43 Tracksuit bottoms

After a year out in the fashion wilderness, I have gone back to working part-time in the centre of town and realised that a revolution has occurred while I have been gone. One that hasn't quite filtered out as far as my suburban high street, where it's still OK to wear bootflares and trainers (actually I'm not sure skinnies ever made it out here to Zone 4 to begin with).

Skirts are now strange and difficult shapes: they bulge unflatteringly at the hips, and thighs, and are called 'tulips'. Obviously its helps if you are incredibly young, thin or preferably both. 'Treggings' is apparently no longer a silly made-up term used only by fashion editors, but an actual item of clothing that women – lots of them - wear. For the uninitiated, treggings are incredibly tight jeans or trousers that are indistinguishable from leggings, and that show off every bump and lump. The young and thin thing obviously applies here, too. As does it with harem pants, miniskirts and any number of current trends designed to strike fear in the heart of thirtysomething women with real figures everywhere.

And don't get me started on the shoes. I knew that ridiculously high heels were supposedly all the rage, because believe it or not they still have style magazines out here in fashion's hinterland. But I hadn't realised women were actually wearing them in such vast numbers. Yesterday I found myself wistfully eyeing up a shiny black pair with a particularly vicious heel in a shoe shop, the sort you could use to bludgeon a small rodent if you were so inclined. However, as I spend half the week running manically past kebab shops and crazy men to get to the nursery before the doors shut and I get fined, I don't think they fit into my new lifestyle somehow. Somebody should invent a pair where you can just slip the heel off and they become practical, rubber soled flats (there's a Dragon's Den idea, if ever there was one).

For now, I am a fashion martian, marvelling at how differently they do things here. The shops are full of mysterious items in strange colours and weird shapes, that I don't recognise or understand. I have no idea how these could be put together to form a complete outfit that won't make me look like I'm wearing fancy dress to a 'mutton dressed as lamb' party. For the first time, I relate to all those souls who have so desperately lost their mojo that they are prepared to undergo total humiliation on national TV, and consult Trinny and Susanna or Gok Wan as a last resort. And for the first time, I feel properly old. Still at least at home, I can pull on my tracksuit bottoms, the ones with snot and baby puke all over them, and feel no shame, and know that across the land other new mothers are doing exactly the same thing.

42 Buying clothes in the supermarket

Remember that rhyme that went round when you were at school? ‘Oh, let’s all go to Tesco’s/ Where [insert victim’s name] buys her best clothes/ La, la, la, la etc?’
Well, unfortunately for you, now that is the truth. Of course, supermarket clothes have come a long way since the 1980s, and we’re certainly not knocking the sartorial delights of Florence & Fred, George at Asda, Sainsbury’s Tu and other similar ranges. In fact, we like them a lot, especially the ones that don’t exploit developing world sweatshop labour too much.

It’s just that there is something a little sad, a little deflated and disappointing, about chucking a new blouse into the trolley alongside a bottle of ketchup and packet of smoked mackerel. Clothes shopping by its very nature should be an indulgent and uplifting experience, even during a credit crunch.
However on-trend and pretty the clothes are, the glaring lights, piped muzak and surly supermarket shop assistants guarantee that, as an experience, shopping in Selfridges this ain’t

Only thing is, if you don’t buy your clothes in the supermarket, you might just never find time to buy any at all. Supermarket clothes shopping enables you to multi-task, something we new mums are good at – and let’s face it, even making it to a supermarket is a treat these days (see also our love affair with Ocado).
Yes, we know there is always Asos.com or Ebay, both brilliant in their own way for those cheap and instant fashion fixes. And, yes, OK, every few weeks there is that obligatory trip to John Lewis/Bluewater, which you now look forward to in the same way you used to look forward to afternoon tea at the Wolesley.
But sometimes we want New Clothes Now, and we want to touch and see them in real-life not as a collection of pixels on a screen. Even if we have no chance of being able to actually try them on – have you ever seen a supermarket changing room that is actually open, even if you had the time to use it?
So. Best clothes. Tesco’s. You know it makes sense.

