A Mom in a Sea of Moms

As you can gather from my previous posts, I am not a mummy mommy; the type of cookies that you will find in my house come in a box and that box is most likely empty because I ate them. While I love the idea of the hippy mom with her back to nature approach, I also love my contouring, latest trends and hair dye too much to embrace the all things natural. As my mom likes to say we have champagne taste on a beer budget, so unless a lottery win is in my future a wealthy momma is unfortunately out of reach. I have zero inclination to get up at 5am for hockey practice and then to sit in a freezing arena, therefore hockey mom persona is a pass if I can help it. I strongly believe that you should support your child to succeed in life, but I am not going to sit there for hours to make sure my kid holds his head up first and then not shut up about it, this means the competitive over-achieving mum is out. You also have the helicopter mammy who has gotten a lot of press over the last few years, and we cannot forget to mention the attachment parenting ma. On top of that there is the “friend” mum, the mother who didn’t get the memo she is now a parent and the non-mom mom

If you think that I am making these groups up you should join me at my mommy and baby brain class (trust me it took a lot of checking my ego to go), or sit on a bench at any busy playground. I can now guess which model of SUV in the parking lot belongs to which mom – and I am always right. You thought you were done with the high school cliques and cattiness when you graduated, then let me be the first to welcome you back to round two and like high school we can boil 95% of it down to insecurities and self-esteem.

I lost track of the the amount of times I have had to bite my tongue or contain my eye rolls. As the doctor stitches you up after labour you should also ask them to add another layer of skin, because you best have a thick one by the time you venture out into the world with your little one. Moms have no qualms about giving you a backhanded complement or indirectly (directly) insulting you, all the while making sure their baby can stay on their belly the longest. Whether it is expressing loudly that not being able to breastfeed would be their worst nightmare, after a few people had confessed sensitive breastfeeding stories, or saying to you that it must be nice to have short hair but they aren’t ready for the “mom haircut” (all have you know my hair is very Parisian), or one who straight up said she likes to know how old all the babies in class are, so she can see how much more advanced her baby is – at least she was honest.

Like most people who use humour in their everyday life, I am very sensitive and take almost everything personally. It took a bit of time for me to understand that these moms were not being assholes on purpose and they themselves are just trying to figure out who they are in this new world. The world where they are still getting used to their new bodies, the lack of sleep, losing a bit of their identity and all the while second guessing everything they do. As I found out after judging and criticizing in my head and out loud to my partner one of the moms in my class, she had had a really rough time after birth and was diagnosed with depression, and these classes helped her overcome those first few difficult months. I will never find it easy to not to be offended, to not be slightly judgemental and perhaps even a bit of a bitch when it comes to my impression of people, but I am working on being open minded and understanding on why people are the way they are, to forgive them for a rude comment and myself for going on the defensive right away. As much as I like to think I am above the clique of motherhood and I can’t be labeled, the truth is we are in this together, and when all else fails the shit moms say can be quite amusing.