The Craft Mummy
Too Posh to Push
Eco Mummy
The Foodie Parent
Helicopter Mum
The "Been There Done That"
The PTA Parent
Designer Parents
The Tate Parent
Craft Mummy
Her house is a chaotic mess of creativity, where good taste and wedding-present Bridgewater china have been buried beneath works of art fashioned from fusilli pasta and Mexican dough.
Pinned to the fridge will be a scribbled recipe for home-made playdough, and in a plastic box will be crammed every bit of string or piece of fluffy fabric that has been squirrelled away until friends of her daughter’s come over to tea. They will be offered home-made biscuits, the packet of Haribo your child arrived with secreted away in a cupboard, and the art fest will begin.
Craft Mummy runs herself ragged mopping up spilt PVA, because the her warm conviction that creative time is wholly good does not completely quash her terror of red and blue finger marks all over the Farrow & Balled walls. Her real intention is to make you feel woefully inadequate because all you will have time for, on a return fixture, will be a trip to the park and a Mr Whippy. As you leave with your paint-covered child, Craft Mummy will carefully hand you a collage of leaves and grasses that is “not quite dry”. It will be immediately sat on by the dog in the back of the car.
Too Posh to Push Parents
For Sarah, pregnancy is a wonderful excuse to go shopping. Since the moment she squealed the news to her girlfriends, she has been in a credit card-flashing frenzy, securing a stash of Elle Macpherson maternity underwear. Determined that not for one second will she look frumpy pre or post-partum – did you see those pictures of Britney in Hello! – she wears her bump as if it were a designer accessory, dreamily rubbing in Japanese Camellia Oil to keep those stretch marks at bay, and has acquired an air whereby she appears to float in an aura of fragile femininity; if Gwyneth can do it, so can she.
Sarah has been flicking past the bits in the baby book about the actual birth – it can’t really be that gross, can it? – which is why she has persuaded husband Nick to stump up for a private delivery. Sarah finds the consultant’s words about “a section if we feel it is necessary” very reassuring. It will fit in around Nick’s work schedule and what does it matter if she takes a bit longer to recover? She’d rather that than an episiotomy – yeuch! – and the maternity nurse starts the moment they get home, so why worry?
Everyone agrees that it’s sensible to give the baby the best possible start in life, and it’s already down for the best schools, so that’s the whole thing sorted.
Eco Mummy
There’s a bit of a funny smell in Belinda’s house. Is it the bucket of nappies in the corner, or the jam jar of alfalfa sprouts, left too long on the windowsill? Little Jerome doesn’t care that all his unbleached cotton romper suits are now a lighter shade of grey – no optical whiteners in this house.
But his older sisters have realised something’s up. Desperate for invitations to houses where they get Jaffa Cakes and can watch TV, they try to make new friends by offering the contents of their lunchbox, but classmates turn up their noses at biodynamic falafel and organic mushroom pâté. Belinda’s offspring – home deliveries every one (it’s a wonder they didn’t name the youngest Ocado) – live in hope of an invitation to a McDonald’s party.
As you leave, picking your way through the hallway cluttered with bikes, bags on their way to the charity shop and the box of organic veg, you feel traumatised at the thought of the harm you’ve done your children by allowing them to drink from plastic bottles. And who imagined there were so many pesticides in apple juice? Belinda’s evangelism has you in a frenzy of self-doubt. You empty your cupboards of all the cleaning products that actually work – then have to buy in a new stock when that odd smell you detected round her house starts to pervade your kitchen, too.
Quality Time Mum
Working in some high-powered job she refuses to give up (it took her so long to get there), Rebecca is racked with guilt. About everything – all the time. At work for not being at home, at home for not being at work. She virtually gave birth in her lunch hour, having finished off a presentation in the early stages of labour before taking a taxi to the hospital. She chose a place that provided a fax machine and broadband in every room. With an epidural, she could carry on with phone calls to Frankfurt until the midwife forcibly removed the handset from her grip.
She was back at work within a week, half the time spent crying out the hormones in the lavs and the other half trying to staunch the flow of breast milk on her Ungaro silk shirt. Her permanently knackered three-year-old, who’s kept awake by the nanny until “Mummy gets home” has come to dread these 20-minute intensive fairy cake-baking sessions with her mother, a virtual stranger who has a phone glued to her ear, talking to the office. Rebecca screeches in on sports day at the last minute and pretends she saw her daughter come fifth in the egg and spoon race.
She has to keep everyone happy, so Saturday mornings are “daddy and mummy time” – while CBBC babysits – and she meets colleagues with children for a power Sunday brunch. She collapses into bed at the end of each day, thanking her lucky stars for the fact that she has so many choices available in her life. I am woman – hear me snore!
The Foodie Parent
Richard and Sophie’s kitchen is a temple to the finest food the world can provide. Their children know it, your children know it. Everyone knows it, because the Foodies keep telling them so.
No ingredient is too recherché. Each meal is a “menu gastronomique”. On the table are Halen Môn salt crystals, wasabi (which your child thought was snot), and vinaigrette (made with their home-brewed vinegar, using a matrix they picked up in northern Italy, donchaknow).
Their children’s palates have been developed since before they entered Little Sod’s Nursery. Thanks to intensive high-chair training in “super little places” on foodie pilgrimages through Europe, Foodie kids can identify a Maris Piper from a Pink Fir Apple at a single bite – although they’ve never been near a chip. The only chocolate they’ve ever tasted is Valrhona. Is there any other kind?
When you tremulously offer the Foodie kids pasta on a play date, they ask you to be more specific: Eliche? Penne rigate? They’ll reject the shop-bought pesto, but they wouldn’t mind tapenade. You’re frantically searching the larder, wondering if Marmite would do, when salvation comes in the form of a bag of Cheesy Wotsits. You tell them they’re Japanese rice crackers and they munch away contentedly.