41 Ikea

I can hardly wait until my son is three years old, and it's got nothing to do with him learning to talk and sharing exactly what's going on behind those golden curls of his. It's because that'll be the day I can safely deposit him in the Ikea creche, amidst the field of mult-coloured plastic balls, to share bodily fluids, germs and who knows what else with scores of other strange children (do they ever clean underneath those balls? I have my doubts).
Then I'll have a whole hour to myself while I cruise the Lack shelves, dither over dinnerware in the marketing hall and watch other couples arguing about which colour sofa to buy. If I'm feeling really indulgent, I might treat myself to a cinnamon danish in the cafe.
But until then, even now Ikea is still a pretty good option for a daytrip - it's a sad reality that these days, for me, heading to a grey concrete retail park in Edmonton actually constitutes a treat. If it's Monday to Friday, you get a free cup of coffee or tea thanks to your Family Card (though whatever you do, don't choose the mint tea. This isn't actually herbal peppermint tea. It's ordinary black tea that has somehow been infused with essence of After Eight. Except nowhere near as nice as that sounds. Some things aren't worth having for nothing.) The restaurant has a circular sensory soft play area, surrounded by a sort of breakfast bar where you can perch and watch your tiddler – watch and learn Starbucks. And of course, if you so wish, you can buy any number of cheap-as-chips stuffed toys, storage baskets and tupperware. Fact: it's simply not possible to go to Ikea and spend less than £100, even if you have no idea exactly what it was that you bought when you get home, except for a couple of drinking glasses and a lightbulb.

40 People who don’t ask when number two is due

Before you had a baby, people were relatively polite. Most of them didn’t ask too nosily if you were intending to spawn any progeny in the near future. They rightly guessed there were all sorts of reasons why you hadn’t had children yet. Perhaps you didn’t want to – yet, or possibly ever. Perhaps you couldn’t, and you were already researching all sorts of pricey, incredibly emotionally wearing and painful fertility options. Perhaps you were just waiting till the time/job/house/partner was right. Perhaps deep down you wanted to, but found the idea of childbirth too traumatic to deal with right then.

Whatever your own particular reasons, most people, even close friends, rightly knew that ultimately it was really nobody’s business but your own, and if you wanted to talk about it, then you probably would.

But now it’s different. Now you have already gone forth and multiplied, your fertility is apparently everybody’s business, a subject for open debate amongst relative strangers. A chorus of ‘Are you thinking about number two yet?’ greets you practically before you’ve even had your stitches done and checked out of the maternity suite. And of course there’s: ‘Wouldn’t it be nice for Magenta/Clarence to have a little sister or brother to play with?’ which is just designed to make you feel guilty, selfish and totally inadequate, something we already do plenty of without any outside help, thanks.

There are a number of reasons why this line of inquiry is vaguely annoying. For starters, while we love, love love having our little ones around, some of us are still figuring out if we have the energy, patience and ready cash for another one in the next financial year. We wouldn’t mind another few months of having a (relatively) flat stomach before we resign ourselves to stretch marks and morning sickness all over again. We don't know for sure if it will happen even if we want it to (in fact, just like the first time round). And some of us have other things to consider too. For example, I live in a house the size of a shoebox. It’s a pleasant enough shoebox, but I’m definitely not going to be able to swap it for a bigger shoebox any time soon. I know in Victorian times they just used to shove the new baby in the bottom drawer, but my bottom drawer is full of old socks and mothballs right now.

Of course, we don’t mind other mothers or old friends or even relatives asking us about our plans. But if you’re the postman or the woman who works in the local Co-op, if we haven’t actually swapped names yet let alone mobile phone numbers, then I’m probably not going to share my ten year plan with you just yet. Especially when I don’t even know what it is yet.

Still a couple of recent comments have stuck in my mind, and I can’t quite get rid of them. A friend of mine said her beauty therapist – a mother of two - told her: ‘I don’t know what I did with all that time I had when I only had one.’ Argh. Better write that novel and climb that mountain, like, now. The second is even pithier. ‘One is like having a pet. Two is like having a zoo.’ And I really wish they hadn’t told me that. Because if there’s one thing in life, I really love, it’s going to the zoo… I’m just not exactly sure I want to live in one.

