The Unmumsy Mum Diary

by The Unmumsy Mum

  I have toured bookshops around the country, met hundreds of incredible mums and celebrated becoming a number-one-bestselling author. We have been abroad as a family for the first time, witnessed Henry’s first nativity and we have almost finished renovating what was a shit-tip of a house. It’s not photo-ready yet, but there’s not a willy wall-tile in sight.

  I’ve made peace with priorities this year. OK, I won’t really be touring the UK to preach my Parenting Priority Pyramid™ (let’s be honest, that would make me a bit of a twat), but I stand by its logic: you can’t do everything, and some things are more important than others. I intend to make looking after myself more of a priority next year. I don’t mean I’m going to book myself in for weekly foot massages, take lengthy afternoon naps and start going off on quarterly meditation retreats, but I am going to stop ‘powering through’ when I am feeling drained. What’s the saying? You can’t pour from an empty cup? Well, back in March, when I was having wobbles over everything, my cup was clearly experiencing a drought, and I was stupid to let things get to that point.

  This year, I have also realised, after a great deal of consideration of the mum labels I hate, that I am perfectly happy being an average mum. I know that in many contexts ‘average’ is used to describe something that isn’t very good (admittedly, nobody goes to school and thinks, ‘When I grow up I want to be average!’) but when it comes to parenting, I happen to think average is where it’s at. Being average is not synonymous with being rubbish. An average parenting day is simply the norm, and there is no shame in that.

  Sometimes, I’m a brilliant parent. On more than one occasion this year I have walked into a travel agent’s and lied through my teeth about our family’s plans to travel to Florida/Asia/Lapland just so they would hand over some brochures that I could take home to Henry, who likes to leaf through them when he’s playing ‘booking holidays’. His flights to New York are five pounds, without any taxes, and take one hour – it’s a great agency. When Henry has had an occasional accident in the night, as is inevitable with small children, I’ve taken time to change his sheets and pyjamas without fuss while having a chat about something trivial like how dark it is, or how I can see the stars out of his window, because I don’t ever want him to worry that his mummy would be cross about something like that. I get frustrated with having to get up, but I am never cross with him. It’s important to me that he knows that. And every night, when I put Jude to bed, I cocoon him in his duvet, read him Fox’s Socks and then I pretend to leave, before peering around the door one last time so he giggles and says, ‘Say goodnight till the morning light!’, a line from the CBeebies bedtime song he’s become attached to. There are many such moments when I feel that I am at least doing something right.

  Yet I also shout far too much, burn our dinners and regularly forget all manner of appointments because, for some absurd reason, we’ve made it all the way to the end of December without owning a calendar. On a scale of parental brilliance, I frequent both the low and the high ends, but more often than not I hang around in the middle, and whether you’re into means, medians or modes, that middle ground is some kind of average, which is fine by me. I would much rather be an average parent with flashes of excellence than be some kind of Supermum struggling to maintain impossibly high standards at all times.

  Tomorrow marks the start of a brand-new year, and I have a fairly solid idea of how things will go. We’ll wake up in the morning with slightly fuzzy heads and we’ll head out to the beach for a classic New Year’s Day walk. It will, no doubt, be raining. Jude will refuse to keep his wellies on and will later cry about having wet ankles after dunking his entire leg in a rock pool. Henry will ask for food and whinge on a loop until he gets some. I’ll try and find a crab in the rock pools and end up finding a dead one (like I did last time), which I will hide from Henry in case he gets attached to it, Mr Snail style. James and I will attempt to get a picture of the boys looking like they’re at one with nature, which we’ll then store as a digital file on the computer and never get around to printing and framing. Then we’ll come home, put the heating on and I’ll cook something deemed fit for New Year’s Day, like a roast or a casserole, which the boys won’t touch because it’s ‘yucky’, and we’ll end up scraping their full plates into the bin and soaking the hard-to-clean dishes while concluding that we’d have been better off having fish fingers. There will be fights over Christmas toys (and empty threats to take them all to the charity shop), and we’ll round off the afternoon watching a film, during which I will sneak looks at my two boys sitting next to me on the sofa – farting and giggling and making constant demands. Then I’ll look over at their dad, sitting on the other sofa, engrossed in his ‘car spotting’ videos on the iPad, and, as always, I will marvel that there are many times when they do my head in, that it’s bloody hard work, but that I love them more than I ever thought it was possible to love something.

  So, for the first time ever, I’m not going to make any New Year’s resolutions or attempt to ‘wipe the slate clean’, because I like the slate how it is.

  Besides, who really knows what next year will bring?

  Maybe I’ll finally get fit. Or maybe I’ll average one jog every 182.5 days again. Maybe we’ll move to a house with a bath. Or maybe we’ll stay put and I’ll carry on ‘treating myself’ to a sit-down shower, where I put a flannel in the plughole and pretend just for a moment that it is a bath. Maybe this book will be a bestseller. Maybe it won’t. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll try for another baby. The jury’s still out on that one.

  I said it in January, and I’ll say it again: let’s just see how it goes, eh?

