A couple of years ago I came across French Children Don't Throw Food, by Pamela Druckerman. This was about 5 years after everyone else seems to have read the book and my kids were way past the point of throwing food, but five years earlier I wasn't reading books, I'd fallen out of that habit when I had kids - I was busy, raising my kids. Roll forward five years and this book made it into a discussion on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show. I was intrigued why Chris Evans was so taken with the book and keen to understand whether I'd missed a massive parenting trick. If the French were producing such well-behaved children, what were they doing so differently? Do the Brits have it so wrong? Despite the fact that I expected this to be a rather retrospective read, the very next half term I broke out the kindle and started reading.
Whether the book provides the answers or the inspiration to get your baby to sleep through the night at two months is a topic for the many baby blogs out there. The reason this book resonated with me was less about what I should be doing with my kids, and more about what I should be doing with me. It took me 6 years to lose my 'baby weight' after I had my second child because 'I didn't have the time' and 'did it really matter? I was a mum'. As a working mum, I was constantly trying to prove that my children were not suffering due to me not being around all the time, proving to myself at least that it was possible to have it all. I spent my days wanting to be seen to be a good mother; by my mother, my peers and the rest of the planet - with varying degrees of success, but I'm really quite certain that my kids have never suffered for me not being around all the time. Whether I suffered was another matter. There are only so many hours in the day. Something had to give, and what gave was 'me': not me the mum, not me the worker, but for me the individual.
What I took from this book, more than any of the commentary on french parenting (which is fascinating) was the fact that French women didn't seem to judge themselves the way that I did. French women are comfortable in the fact that the perfect mother does not exist. They don't shroud themselves in guilt, because, however much time they spend with their children, they are not spending more. French women also have firm opinions ideas about when to prioritise themselves; clearly, they had never had to deal with a health visitor when you shamefully admit that you topped the baby's milk up with formula for their 11pm feed because you could only express 2oz and you were so tired. Most abandon breastfeeding shortly after leaving the hospital yet are not so relaxed about shedding their baby weight, with many getting their figure back within 3 months. In Paris, says Druckerman, "even mothers who don't work take it for granted that they'll enrol their toddlers in part-time childcare, even for just a few hours a week, in order to have some time alone. They grant themselves guilt-free windows to go to yoga class and get their highlights retouched." I'd have been grateful for a solitary wee. French mothers also seem to do much better at regaining their pre-baby identities and are more physically separate from their children - not joining them on the climbing frame, the slide or the see-saw and rarely ditching their career for childcare. I'm not here to judge on specific parenting choices - but I wonder whether the expectation on French women to be women and mother in equal measures and the expectation on French children to have independence from their mothers at a much earlier age takes some of the pressure to be a supermum off? I appreciate that it's one expectation swapped for another, but if that new expectation is that you look after yourself, exercise, eat well, socialise..... invest in your own identity, how might that feel?
So gone are the late nights baking biscuits for classmates on a child's birthday. Hello, ready-made cupcakes with a dollop of icing and a Loveheart. It's still very much a work in progress, but now I try to only do the hard stuff when I enjoy it and fake it when I don't. Being a mum is hard - it's a 24-hour job. If you work as well, well that's hard too. It's time to stop judging ourselves negatively for what we're not managing to do (I'm assuming there is at least one person out there who feels the same), to give up on failing at being perfect, and time to rejoice in being rather good.
I'm not expecting this to be a blog in its truest sense, but I do want to share some of the good stuff, as well as some of the sneaky stuff that gets me to the end of each day - feeling that I'm doing okay. I'll also share the tips and tricks that I have found that have helped me.
Think of this as more of a how-to/survival guide, whatever type of mum you are. Because if we can all fast-track or fake it a bit more, we get more time to invest in what we love.
I'd love you to comment if you have thoughts. Unfortunately, the Wix blog requires you to 'sign in', which you can do simply via Facebook. I'm trying to find ways to get around this but for now, I'm in the hands of Wix developers...
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