39 Spitting On Tissues

Do you remember how much you hated it? You knew it was coming, there was nothing you could do and then there it was - the dreaded tissue, your mum wetting it ever so delicately with her warm soggy saliva and rubbed energetically all around your face. The thought still makes me cringe.

And yet. I have been there. I've been searching for the half-used tissue in my overstuffed handbag spitting away and rubbing jam-stains and toothpaste-marks like a maniac. And loving it. LOVING IT.

Is it a way of getting my own back? I mean, it is kinda cute the way she makes a 'yuk' face when I do it... Or is it some kind of deep-buried cat-like maternal instinct - a small evolutionary step away from simply getting my tongue out and licking my daughter clean on a crowded commuter train?

What's sure as eggs as eggs is that this is one of those things you'd NEVER consider doing pre-baby and can look forward to doing as naturally as shrugging once that sticky-faced child is part of your life...

38 Exercise DVDs

I've been really lucky since having my baby. I have this great personal trainer who's helping me get back into shape, and it's only cost me about a tenner to use her as many times as I like. In fact, you might even have heard of her - her name is Davina and she's got this funky kickboxing-type routine that she does with the odd wry aside and cynical wink to let you know she's finding it a little bit tricky too.

When I'm fed up with Davina, I could always turn to Nell, one of the Stricly Come Dancing presenters or even a C-list actress who used to be on Emmerdale if I'm feeling desperate. There's just a couple of downsides. I have no motivation whatsoever, my living room isn't big enough to swing a pygmy kitten in (which means I end up crashing into the wall or sofa every time I do a half-hearted high kick), plus I also get lost following any exercise instructions more complicated than 'now touch your toes'.

However, if you've had a baby and like me, your partner gets home at gone 8pm, you have little hope of ever getting to the gym again, exercise DVDs are still your best bet. They're also mercifully cheap, often less than £10 - the going rate for the average London fitness class these days. And, of course, you don't have to pay for them on direct debit for the rest of infinity. (Why don't more gyms operate modest pay-as-you-go schemes? Obviously something to do with the fact that while most of us are great at signing on the dotted line, usually in the bleak winter light of January, we're not so good at the actually 'going' bit.)

Since having my baby, I have bought no less than seven exercise DVDs. Two of them still have the shrinkwrap on. They vary in quality, but while cruising on Amazon one sleep-starved evening, I stumbled upon a particularly brilliant series of 10 minute workouts - surely even I could find a pitiful window of ten minutes a day to do a few crunches and squats? Um, try a bit fat (literally) no. It's just far more tempting to sit down with a plate of digestives and the latest episode of Mad Men. I'm not completely giving up though. For one thing, my baby boy finds it far too hilarious watching me make an idiot of myself in front of the TV. Who needs Teletubbies when he can watch mummy attempt and fail to perform a downwards dog?

37 Sniffing your baby's bottom in public

You swore you would never, ever become that woman. You said you would rather die. You were convinced that this was the action only of awful, mumsy women with no regard for basic social conventions. The type who thought that the fact that their darling son or daughter had snot on their chin, and seven different types of dried puree plastered to their cheeks, was actually somehow cute rather than merely disgusting.

Yet somehow, without warning, you have become her. You are the woman who holds their baby aloft and sniffs their bottom. In front of other people. Possibly people without children. Possibly people without children who have no intention of ever having children, and possibly people without children who are also eating or drinking at the same time.

'I think Jasper has pooed' you then announce loudly to anyone present, and with no shame, as if anyone else gives two hoots. Because either they haven't noticed the smell of fresh number twos wafting across the table. Or they have noticed, but are just too polite and British to do anything other than hold their faces very slightly at an obtuse angle.

Either way you are now engaging in activity that pretty much puts you on a par with the average chimpanzee. I guess that's what having babies does to you though.

36 Scratchcards

I never bought a scratchcard until I became a mother. Or subscribed to the Lottery website for that matter. It probably had something to do with the fact that I had cleverly timed my pregnancy to coincide with the worst global recession in living memory. Have you seen how much a pack of Aptamil costs these days? £8! That’s way more than I usually spend on a bottle of wine. As well as worrying about how to afford the basics - heating, shelter, childcare, sufficient Jaffa Cakes - there’s always the university fund to think about. (Though faced with the end of money, certain doom for our planet and total breakdown of civilisation as we know it, I’m not sure having gone to university will have quite the same cachet in the future. Our cherished offspring will be too busy building mudhuts and munching earthworms to fret about what subject to write their dissertation on.)