  It was always going to be a risky move, announcing to my social media followers that I wanted to add an ‘Ask Me Anything’ section to this book. As responses started pinging into my inbox, it became clear that my ‘no question is off limits!’ had been taken quite literally and I soon found myself howling with laughter at some of the more ‘personal’ lines of enquiry. Sadly, I didn’t have the chance to respond to everybody who sent in a question – so I wasn’t able to confirm whether or not being pregnant made me fart during sex, or whether I would be free to go on a date with ‘Raúl’ who would like to get to know me for ‘friendly times’ (and could be discreet if it was something I didn’t want my husband to know about, winky face). Nevertheless, I hope the following answers provide an entertaining insight into life behind the Unmumsy scenes.

  If you could hand just one parenting task over to somebody else, meaning you would never have to do it again, what would it be?

  Potty training! Since this book was first published we have been through potty training for the second time with young Jude and, my God, has it tested our patience. On reflection, it seems we struck it lucky with Henry, whose accidents were few and far between. Jude has proved slightly more of a challenge, and by that I mean that every time we think we’ve cracked it he surprises us with a wet (or worse) pair of trousers. We know, of course, that this is perfectly normal, that he can’t help it, that we just need to be patient. But when he swears blind he doesn’t need to go and then wets himself ten minutes later (usually in Lidl, where there are no customer toilets), it takes great willpower not to bash myself around the head with a special-buy camping chair.

  How do you cope with ‘mum guilt’?

  I seem to find something new to feel bad about every day. It’s never ending: I don’t do enough fun stuff with the kids; I shout too much; I allow work to interfere with family time; I’m not investing enough time helping Henry to learn to read; I haven’t made enough of an effort to take Jude to clubs and groups which means that, unlike Henry, he doesn’t really have any friends yet; I sometimes get bored playing games with them, so what kind of a mother does that make me? The list goes on.

  I have, however, recently started to view this guilt slightly differently by taking into account the wider context of what it actually says about me. The very fact that I am worrying about not managing to read with Henry qu
ite as often as I ought to shows that I care about his reading. The fact that I’m concerned that work is interfering with quality family time shows that I really value that quality family time, and so on. If nothing else, feeling guilty shows that I care about my kids enough to want to do my very best by them and, usually, if I am feeling tremendously guilty for doing (or not doing) something, I try to rectify it. If the kids have been stuck in front of cartoons all day and haven’t seen daylight, I bundle them into coats and wellies and take them to the park for an hour before teatime. When Jude’s birthday approaches and I realise once again that the guest list for his party appears ‘selective’ because he doesn’t really have any pals of his own, I book in some hasty playdates with children the same age in an attempt to socialise him before the big day. If I never felt guilty, I might not be motivated to strive to improve myself as a parent – so maybe a little bit of guilt is not such a bad thing.

  What’s the most embarrassing thing your children have said or done in public?

  I reckon I could dedicate a whole book to the mortifying situations my children have put me in. Public toilets – particularly those in department stores – are often where the most embarrassing incidents with the kids take place. They chat loudly about what they are doing – ‘A really stinky poo!’ – or question me at top volume about what I am doing – ‘Is it just a wee, Mum?’ The time that really sticks in my mind is when Henry asked me (at Henry volume) why my willy was bleeding and whether I needed a plaster. Still, it’s not as bad as the woman who messaged my Facebook page to tell me her child had shouted, ‘Yes, you do need some more string up your bum, don’t you?’ when she picked up some tampons in Waitrose. The fact that it happened in Waitrose made it worse, somehow.

  How does your husband feel about your social media stardom? Does he get annoyed that it eats up a lot of your time?

  James thinks the online world is all a bit nuts, and never more so than when people who have read my stuff online make a beeline for me when we’re out in real life. This usually happens at parent hang-outs like soft-play centres or theme parks. Although it doesn’t faze me in the slightest (I love chatting to people who have read my blog or books), I do sometimes end up having a lengthy conversation with a family I’ve only just met while James stands and watches.

  I think the most annoying thing for him is when I allow myself to get distracted by what is going on in my social media space when we are supposed to be watching a film together or enjoying a takeaway on a Friday night. My brain is now wired to be constantly on the lookout for shareable photos or something that would be great material for a blog post – and because my content focuses on our everyday lives as parents, it is really hard to draw a line between ‘work’ and ‘time off’. The flip side of all the social media craziness, of course, is that it has opened an awful lot of exciting doors for us as a family. When the supercars started arriving for a review assignment I was commissioned to write in the summer, James was quick to reassure me that it was the best career move I’d ever made (as he took the Rolls-Royce out for a spin on his own, just to check it was safe).

  What type of a school mum do you think you are? And is this different to the type of school mum you thought you would be?

