a bit smaller possibly and make a nice tip-tapping noise.

On the other hand you spend a day trying to balance on the equivalent of a vertical pencil, can’t run without looking like a numpty and wobble away at the first sign of uneven flooring.

Add in a bit of rain and you discover that balancing on your tip toes and pencil ends doesn’t exact give you much in the way of grip, especially on nice flat polished surfaces.

You can’t stand up for any significant length of time without your feet hurting and having to impersonate a flamingo balancing on one foot at a time to try and reduce the pain and invariably you find yourself having to carry and extra pair of flatter shoes for when it all gets too much to cope with.

There’s a reason why half the population gave up on heels – you can’t build an empire whilst worrying about your balance.

Ladies we need to take back the kitten heel as our best hope of winning the war of the sexes!

Is the written letter really dead?

Muddling Along — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 17:25:41 +0000

When did you last write a letter?

When did you last receive a letter?

On the Today programme this morning, economist Ian Senior opined that “the sad truth is that the traditional physical letter is only there for people who can’t send emails”.

I’m not sure that this is right – I’m not sure that hand written letters are the preserve only of those who can’t or who won’t embrace modern technology.

Yes for an awful lot of daily communication email is a great substitute but there are some things that still need a proper letter, preferably handwritten.

What about thank you cards?

Wedding invitations?

Birthday cards?

And what about postcards you pop in the mail to remind friends and family that you are thinking of them?

For me a letter is far more meaningful than an email
Is this because I spend my working life crouched over a computer tap-tap-tapping away at emails and documents?

Is it because I’m a die in the ditch Luddite?

I think not, I just think that, whilst technology has moved on and electronic communication has changed our lives, there is still something very important about putting pen to paper.

Despite being fairly gadget obsessed I still keep a paper diary with handwritten lists in it – I just cannot get an electronic equivalent to work for me.

Same goes for Christmas cards – I’ve tried sending out electronic ones but the handwritten versions with a message scribbled on it just seem more personal?

Am I showing my age or are letters still very much alive and part of our lives?

The Friday Rant Club – I am still a full time Mum

Muddling Along — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:36:32 +0000

Let me get this absolutely clear – set it out straight for those of you in the back who may not have been playing attention – I am a full time Mum.

Yes I may work BUT I am still a mum even when I’m away from the house.

I don’t suddenly get to hand back all the things associated with having children the second I step out of the door.

Irrespective of my physical presence in their lives I am still a full time mum.

I may not be responsible for their care during all of the daylight hours BUT that does not make me any less of a Mum.

I still have to work out what we will all eat, what they will do, I still worry about coughs and colds – I do not flick a switch and stop being a mother because I do some other stuff during the day.

In the same way that becomming a Daddy was an irreversible process for Mr Muddling, so it is for mothers – whether we work or not we are fundamentally changed – physically, emotionally, mentally – by the fact that we have children.

It’s like breathing – I carry on doing it even when I’m doing other stuff.

So can we stop with the whole working mothers aren’t full time mothers thing? I’m as much of a mum as any other mother – it’s just I have exchanged one set of small demanding, often unreasonable people for a lot of larger, equally demanding, frequently unreasonable people.

Right – got that off my chest.

Have a good weekend all!

__________________________________

The Friday Rant Club is a chance to get those niggles, those irritants, those things that make you want to throw a toddler-stylee tantrum off your chest before the weekend.

Go on, let it all out and if you feel like it there’s a rather nice little button over there on the right to show you that you like a bit of a rant or even better get in touch and send me a guest rant.

Frazzled

Muddling Along — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:25:30 +0000

What a day.

One of those days where I am I pulled in too many directions – exhilarating in some ways, frustrating in others.

Have I managed to do any of those different roles even adequately?

Who knows.

Work hasn’t been great this week (for that read utterly nuts, unremittingly nuts) and I’ve had to work on days when I had hoped to be off with the girls. Same old.

