Mama FAQ

Happy day, British mamas! I should confess here that the word 'mothering' sounds to my American ear like 'smothering'. 

I might have forgotten Smothering Sunday had it not been for an intervention by the eternally wise Bibsey Mama. Having now remembered it in the nick of time (whew), here follows a motherhood faq a la Chaos HQ. 

For banana showers. 

Describe Motherhood in three words

Poo. Puke. Bananas. The universal uniform of motherhood. Some say this triplicate is good for the complexion, others say it builds character. Most agree it poses significant challenges to mental health. 

Does your experience differ from your mother's? How?

My mama raised three kids and several dozen chickens with only an occasional 'darn it'. I manage two kids and one toaster by speaking a sailor dialect. 

What's the hardest thing about being a mum?

Kids go bananas at the slightest provocation. 

What's the best thing?

Kids go bananas at the slightest provocation. 

How has it changed you?

I don't even remember what used to get me out of bed in the morning. I mean, no one was kicking me or demanding bananas in those days. 

What do you hope for your kids?

That they will never lose their joy and nonsense. 

What do you fear for them?

That they will lose their joy and nonsense. 

What makes it all worthwhile? 

The reasons are more numerous than stars in the sky. Like days spent jumping puddles and hunting invisible dragons, covered in finger paint, glitter, and bananas. 

Return to the mothership

Ali has discovered the plot of every story ever told.

Beam me up, mama. 

Here it is: baby misses mama, baby goes searching for mama, baby finds mama, baby is filled with joy and screaming adulation.

A twist on the plot is that sometimes baby is looking for papa. Sometimes even - gasp - mama and her papa.

Ali likes to loudly recount this plot structure during movies. TV shows. Book reading time. Etc.

Lately her parental search algorithm has bleached into the physical world. Toys must be nested with their parents.

Which is why we spent last weekend at the zoo: a baby giraffe had to be reunited with her mama.

Plastiraffe. 

There is a London restaurant called Giraffe that tolerates kids more than most London restaurants. And they give away little plastic giraffes with the smoothies.

One problem with little plastic giraffes is that they are pretty cool and thus worth fighting over with your sister. This means that little plastic giraffes are usually missing at least one leg and look a bit twitchy.

Another problem with little plastic giraffes is that they miss their mamas so very much.

And so our twitchy, three-legged plastic giraffe had to be returned to her mother unit. As an added bonus her papa was there too.

You there Mom?

The giraffe parents looked uncertain when confronted with their blue plastic offspring, even though she was offered up to them with much joy and screaming adulation.

At moments like these I am reminded that my kids see me very differently than I see myself. They seem to think I am a super-human who holds up the dome of the world.

I remember having this concept of my parents too. I know it will be replaced  with criticism, then understanding.

Which is a relief: dome-holder is an awfully hard title to live up to. And it can lead to backache.

Mama culpa

Dear Mom,

I'm sorry. Years late, I know. Perhaps it will bring you comfort to know that your granddaughters are currently locked in a vicious intergalactic war with no exit strategy. I'll explain.

As Ana sees it, her little sister is Zuul, destroyer of worlds, habitat-thief and crowing monster. She is like the evil penguin in The Wrong Trousers, the one who takes all of Gromit's stuff and then convinces the Wallace - allegedly the responsible household adult - to behave like a complete tit and a bit of a criminal.

From Ali's perspective, Ana (who is actually just a giant hairball in need of vigorous hair-pulling) should adopt a more relaxed attitude. Ana's toys need a lot of breaking, because they are more fun broken, especially balloons. And if you rip the pages out of books, you get to make up your own story, right? Crowing to high heaven helps to drive this point home.

THIS IS SPARTA!!!

Their perspectives are clinically insane and totally irreconcilable. There is simply no way to communicate to them in Babish, their native tongue, that 'favourite' is a pretty dumb word to include in the same paragraph as 'I love you both more than the cosmos and would gladly go under a bus for you tomorrow - yes both of you - if only you would just stop squabbling about who gets to push me under.'

You see, all I really want is a little quiet. And to sit down. And for the bickering to go out with the tide, or on the breeze, or with the rubbish - I'm not picky about how it leaves. I suspect you know this feeling well.

Mom, I am guessing that you had a pretty relaxing life before my sister and I landed from Mars. Maybe you didn't enjoy separating claws from scalps on a daily basis for a decade and a half. Maybe the necessity to always have TWO OF EVERYTHING ALL OF THE TIME because we were too primitive to share ANYTHING drove you completely batty and left you with little option but to ABuse the CApslock FunCTION. Maybe as you went to bed each night, just the thought of waking up in the morning made you feel profoundly beat, because you knew we'd be up by 6 and locked back into our demented prizeless tussle by 6:15.