But it was the Rich For Life scratchcard telly advert that really hooked me in. A guaranteed £40,000 a year for the rest of my life! I wouldn’t have to worry about paying my overdue library fines ever again! Unless we end up in a situation of Zimbabwe style hyper-inflation, of course. In which case £40,000 will probably just about buy you 20 Marlboro Lights and a bag of Hulahoops. The ‘Moderately well-off for the next couple of years’ scratchcard doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, though does it?’ I’m still going to be buying them though. I’ll take what I can get.

35 Eating cereal straight out of the box

OK, it’s possible that this is just me along with that category of adult males who never learned how to use the oven.

But when you’ve just had a baby, you often find yourself eating foods alone that once used to be a mere component of a nutritionally balanced meal. A solitary chunk of cheese, say. Or half a tomato. Possibly a lone finger of KitKat (admittedly this was never actually part of a balanced meal, but you probably would have managed two fingers in one sitting).

Getting it together to find a bowl, put the cornflakes in it, pour milk on top and find a spoon? You must be joking. Plus you’d have to go out and actually buy a pint of milk. You’re still in your dressing gown, for heaven’s sake, and it’s 4pm.

Lunch, once taken somewhere between 1pm and 2pm, is a hurried, disjointed affair at half-past three, enjoyed during that brief window of time when your baby isn’t hungry, tired, needing to be changed, suffering from ennui/existential angst/separation anxiety ('Mummy has left the room! I'm pretty sure she's gone forever this time!') or just being difficult for no good reason. That’s on a good day. On a bad one, it’s half-past five.

Other strange things you may find yourself eating in lieu of a proper meal include: chocolate digestives (for breakfast), cold toast (without butter; see also cold tea and, worst of all, cold soup). Possibly some unhappy shredded lettuce on its own if you’re having a fat day. Tuna, straight out of the can, wolfed down unceremoniously like dogfood. A Nutrigrain, whose vaguely food-a-ceutical packaging and blurb makes you feel virtuous even if it is basically a Jammy Dodger in disguise.

It goes without saying, you will also eat the remains of whatever disgusting goo your baby is eating today. (Remember girls it only takes an extra 100 calories a day to add up to an extra 10lb of weight a year.) Though you positively draw the line at pureed parsnip. You may no longer be able to participate in all the major food groups, but you still have your standards.

34 Frozen Peas

What would mothers do without frozen peas? You've just got home, your little one is starving and you're down to a slice of manky ham, half a Babybel, the usual pasta screws (you never allow yourself to run out of those) and you know you ought to give your little darling some vegetables but you didn't get a chance to visit the organic greengrocers* in between racing between nursery, bus, train and work [check emails, look busy, munch lunch, check emails, look busy], then train, then bus, then nursery and then home. Not if you live in the back end of arsewhere anyway. Because your corner shop doesn't stock vegetables seeing as the locals survive well enough on kebabs. But enough digression already.

So we grind out the bottom drawer of the freezer (when will you ever have time to defrost that damn receptacle again?) and tumble some peas into a garish coloured Ikea kids bowl (every mummy has a set of these, it's mandatory), shove it in the micro. Bob's your gay uncle, you have something resembling a meal without so much as breaking into a sweat. Of course, that's if your 2-year-old hasn't yet developed that peculiar aversion to anything 'green' which afflicts 75% of all toddlers at some stage or another. In which case just keep a bottle of food colouring handy. Purple works a treat. Or go the sweetcorn route - another sure-thing standby. There isn't a kid under 5 who doesn't love the yellow stuff - fact.

*mythical outlets of overpriced superhealthy food which were invented by health columnists and baby guide authors to make mummies feel guilty for feeding their precious ones frozen peas

33 Day nurseries that stay open late

What is it with nurseries and their crazy opening hours? Perhaps it’s just the ones near where I live, but none of them seem to stay open past 6pm. That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it's 5pm.

