The mother of all roles (From Bournemouth Echo)

The mother of all roles

8:00am Sunday 14th March 2010 in

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NO ONE wants to be called a bad mother, but there’s no such thing as the perfect mum either.

Yet women today are expected to be the perfect wife, run the perfect home and raise the perfect child. Modern parenting has become a competitive sport – and we mums can be our own worst enemy. It’s as though we’re desperate to find a mum who’s not as good us to make us feel better!

There have been many moments when I’ve been a bad mother. I’ve put the clocks forward so I can get them to bed earlier because I was tired. Sometimes I give them fish fingers for tea in front of the TV and I even let my nine-year-old son watch a film that was a certificate 12.

But just because I’m not up to my elbows in cookie dough every day or feeding them puy lentils and organic sausages, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to become drug addicts or axe murderers. So as an antidote to all the sentimentality surrounding Mother’s Day this weekend, we talked to some local mums about moments when they’ve been less than perfect.

“Being a bad mum comes naturally to me, I’m afraid,” says Daily Echo columnist Faith Eckersall.

“There was the time my eldest was four years old and asked, in a very loud voice in a supermarket queue: ‘So where do babies come from and how do they get there, mummy?’ Quick as a flash I replied (looking terribly surprised) ‘Do you know, I’ve got absolutely no idea, shall we ask daddy?’ I’m only surprised no one applauded my lightning presence of mind.

“Then there was the occasion where I told them that all the years I’d led them to believe that the ice-cream van plays its tune to let the children know they’ve run out of ice-cream, was actually a fib, and that I’d done it because I couldn’t be fagged to drive them to the cul-de-sac where it always stopped. That went down like a lead balloon.

“But could anyone be as bad as the wife of a former boss of mine, who confessed that one day she’d woken up early and gone into the baby’s room, to discover he wasn’t in his cot. ‘I wondered what on earth could have happened to him and then I remembered that I’d put him outside in the orchard the afternoon before, in his pram for a sleep, and I must have forgotten to bring him in,” she trilled. “So I walked down there and sure enough, there he was!’ Feature writer Lorraine Gibson says she spent weeks trying to wean her daughter Molly off her beloved dummies by telling her that they were dirty and yucky and made her look silly: “Then I dangled one like a carrot in front of her face to persuade her to have a nap when I was really tired!

“I also have a friend who occasionally used cold wet wipes straight from the pack without warming them in her hand first just because she found her son’s shocked expression when it touched his bum very funny!”

Helen A’Court who has two children and runs a hairdressing salon in Winton adds: “I’ve lied about the time to get them to bed earlier. I also used to skip pages of their bedtime stories just to speed things up because I was tired.”