Keep your friends close and your frenemies closer. 

It's a sick cosmic joke really: kids do the most damage to their captors in the early years before they are even capable of forming memories. It's a watertight defense - better than insanity and innocence put together. Which is why prior to having kids I never even realized that I owed you such a huge apology for all the million awful things I surely did to you in my pre-school years that I can't even remember.

Mom, I wish I could return to you the years of lost sleep and peace. However, rest assured that your revenge is currently being enacted by two very talented horsetoddlers of the apocolypse. Their dedication to the job is admirable, and you'd be proud to know that they have both been nominated for a Nihilist of the Year Award - they are currently trying to out-campaign each other, Miliband-style. They are clearly worth every fruit shoot you (or Zuul) paid them, and more.

'Would I fire my sister? No, but I'd sell her for ice cream in a Night Garden minute.'

Take solice in this: your years of exhaustion paved the way for a great life-long friendship - seriously - Tanta is my best friend. She is not even paying me to say that, although she will certainly dash off and pen something even nicer about me, and then we'll be stuck in a bitter flying compliments war that could last for weeks - who knows, maybe years. But seriously, I haven't clawed her scalp in over a decade and I don't know what I'd do without a friend like her. Or you.

With much love and thanks on this and every Mothers' Day.

Mama

*Not that I know what the word means. Seriously, is it Greek?

Lonesome, quarrelsome heroes

Out on the bleak rainy road recently, I saw a bright orange lorry emblazoned with: 'Iceland: because mums are heroes'.

For my brethren on the mañana side of the Atlantic: 'Iceland' in this instance means Britain's premier budget frozen foods shop, not that other rainy island. You can buy a hundred differently-packaged bags of fish fingers at Iceland the store, and a lifetime's worth of ketchup.

I had a few questions to ask of this lorry. Like: Was Boudica a big fan of frozen chips? Does the purchase of bulk freezer peas transform a mum into a some kind of Odysseus, tied to the mast of a death-star buggy, braving the siren call of fresher foods? Are mini-vans as sexy as bat-mobiles? Have us mums really got as little fashion sense as Wonder Woman?

THIS IS SPARTA!!!

But the lorry drove on before I could get any answers. I tend to have this effect on slogans that I try to interrogate.

The apparition of this motto in my morning left me thinking of that scene in The Princess Bride, where the dashing hero Wesley is captured by Prince Humperdinck and strapped to a super-duper-evil torture machine in the dungeon pit of despair. As the film makes abundantly clear, the super-duper-evil machine process is quite painful and screamy, and it extracts years off Wesley's life in the blink of an eye. He leaves the dungeon a broken, aged, near-dead sort of hero.

The super-duper-evil machine process definitely has some similarities to this parenting gig. Kids will give you a backache in place of a social life. They are the world's most effective antidote to youthfulness in adults. Of course, they also infuse life with a deep, abiding sense of purpose - something you normally can't purchase on the frozen foods aisle.

So if I was a Motto Creator instead of a Soup Developer, I'd suggest this revised wording for the orange lorries, to better reflect the general experience:

Bog Standard Woman be warned!: children will turn YOU into that frazzled woman at Iceland at 3 in the afternoon: bad posture, no obvious hairstyle, shockingly ugly footware, ketchup-spattered ex-maternity shirt, gripping a trolly with white knuckles, yelling childishly at a rabid pack of short people to STOP BEING SO FLIPPING CHILDISH. 

Because yes indeed - mums CAN be heroes. But madness is compulsory. And fish finger procurement is highly likely. 

However, take heart Bog Standard Woman: a mama is a sort of whisky priest - she soldiers on through the Icelandic jungle, hounded by short creatures on all sides. Aisle after frozen aisle, no spending money left in her holey pockets (it has all gone on battery-operated bubble-blowers and other awful plastic tat). All she has left is a grain of hope, a truckload of caffeine, and a nearly-spent flask of brandy if she's lucky. Seriously uncool, flawed, duty bound to her calling, even to the death. 

A grumpy, exhausted and very well-disguised hero.    

So here's a Mothering Sunday toast to dishevelled heroes with maternal battle scars - join me in raising a chipped sippy cup to tough days gone and a brighter, taller future. I hope to heaven that I may one day wear an obvious hairstyle, discover good posture, and a luxuriate in a calm demeanour. For now, I simply want the day off. I plan to spend it napping, heroically.