Doing the Mum Maths

My guilty conscience has never been a nagging little voice in my head; it’s Miley Cyrus swinging about on a giant flippin’ wrecking ball screaming at me until I do the right thing. The guilt festers inside me until I HAVE to fess up, even with really minor things – I just can’t hack it!

One of the most difficult things about motherhood for me is managing those seemingly constant guilty feelings – did we do enough stimulating activities today, could I have handled that situation better, did I make the right choice there?

“I’ll look after the remote mummy…”

As the day draws to a close I can feel myself doing the ‘Mum Maths’ and tallying up my score; five points for taking Miss O to the farm today, -10 for the part when she lobbed food pellets at a cow and almost blinded it (she’s got one hell of a right arm on her). Eight points for getting two types of vegetables onto her lunch plate, -10 for letting her have an Easter Egg before 8am because she’d been up for 4 HOURS already and it’s the only known cure for incessant whinging…

I’ve always been pretty crap at maths, but I very rarely feel like I’ve ended the day on a positive score!

Here are some other things that tend to balls-up my total:

I rely a little too heavily on CBeebies; we’re basically co-parenting her. We had to put together a ‘My Family’ book for nursery last month and it felt almost disloyal to leave Justin Fletcher out, he visits at least three times a day…
I told Miss O that her VTech Pop & Play Elephant was ‘broken’, when it’s actually serving two weeks of solitary confinement in my wardrobe. She bloody loves it, but mummy only has so much patience for a toy that shouts at you whilst simultaneously machine-gunning balls at your boobs.
If I get the first whiff of a disgusting nappy, I’ll immediately send her toddling off to J with an enthusiastic “Where’s Dadda?” whilst I find some urgent ‘cleaning’ to do in the kitchen (also known as scoffing Maltesers and browsing Facebook).
I have, on many an occasion, fast-forwarded ‘In the Night Garden’ when she’s not looking in a bid to kick-start bedtime a little earlier.
The house is a complete tip at the moment – if we were burgled you’d be hard-pressed to tell which rooms had actually been ransacked. I haven’t seen the dining room table for about a year now, I can’t sit on any of the sofas because Miss O is currently showcasing her ‘pots, pans and rubbish she won’t let us throw away‘ collection on them, and I’ve started squinting a bit whenever I go to the bathroom so that it doesn’t look quite as disgusting.
I’ve retained absolutely no child-rearing information whatsoever from all those pregnancy classes and books. “Algernon isn’t sleeping well – a classic case of the ‘5 months, 3 days and a smidgen-past lunchtime’ sleep regression”, I’ll hear someone announce at soft play whilst the other mothers nod along sagely. How do they know all this stuff?? J also seems to think that I’m some kind of walking toddler encyclopedia – little does he know that I’m merely the middle-man between him and Google!
Sometimes, the mum-rage overwhelms me and I tell Miss O that Dadda is being a bit of a ducking cockwomble. I do however say this in my very best sing-song Mary Poppins voice, in the hope that this balances out the profanity a bit.
We chose not to take her to a friend’s wedding recently and packed her off to Grandma’s instead. Miss O had a lovely time but mummy tried to wash away her guilt with lashings of Prosecco…rumour has it that she was carried home at 10:15pm after J caught her doing Jager Bombs with the groom’s father and realised she’d probably had enough. Mummy vehemently disagreed, but on arriving home and promptly vomiting all over Miss O’s singing mini-oven, had to conclude that he may have been right. Oh the shame…

She’s never been the same since…

So yes, it’s safe to say that I’m not mummy of the year (or this postcode, or even this room a lot of the time), but maybe I need to review my point-scoring system? Miss O is regularly cleaned, changed, fed and watered – she laughs A LOT, has the nursery staff wrapped around her little finger, and has recently started patting me on the head in an incredibly sweet (if slightly patronising) ‘good job mama!’ kind of way. So we must be doing SOMETHING right. I’m going to have a recount…

(Hang about – I can hear a cork popping downstairs… 50 points for J!)