When I started this blog I was ready to bare my arse. I was tired of thinking everyone else was always doing a better job. Of endlessly cataloguing all the things I “should” have been doing, the cakes I “ought” to have been baking, the hours of television I “shouldn’t” have had my kids watching. I was ready to just be who I was, to come clean, to bare all. So I wrote this.
Recently I decided it was time to recapture this essence of Milk. To talk about all the corners we cut as mums, women, wives – the unquestionable, unthinkable, unhygienic things we do behind closed doors. So I have enlisted the help of some of my reprobate favourite bloggers.
So welcome to a week-long M2M confessional. And absolutely no writing from me. Enjoy!
*****
The lovely Very Bored Housewife describes herself as “Plodding (her) way through Catalan life, waywardly straddling three languages, 2 cultures and a lack of decent cheese.” Now, anyone with a penchant for decent cheese is okay by me, plus her writing is funny, honest and blunt. No nonsense is good nonsense in my book….
Laid Back Parenting: It’s a lot less bovver than a hover(mum)
When Henrietta asked if would like to write a guest post for her, I immediately said yes. However, when she said it was about slack parenting I was deeply offended. Me? Cut corners in the parenting department, what on earth made her think that I do anything like that?
Anyway, indignant I swallowed the last of the biscuits that I’d hidden from my son and put the wrapper in the bin (underneath the empty rice packet so he wouldn’t spot it), and wondered briefly where he was.
It was OK, he was in the middle of a marathon session on the Wii, he was on level 6.3 or 63 (I kind of vague out when he talks about such things) on Donkey Kong. “Fish fingers all right for your dinner?” I enquired, poking my head around the corner. “I had fish fingers last night Mummy” he replied “Can I have spaghetti and meatballs?”
What, a dinner that needs preparing from scratch? erm…. “We’ve ran out of meatballs.” I reply, firing up the oven.
Yeah OK, so shoot me, I am a terrible mum. I don’t so much as take short cuts, I’m just of the idle persuasion. I hate doing crafty things, board games bore me, and pushing my son on the swings makes me want to stab my eyes out.
Thankfully, due to a combination of nature and non-nurture my son is a fine boy who can happily amuse himself, the time we do spend together is spent laughing and giggling and doing things that we both enjoy.
I don’t think that this is because I cut corners; to be honest cutting corners would demand that I stop and weigh up the pros and cons of my choices and who the hell has time for that? I just do what comes naturally and the path of least resistance, least work and least stress is the path that I find myself walking down.
I could no more be a helicopter mum than I could be a perfect housewife, stuff gets done when it needs to (or more likely if it’s to be seen by visitors), the rest of the time I let things slide. Sure, I’d love to have a show home that’s sparkling clean at all times, but we’d all have to live in the garden and only come in the house if we’re wearing those plastic jumpsuits and shoe covers that you see forensic crime scene experts wear on the telly.
I don’t hover over my child, watching his every move, hell God blessed me with a adequately stuffed ass that’s just perfect for sitting on, why disappoint him? My boy has structure at school, at home he can be more feral. He gets fed when he’s hungry, cleaned when he’s dirty and cuddles and kisses on demand—mine and his. The only clocks we go by are the ones run by his stomach and his tired eyes.
I think I am supposed to admit to a catalogue of mothering errors, OK so there was the time he fell off the bed as a baby (onto a hard tiled floor), I am a year behind his inoculations because I clean forgot to look in his little blue book for the dates, quite often a large part of his daily fruit and veg allowance comes in the form of dried fruit which he snaffles from the kitchen himself and he regularly get his outfits from the bottom of the ironing pile. I’m sure I make text book parenting mistakes on a daily basis but I doubt I could change the way I parent if I tried.
Anyway, it’s all character building stuff, wouldn’t you say?
Tags: guest post, note from lapland, real parenting
the long face of celebrity: SJP and those horse pics
21 Novhttp://sarahjessicaparkerlookslikeahorse.com/
I got told to get over myself the other day.
It all started with a tweet. A tweet about a website this person had sent out as “the funniest thing (they’d) seen in a long time”. It was your usual web fare – a mash up of Sarah Jessica Parker and various horses, a chance to expound her equine similarities.
My issue wasn’t that these mashups were, frankly, rubbish, but that I just found the whole thing, well, a little bit mean.
What if SJP was your sister, daughter, friend – would you still laugh? Maybe you’re having the same reaction as my fellow tweeter did – “Lighten up Milk, it’s just a bit of fun!”. But is it really okay?
Of course, the “Is she fair game simply because she’s in the public eye?” debate is nothing new, but is this kind of behaviour becoming even more normalised in a virtual world where it is easy to make and distribute this stuff and where anything goes as long as it’s funny? Does this easy, laissex-faire medium turn all of us Guardian-reading liberals into digital Bernard Mannings?
I’ve done it. I’ve giggled at the lesbians that look like Justin Bieber or Female celebrities that look like men, so I’m not sure why it took SJP to make me stop and reconsider.
Maybe I am taking it too seriously but I do wonder what it teaches our society about how we should treat people? That it’s okay to criticise, take the mickey, guffaw at another person if they’re in the public eye, and especially if the medium is an intangible, virtual one? That you can rip the piss out of someone, anyone as long as it’s typed on Facebook and not said out loud in the playground?
Thankfully I’m well into my 30s now, my heat-buying-days are over, and I honestly don’t care whether Cheryl cole is suffering from premenstrual zits or Claudia Winkleman has forgotten to wax her tash (made up, don’t sue). So shouldn’t us Tricenerians be setting the bar for the younger ones and reminding them that while it may be attractive comedy fodder, not everything goes?
I think i’ll stick to Cats that look like Hitler and Vegetables that look like penises. It’s what the Internet does best but without the laughing at someone’s expense.
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Tags: Bernard Manning, celebrities, internet comedy sites, Justin Bieber, Sarah Jessica Parker