Helicopter Mum
What’s that strange whirring noise that accompanies little Hector wherever he goes? Why, it’s Tamsin, his mummy, hovering at a safe distance, far enough away to allow him to interact, at least a little, with other people, yet close enough to swoop. Always ready with an opinion, a wet-wipe or a snack, she’s as connected to him now as she was by the umbilicus, and as crucial to his wellbeing, or so she would have you (and him) think.
He’s never on his own, Hector, although Tamsin did once leave him with Mrs Arkle who cleans – while she went upstairs to change. At five he has yet to speak because Tamsin does it for him.
Tamsin is particularly noticeable at parties, where she stays, offering to help. How kind, you think, until you notice that the only thing she’s helping with is Hector. She ignores any other child’s request for juice, referees Musical Statues to make sure he wins and refuses to help with the washing up, because she can’t see him from the kitchen.
At the playground she shadows his progress, car keys clenched in her hand in case they have to dash to A&E. Don’t bother trying to engage her in conversation. If you’d really like to speak to her, go and chat to Hector. She’ll be there like a shot, eager to respond.
The “Been There Done That”
Jenny has climbed the foothills of babies and toddlers, negotiated the glaciers of the tween years, cramponed and ice-picked her way up the north face of teenagers and has reached the summit. From the privileged position of one who has children for whom A levels are a distant memory, she looks down as you battle the challenges below. She listens with a smile as you rant about recalcitrant behaviour, common entrance or incompetent teachers, and you take her smile for support. In reality, it is wry and knowing, even a tad patronising. She nods reassuringly, then utters those words that fill your heart with dread: “This is nothing. Just you wait.”
Thousands of miles ahead of you on the parenting trail, Jenny can discuss GCSE options and theory driving tests, knowing you will have no comprehension of what she is talking about. She’s an expert on gap years and UCAS forms. When you visit for coffee she struggles to find a biscuit suitable for your toddler, and leaps up with, “Don’t touch that, sweetheart,” as he lunges for her son’s mobile phone. Said son then strolls in and picks up the keys to the Mini Cooper from the table. Do children really get that big?
Jenny, who dresses like your mother, smiles indulgently but don’t be fooled. All that nonchalance hides a ball of anxiety, but she’ll never admit how easy early parenting is compared to the horrors of having children who are now about to flee the nest and, ergo, her clutches.
The PTA Parent
Ever since she was chair of the Junior Common Room at UEA, Mandy has been able to smell a committee at 500 yards and she can’t resist being involved. Her motivation this time is that she is in awe of Ben’s teachers and feels it’s so important to be a key player in school life.
She has made inroads by making herself available to accompany school trips and positioning herself next to the form teacher on the coach, but the woman remained unresponsive to questions about Ben’s progress, even though Mandy bought her coffee in the Science Museum café.
She’s pleased that the head now calls her by her first name, but she can’t help thinking that, by joining in the fundraising for new computers, she’ll cement the relationship further. The fact that she’s single-handedly organising the Auction of Promises supper might be valuable when Mr Cafferty marks Ben’s Victorians project.
Mandy is always there early for collection at 3.15 so she can collar people to help with raffle tickets, but they all have to rush away. Someone has to be committed. They’ll have her to thank, though, when there are two lovely new computers in the library.
Designer Parents
Function follows form for Giles and Daisy. Every item in the house is an homage to their highly developed aesthetic taste – and that goes for the baby stuff, too. It was a bit of a shock, that first trip round Mothercare. All that plastic! All that colour! It seemed there was just no way you could make a baby minimalist.
Things have moved on a bit now, thank goodness. Now that babies are a recognised fashion accessory, DPs are better catered for. From the Bill Amberg papoose to the Bugaboo, there’s plenty to satisfy their retail longings. Armani even do a baby range. With cashmere bootees from Brora and Alice Temperley rompers, they’ll match mummy’s cardi and frock beautifully. Daisy can use the kids as an excuse to visit all her fave shops and there’s always a chance you’ll bump into little Apple or Lila with nanny in tow, or even (oh, joy) their mummies, while you’re browsing the racks.
The problems arise when the kids start to assert their own taste. Sadly, their choice of telly programmes doesn’t bode well. There’s no way you could call a Boohbah chic, even in an ironic way, and as for Balamory…
Overalls? I don’t think so.
The Tate Parent
India was a late and unexpected blessing in Jane and Harry’s marriage. She is the most perfect creature they could imagine and she never tries their infinite patience. Granted, the adjustment has been, well, frankly immense and Harry has had to put a lock on his study door since the day she crawled in there and shredded his notes for Monday’s lecture on Eastern European economics. But she coped very well with last year’s trip to Peru and looked like a native in her little papoose on Jane’s back.
Jane is frankly terrified of her daughter, especially when Harry goes off to work in the university department that used to be the centre of her world until she had to give it up – a nanny? Unthinkable! She looks at India’s faintly menacing expression in her highchair. Getting her down will be not unlike unleashing the dogs of war.
India will inevitably be artistic given the family genes on both sides, but there’s no harm in helping nature along. Hence the family days out to art galleries and museums. Harry crouches down beside India in her buggy and explains loudly, in the simplest terms he can, the influences behind Vorticism. At 24 months, India is mad as hell at being strapped in. Her parents, keen that she should be able to express herself, release her and watch with glee as she waddles towards the Rachel Whiteread installation. They retire shortly afterwards to the café, exhausted by attempts to stop her clambering all over it.
Perhaps, Jane wonders as she sips her green tea, the Eden Project might engage her more.
Taken from The Madness of Modern Families
Read an interview with the authors, Meg Sanders and Annie Ashworth