Today was more exciting than usual – next week is going to be interesting. It’s at time like these when I remember the things I love about my job – the pointy edge of the life of a company and the people who work for it and juggling calls, viewpoints and trying to get it to all come together.*

The downside of this has been having to juggle with the girls – we haven’t had a full day together but we have had this afternoon and it has been fun. I guess I’m lucky that they know and understand that sometimes I need to work. Guess training them from an early age helps!

But we’ve had cake, we’ve had fun, we’ve had cuddles.

And the best bit is that I’ve just got off the phone with my boss and I don’t need to be in the office tomorrow, in fact it was almost a call where he seemed to be sort of understanding that part time does mean some days not being there. Progress of a sort.

So tomorrow a full day with the girls and yet a day where I’ll be checking my Blackberry, answering emails, on the phone but I will still physically be here. I’m going to see Bigger at her swimming class, take a whole big bag of baby clothes to my sister who is due any day and we’re all going to have lunch together.
Juggling.

Yes the juggling does mean I’m not always 100% doing all the things I should be, but do I have to give 100% to everything all the time? So yes I’m frazzled, tired, in need of a break but it’s sort of ok. Or at least it is until the next crisis and urgent call I can’t ignore when the girls are seeing how loudly they can scream…

*sort of tricky to explain what I do…

Does maternal guilt really exist?

Muddling Along — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:54:24 +0000

I don’t know if I’m a bit of a heartless cow or just good at compartmentalising but I don’t get the whole maternal guilt thing.

There I’ve said it.

I don’t get that mothers feel guilty when they leave their children and obsess over every choice they have made and beat themselves up for anything that might be a bit sub-optimal but was the best that they can do at the time.

I especially don’t get working mothers’ guilt. Guilt that appears to come from the fact you are doing something for you, away from your child and not there pandering to them all the time. I wonder if this is all a construct of the media, a way to get us to buy self help guides, to watch TV shows offering solutions to something that doesn’t really exist.

I understand regret – I regret those times that I wasn’t there to cuddle them when they were poorly, the firsts that I have missed, the times when they tell me that they miss me because they haven’t seen me for a few days.

But I do not feel guilty.

And let us be clear – I’m a Catholic and I know what feeling guilty feels like. I feel guilty if I can’t face taking the girls to mass each week and suffering through an hour of trying to make them behave like mini grown ups rather than exuberant pre-schoolers. I know what guilt is.

My husband doesn’t feel guilty that he goes out to work – that he barely took any paternity leave, that he has only done nursery drop off a couple times – it just is a part of his life that we find the best childcare we can and then leave them confidently with that carer.

I hear other mothers discussing how guilty they felt about teeny, tiny decisions taken at haste in a normal day and I wonder why they are beating themselves up over something that ultimately won’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things. I’m doing my best – yes sometimes I am a bit shouty, or short, or distracted but I am doing my best. And I know that when things are out of balance we will find a way to sort it all out and get life back into the right order.

I read about mothers feeling guilt about working, about not breastfeeding for longer, about controlled crying and want to run over and give them a shake and say you made the right decision for you at that time with the information and situation you had.

And perhaps share with them what a kind midwife told me that childhood amnesia means they won’t remember any of the ways you messed up in the early years and that they were designed to survive – it takes an awful lot to mess it up sufficiently to damage them.

Evolution is a wonderful thing.

Or maybe I am just an emotional pygmy – what do you think?

Happy un-Valentines day

Muddling Along — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:13:57 +0000

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly needy person – yes I do like the occasional bit of positive feedback or a compliment on how I look but I’m not out there begging for my ego to be massaged regularly.

Valentines day should be easy to write off as just another day. I’m happy in my marriage, comfortable in this relationship and since we’ve been together nearly 15 years these things are probably consigned to the file marked ‘things we used to do’.

Trouble is that it is so much easier to say than to do.

Normally I’d take advantage of Valentines being one of only a handful of dates when I can be sure we can both get out of work at a reasonable time* to have a nice night in with some cheese and wine and to avoid the whole commercial-fest that Valentines eating out has become.

