Years ago, you would sometimes overhear middle-class people in shops and other places where they allow families to roam freely, threatening their children with something called ‘time out’, and you would laugh scornfully and vow to never let yourself sound like such a total dick in public. But as with all the things you said…
One of the great disappointments of motherhood is realising a couple of years in that you are not the parent you planned to be. ‘I will be fun mum,’ you decided in the years before you had kids. ‘That picture of Princess Diana with William and Harry on the log flume at Thorpe Park –…
It isn’t news that a woman’s dress sense can go amiss when she has a baby. Until they confused us all by becoming trendy, ‘mom jeans’ were a byword for bad fashion. The likes of Stella McCartney and Georgia May Jagger might remember their mothers’ wardrobes as a treasure trove of Chloe and Terry de…
You didn’t like to say it out loud – lest you should compromise the feisty feminist anti-housework stance that had been your friend in the home ’til now – but you were secretly quite excited about maternity leave, not only because of the lovely baby you’d be having, but because maternity leave meant you’d finally get to play…
Back when you were child-free and friends announced they were having babies, a part of you would be pleased for them, but another would be sad and disappointed, because you knew that you were losing a partner in crime. You knew this spelled the end of wild nights out, and that all future meet-ups would…
Clothes shopping is one of those activities, like partying and sex, that pretty much goes out of the window once you have a baby. In the early days you’ll make the effort, telling yourself that it can’t be that hard, and that the baby will like Topshop because it’s ‘stimulating’. So you’ll go, parking the…
In the first few weeks after your baby is born, health professionals sniff around you with multiple-choice questionnaires about the baby blues and how many times you’ve cried in the last few days and if you are at all interested in committing suicide. This concern is all very nice, but it seems kind of arbitrary…