  I think I am a middle-of-the-road school mum – an average one – and I am mostly very happy to occupy that position! In any class or year group there are one or two organised mums who are on top of upcoming events and whom the other parents rely on to cascade any information relating to the school timetable and changes to the reading book bands. I’m never the mum who knows the deadline for Harvest Festival food donations; nor am I the mum who sets up a Facebook messenger group and uses it to remind everybody that school photos are coming up and that it might therefore be a good time to book in for haircuts. Yet (touch wood) I am also not the mum who forgets about non-uniform day or fails to get a ticket to the nativity play. I’m somewhere in the middle of these two kinds of parent. If I had sat down, before Henry started school, and thought about the sort of school mum I realistically expected myself to be, I don’t think I would have been too far off. That said, I did used to wonder how some parents could run late for school every day when 8.30 is really not that early to be leaving the house. I know now. I know about the lost shoes, the teeth-brushing protests and the last-minute meltdowns over there being no dried apricots left for the fruit snack – which is a catastrophe because yesterday was the last day he liked bananas.

  If you weren’t a blogger-turned-author, what would be your dream job?

  It’s a corny thing to say, but being an author really was always the dream. I’m sure if I was doing anything else, I would be looking at other people who do what I do now and thinking, I wish I could do that. When I was at school, I also had dreams of being a TV journalist, so while other kids were singing into hairbrushes, I was pretending to present a breaking news story for the BBC from my bedroom. I then volunteered for a Drama project where I had to be filmed pretending to be a TV anchor for a ‘breakfast show’ and it turned out that, unfortunately, I was all kinds of awkward in front of the camera. I failed to make eye contact with anyone and didn’t know what to do with my hands. Looking back, that was probably the moment I decided I’d prefer to use the written rather than the spoken word to get my point across!

  Do you think you’ll continue to document your and the boys’ lives online indefinitely?

  That’s a really good question. The honest answer is probably not, or at least not in the way I have been doing so to date. As the boys get older, it is going to become increasingly hard to share what we have been up to without worrying that I am overexposing our lives, particularly when it comes to sharing pictures, as I know that when I release photos on to the World Wide Web there is no getting them back. Now that Henry is at school I already feel more wary about what I disclose; I am torn between wanting to maintain my writing about parenting in a wholly truthful way while at the same time not wanting to embarrass him or draw unnecessary attention to his life at home. There are no guidelines about this sort of thing – I can’t turn to the bloggers or vloggers of yesteryear and ask them how their kids feel about having had their lives shared on the internet eighteen years ago. All I can do is go with my gut feeling, which tells me that at some point I will want to take our lives offline. The tricky part will be working out when …

  I still can’t quite believe I have written another book! I feel incredibly lucky to have undertaken this adventure for a second time and there are lots of people I would like to thank, both for making it possible in the first place and for keeping me going.

  Hannah Ferguson, thank you for your continued support and for being the voice of reason I turn to whenever I’ve got my panicked WTF face on. Michelle Signore, thank you for making me laugh out loud with your edit notes and for not losing your patience over my overuse of brackets (sorry!). Sophie Christopher, thank you for being a publicity whizz – you have gone above and beyond the call of duty by supervising my children on our various road trips and answering my WhatsApp messages about outfit choices. I would also like to thank Larry and the rest of the Transworld team for continuing to take such good care of me and being so passionate about all things Unmumsy.

  To my sister and all my friends who have persevered with trying to arrange meet-ups and phone calls even when it has looked a lot like I might have fallen off the face of the earth, thank you. I’ll make it up to you next year. Mary-Anne – please let’s not go to a strip show for my thirtieth.

  Dad, Tina, Ena and Andrew – thank you for helping out with looking after the boys and not thinking me rude when I disappear off with my laptop for hours on end. At least now you know I was actually writing a book and not just checking Facebook (sometimes I was just checking Facebook). Seriously, though, grandparents are very often underrated and I do appreciate all you do.

  James, my ever-wonderful James, I quite honestly think our marriage surviving two books is just as impressive as it having survived two babies. I am
well aware I have been difficult to live with at times this past year and your patience as you pause Netflix to hear me whinge and on one occasion cry has not gone unnoticed.

  Henry and Jude, one day in the (hopefully quite distant) future you will read this, and I hope that when you do, you understand why I put our lives on paper. I love you both so very much.

  Lastly, I would like to thank the followers of my blog and social media pages for providing unrivalled moral support at various testing points this year. Thank you.

  About the Author

  Sarah Turner lives in Devon with her husband and their two boys. She started writing as the Unmumsy Mum after becoming plagued with self-doubt, heightened by the somewhat glossy parenting literature she had read online. Everybody seemed to be coping so well. Where were the tales of mums tearing their hair out after yet another breakfast battle and endless re-runs of Peppa Pig? She made a vow then and there to document the everyday reality of parenting, and her blog page (www.theunmumsymum.co.uk/) and subsequent Facebook page (www.facebook.com/theunmumsymum) were born. You can follow Sarah’s parenting adventures on Instagram and Twitter @theunmumsymum.

  Also by Sarah Turner

  The Unmumsy Mum

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  www.penguin.co.uk

  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Sarah Turner 2017

  Cover design by Sarah Whittaker/TW

  Sarah Turner has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.