I’ve never ever had a job where I didn’t have the best part of an hour commute door-to-door. And I’ve never had a job where I finished working before 5.30pm, usually 6pm. Even when home time arrives, there is the obligatory few minutes where you round off the day’s tasks, shuffle papers and basically try not to look like a work-shy clockwatcher who’s waiting for the big hand to hit the six.

Shooting out of the door on the dot of half five is frowned upon in many offices - so really we’re talking about a working day that ends at 5.45pm or 6.15pm. OK, that gives me two minutes to get out of the building, 12 minutes to fly home and one minute’s grace before we go into bank-busting overtime. Now where did I leave my time machine?

Who exactly are those mothers who finish work at 5pm then make the leisurely ten minute stroll to their nursery? What do they all do? Where do they work (and can they give me a job)? Do they just spend their days shopping? This a mystery I have yet to solve.

Life is hard enough for working mothers. We go to the office, half-dead from lack of sleep, with porridge on our sleeves and snot in our hair. We have to apply mascara on the Tube, while other people stare at us. Commuting should be a break for us, a chance for us to catch up on reading trashy novels and London Lite. Not 45 minutes of blind panic and shallow breathing as we will the Central Line not to grind to a shuddering halt yet again. We need nurseries with long opening hours, so we don’t arrive at the gates panting and sweating, and then find we’re being charged another tenner for those extra five minutes after all.

Maybe longer hours would be tough on nursery staff. But aren’t they supposed to be providing a service for the rest of us? Couldn’t they work shifts? Or are we the only people out there with such difficult lives? Answers to these questions and more on a postcard…

32 Watching Loose Women with the subtitles on

For me, it all started a couple of years back with Deadwood. For those unfamiliar with this superior US drama, it’s set in a lawless 1870s goldrush camp and stars Ian ‘Lovejoy’ McShane as a Machiavellian saloon owner. Pride and Prejudice this ain’t, with profuse swearing and brothels on every corner. The language that the characters speak is almost Shakespearian in its eloquence and wit, some of it apparently even written in iambic pentameters – and with subtitles on I found I was able to appreciate it to a whole new level. Then came The Wire. I had no idea what the hell was going on at the start, only that it looked a bit scary. But the jargon of Baltimore's inner city drug runners suddenly became poetic – rather than plain incomprehensible – with the subtitles switched permanently to ‘on’. Before long I was watching loads of things with subtitles on – films, Frasier, Mad Men.

And then I had my baby and subtitles really came into their own. With the constant crying, gurgling, babbling and plinky tunes that now forms the background noise of life, subtitles are no longer handy for catching those missed witticisms and asides, they are darn well crucial for following the plot. OK, I know Loose Women doesn’t have a plot but you know what I mean (actually live subtitles tend to be annoyingly hit and miss, it has to be said - see above image).

Now if I don’t have subtitles on for anything other than Teletubbies, I feel I am trying to play snooker underwater or the piano blind-folded. I never realised quite how much dialogue I missed before as 'method' actors fashionably mumble, grunt and slur their way through scripts. For instance, the brilliant new 30 Rock on Five USA doesn't have subtitles, unlike the DVD box set - and I find it irritating beyond belief when I do miss the odd line here and there.

Anyway. Subtitles. Try them. I promise you’ll be hooked before you know it too.

31 Big Slobbery Kisses

Nobody in their right mind would enjoy being slobbered and schlicked by an over-salivating old aunt. But switch the aunt for your bubba and - my oh my. Bring it on. We can't help it, we go weak at the knees, we go all gooey in our brains and we go all slush-puppy in our hearts. There's nothing like your first smacker from your little one. And once they learn how to make you melt they have you round their little pudgy fingers. So what if it's 6am and you know any minute the first tantrum of the day will screech its way around the corner. She's sucking your ear, slobbering your nose and squelching your eyes with an "I love you Mummy" to break your heart. And all you can think is: So. This. Is. Why. We. Do. It.

30 Mistresses

'Mistresses' is great. It features sassy, older female characters misbehaving horribly, and is utterly brainless. In short, it's perfect veg-out-after-four-hours-sleep evening telly.

However, I don't know if this struck anyone else as so brilliantly laughable as to be insane, but the new series also features a character, Siobhan, who has a young baby - possibly six-months-old judging by the size of her (and we new mums love to endlessly analyze TV babies).