Except this year Mr Muddling is away and it is a little bit harder to just shrug and say today means nothing. I’m not even sure if, in amongst his all consuming current work project, he has even realised what is going on – he muttered something about ‘are we doing it?’ at the weekend but to be fair that might have been about unloading the dishwasher.

I’m home alone again this week – the attraction of having total control over what to watch and what to eat for supper has rather faded after doing that all of last week too. The downsides of it just being me vs. the girls at bedtime and overnight have grown day by day – it hasn’t been as bad as it could have been (TOUCH WOOD!) but it is still nice to have someone to share the burden.

I guess the trouble is that it is one thing to shun Valentines as part of a happy, joint boycotting duo. It is quite another thing to be on your own, knowing that your partner is somewhere else and too busy to talk and in any event hasn’t realised that today has any more significance than tomorrow or yesterday.

I shall be spending tonight on my own, with my book, some wine and some chocolate and getting on with my crochet. Deep down I’m hoping that he will get in touch or he will remember when he comes home at the end of the week.

So who’s up for sharing one of those rather scrummy looking M&S meals for 2?

*admittedly Valentines does mark the anniversary of my first all-nighter 12 years ago…

Last minute Valentines heart hairclips

Muddling Along — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:42:41 +0000

Had a Bad Mummy Moment tonight.

In the heat of it all – work being crazy busy, trains being delayed and the such like – I realised that not only was I not going to see the girls until tomorrow night (I got home too last to see them at bedtime thanks to train delays and I have an early meeting in the morning, I’ll be away before Littler is up and Bigger will probably still be sleeping too) but that tomorrow is Valentines so I decided to rustle up a little something for them both to find on their breakfast plates in the morning

Attic 24′s tiny hearts take mere minutes to do, especially once you have done a few and got into the swing of things, and then I added in some of my kirby clips and tah dah!

I can’t get the words to flow

Muddling Along — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:10:19 +0000

Most of the time I can sit at my computer and the words flow from my fingers – writing for this blog is instinctive. I think my posts all over the place, lying in the bath, sitting on the train and they gradually form somewhere in the recesses of my mind. When I come to write them usually they tip tap onto the page more or less effortlessly.

Except at the moment I am finding it hard to write. I’m finding it hard to get things set down

There is an awful lot going on at the moment which doesn’t help – work is getting crazy again and Mr Muddling was away all of last week and is away all of this week. It’s not that I mind being on my own, it has it’s attractions, but for some reason it does seem to dull the creativity.

The biggest problem is that there is so much I can’t talk about going on – as always, the thing at the front of your mind that You Must Not Mention is all that you can think about!

The baby thing preys on my mind. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which things I should be doing to increase the chances and I’m not even sure if I have the emotional energy to go on. I had assumed that I would be pregnant again by now – I’m not and it seems like an awfully distant possibility. I could write every day about where I am with this but who would want to read that?

My to do list is also out of control – I want to sort out my bedroom but I can’t do that during the week because Bigger has taken up residence in my bed. The upstairs hallway needs sorting, the clutter is gradually coming back and I want to get everything finished and sorted. Our builder has gone missing and hasn’t come back to finish the things that need finishing so we are in a sort of house limbo – sort of finished but sort of not.

So winge winge winge and a blog post is done – better get back to doing all the other things that I need to do.

Can women have it all? Do men have it all? Or do none of us?

Muddling Along — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:20:24 +0000

I’m increasingly coming around to the view that the only way to get ahead is to have a strong support network at home – yes, women are making great leaps forward BUT if I look around me at the women one layer up from in my career they generally have a husband at home. They are free to go ahead and strive forward in their career because there is someone else there to do everything else – they can have a single, driven approach because they don’t have those household responsibilities.

It is an awful lot harder to try and be two equals both trying to have equally high flying careers because neither of you is getting the dry cleaning sorted, the washing done or the house cleaned and it means a level of distraction when compared to your peers who have that sort of infrastructure.

I should probably feel sorry for my husband that he, an alpha male, made the mistake of marrying an alpha female rather than a nice girl who would have spent her life telling him how great he was and creating a settled home. Instead the poor man has to search for his own socks, do his share of the home making and be up in the night with small children too.

So if we crack the enigma that the only way to get to the top as a woman is to have a beta man behind the scenes then why aren’t more women doing that? Why aren’t there more stay at home husbands, more men taking part time work to look after the children, more men in the playgrounds?

And that I think is the nub of it, that women have still not got themselves to a place where they are the alpha’s in a relationship and where men still have the idea that they have to be breadwinners deeply engrained.

Logic has nothing to do with it, emotion and evolution more so. We need to be raising a generation of girls and boys to think that Mummy going out to work and Daddy staying at home is the norm or even that Mummy and Daddy going out to work but sharing the home tasks and childcare is the norm. I remember reading about one Scandinavian country where school children were asking if men could be prime minster because there hadn’t been a male leader in their lifetime – we need to change the wiring of our society in a similar way if it is to change these underlying currents that are shaping society. Not so that women take over but that them holding the role is seen as equally obvious.

But perhaps that isn’t the answer – perhaps that is going too far the other way from where we stand today? Perhaps instead what we have to consider is that there might be an awful lot of men out there who are faced with no choice but to carry on working and climbing up the career ladder. Perhaps there are men out there who want more time with their families, who want to slow down on the career, the stress, the time away.

Perhaps what we should be looking for is something new, a workplace where both parents can work less hours without stigma, a workplace where family first is the norm and not firm first. A place where presenteeism is a thing of the past and delivering results is more important.

We have had a few Fridays recently when both of us have been not working – it has been wonderful, that little bit more time together as a family has a disproportionate benefit. Yes job loss is scary, yes it puts additional pressure on the remaining worker but perhaps, for us, it might be the opportunity to consider what we want to do as a family and how we can make work work for us.

Photo credit

Enough with the judgemental claptrap

Muddling Along — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:29:56 +0000

I’ve always thought that one of the benefits of having gone back to work into my male ghetto so quickly after the girls was born was that I missed out on an awful lot of Mummy interaction. Yes I missed the opportunity to make friends, to share experiences but I also missed a whole lot of judgemental tripe.

You may or may not be aware that Amanda Holden recently had a baby. You may or may not be aware that she is going back to work quite quickly after that baby has been born.

It appears that this is enough to give rise to outpourings of judgemental comments all over the place about what sort of mother this makes her and what sort of example it is setting. Much the same tsunami of wrath was played out when Rachida Dati took a short period of leave after her baby’s birth. A storm of comments that doesn’t take into account what support she has set up for herself, if she is really leaving her baby behind and what is driving her to do this – might it be that she is doing a job she loves and wants to do, has her baby with her and her family around her. Or not.

It’s all a bit sad making really – how can anyone stand on the sidelines and say what is the right or wrong choice for that mother and her family? How can they know what the situation is at home, the pressures of work or money or career and how can they understand the complex balance of choices that has led her to be going back to work quickly?

I’ve been on the receiving end of a fair amount of judgemental comments about whether I was going to go back to work or to throw it all in and stay at home. Comments that failed to understand the what and the why and just exposed the prejudices of the people making them. Comments that showed that they didn’t understand that my choices were made because of all manner of dynamics some to do with me, some to do with my career, some to do with my husband’s job, some to do with childcare and so on.

How about we sit back and work on the basis that all the other parents out there are making the choices they do for the right reasons for them and their family.

How about we ignore that yes, there are a few parents who probably need saving from making the wrong decisions but they are a tiny minority compared to the millions of parents doing the right thing day in, day out.

How about we consider that we probably don’t know everything about the iceberg of a family from the tip we see played out in public.

It covers all aspects of parenting from how we give birth, how we fed our babies, how we live with them – we shouldn’t be standing on the sidelines judging, we should be offering help, support and not knocking people down.

How about we start being kinder and less judgemental and remember that even one comment can be incredibly hurtful and will linger in the minds of those who hear it. The internet is a powerful place, it has a long memory and once things have been said it is awfully hard to unsay them.