At night, when baby has gone to sleep and her unsuspecting husband is similarly out for the count, Siobhan sneaks out of the house, hangs out in upmarket hotel bars and picks up strange men, before having hot, nameless sex with them. She then pops back home again, and slips back into bed, where hubby is still snoring. All without once checking the baby monitor.

Obviously I understand this is a mainstream BBC1 drama and not to be confused with real life in any shape or form. But even so. At six months after the birth, most of us are just about getting used to sex with our own partners let alone sharing our episiotomy scars and taking our clothes off in front of complete strangers. The idea that after months of deliriously wide-eyed nights, when our darling baby is finally sleeping through, we would then actually want to dress up to the nines (in the dark mind, with full make-up), and drive off into the night for a bit on the side is too fantastical for words. Most days we don't even put lip-balm on. And what happens when, inevitably, baby wakes up at 2am? Sorry angel, Mummy was too darn busy getting jiggy with that creepy older guy in room 402 to worry about changing your nappy or feeding you. But don't worry, she'll probably be back in the morning, just looking a teeny bit worse for wear. And smelling of unfamiliar aftershave.

Of course, this is partly why we like 'Mistresses'. We may not actually want to be Siobhan. We would frankly much rather have another ten minutes shut-eye than a meaningless brief encounter in some godforsaken Travelodge. But we like the fact that she is supposed to be a new mum who is still sexy and still being naughty. It just makes us feel a bit exhausted watching her.

29 YSL Touche Eclat

The question isn't what do we do with it. The question is, what would we do without it?

A miracle cream? That may be a slight overstatement. But it's a jolly good item of make-up that is pretty much essential for any new mummy.

Of course, pre-baby I already used YSL Touche Eclat. I'd already succumbed to the near enough blanket coverage in any women's mag I've ever read. But I couldn't truly see the reason why it was raved about. I'd use it to make myself look a little fresher on a night out. I'd use it after a late night made me look a tad shadowy under the eyes. But after a while I'd kind of forget about it and it would languish at the bottom of my make-up bag.

The truth is, I was never tired enough to appreciate the incredible way it makes you look, well, eye-bright alive! As opposed to eye-sunken dead. You see, if you've been in and out of bed like a flipping yo-yo all night to breastfeed/change nappy/soothe/rock/walk around bouncing baby/stop toddler bouncing on top of you, and so on, ad finitum, come 6am you look like you would be more at home in a morgue. But slide some of that stuff underneath your eyes and dab on a bit of blusher, and you can just about fake it for another day.

28 Strangers who ignore your baby crying

I’ll never forget my first trip to the supermarket when my weeks-old son started screaming his tiny little head off. A passer-by with copious amounts of time on her hands helpfully pointed out that he seemed ‘very upset’. Not having been struck deaf and blind a moment earlier, I could only, mortified, agree with her before slinking off down the chilled meats aisle and making a quick exit.

Here's a helpful tip for complete strangers who decide to inform stressed-out new mums that their baby is obviously a) hungry b) tired c) cold d) crying. Don’t.
Anyway a) He isn’t hungry because he has probably just necked half a pint of Aptimel or breast milk. b) He isn’t tired as he’s been sleeping all morning (just not a single millisecond during the night, but we won't go into that). c) He isn’t cold; like most babies he just has cold hands and anyway last time I looked we didn’t live in Antarctica which means he doesn’t need to be swaddled in 20 layers of fleeces, blankets or miniature shell suits. d) Ok, you’ve got a point he is crying. That’s because he’s a baby. You’re blocking my way. Bye!

27 Doorway baby bouncers

Imagine a baby sitter who didn’t charge you ridiculous rates. Who popped round immediately whenever you needed to have a bath or make some proper coffee. And who wasn’t a female relative/in-law who subtly implied, with her very presence, all the many ways in which you were failing as a mother and raising your baby to be a backwards sociopath.

That in a nutshell is the beauty of the doorway baby bouncer. This marvellous contraption is a fabulous way to reclaim just a little me-time in the sea of changing nappies, doing laundry and sterilising bottles that occupies your baby‘s first year. It means five minutes off from having to be a pitiful Mr Tumble impersonator, or reading that bloody book about the brown hares who love each other, one more time.

OK, the osteopathic community might be in two minds about whether it’s bad for your baby’s hip joints. So we suggest you don’t leave him or her in the bouncer for, say, the entire duration of This Morning, Loose Women and Murder She Wrote. Fifteen minutes will probably suffice. And I have to confess, my son developed a disturbing after-effect whereby he would bounce around on any surface you placed him on for days afterwards, like a disturbed meercat at the zoo. (I can only think it was like that dizzy seasick feeling you get hours after going on a particularly vigorous fairground ride.)

But all things considered, for a few minutes’ peace, baby bouncers are well worth the money. Do it. Just, for heaven’s sake, make sure the thing is hanging in the middle of the doorway, so they don’t repeatedly bash their tiny little skulls against the frame…

26 Talking About Babies (2)

We like talking about babies because if we didn't we'd explode. Unlike our days pre-mummyhood, which were semi-predictable and comprehensible in comparison (and dang it, didn't we blabber anyway - bluddy work, bluddy tube, bluddy wobbly tummy), our days post-baby are impossible to predict and thoroughly flummoxing (bluddy potty training, bluddy buggy, bluddy wobbly tummy). If we couldn't blather on about it to somebody else (mummy or not) we'd end up, probably, chewing temazepam to keep our mouths busy with something. Which women did, in droves, before we woke up to the fact that - actually - we COULD admit to ourselves that motherhood was just slightly more difficult than we'd presupposed.

At around the same time being a mother was accepted as a valid 'role', society realised that children and babies weren't only to be 'seen and not heard' but little people with real feelings. Instead of leaving them at the bottom of the garden to 'exercise their lungs' mothers went with them to the bottom of the garden and pointed out the flowers. So sue us that we found our 10-month-old's first word "fowa" as cute. At least we heard them. And instead of smacking them into submission we cared to find some other ways of disciplining. Ones that involved rather more thought - and, woe betide us - some discussion with others! And, for better or worse, advice gleaned from books and websites.

And we talk about babies because we have to. Modern motherhood is a talking point because today's hi-tech fast-food world is frought with obstacles and contradictions. We are harangued to breastfeed from the off but are treated as pariahs in public life when we do. We are told to get back to work and pop the poppets into pre-school at 2 years old [never mind the finances never add up]. Next day we're told we're selfish cows for wanting some independence and to go home and knit some sustainable wool nappies [this time the finances definitely don't add up]. We are told by our own mothers we're doing everything wrong and are told by society we are doing everything wrong. Is there any surprise we have a little chat amongst ourselves?

Yes, there's a point at which we even bore ourselves. But if you're mothering 24/7, isolated in your corner of a big city, sites like Mumsnet can provide true solace and - incredibly - conversation NOT about babies including movies, celeb gossip and jobs. Meanwhile you'd hope your good friends would put up with your witterings in the same way you put up with their endless boyf troubles and 'search for the perfect pair of jeans' saga. Suffice to say, broadsheet bints who blather on about the latest glossy members-only bar or their obsession with 80s clothing would probably become the worst baby-bores of all, endlessly comparing this season's Bugaboo fabrics and whether to update their latest armcandy, sorry, baby with the latest eco-trend.

26 Talking about babies (1)

Following on from the last entry. Of course, we also like talking about babies. While certain members of the broadsheet press (see Observer Woman last week), apparently suffering from terminal lack of empathy, might find this irredeemably dull and offensive, we like talking about babies because having a baby is a completely life-changing experience and frankly, it’d be weird if we didn’t ever talk about it to our friends. Especially within the first few months, when your world is turned completely upside down.

To couch it in terms that such journos might understand, imagine if you had a really important new job, and didn’t discuss it at great length with your bezzy mates. Or were in a terrible car accident. Or fell head over heels in love with a fantastic guy. Or, I don’t know, you went to a really, really GREAT bar (at last, a comparison they might understand). They might think you weren’t really their friend anymore, that you didn’t want to share the important details of your life. And if your pals seemed unbelievably bored by the details of your amazing new job or boyfriend, perhaps even slagged off the fact you’d talked about it a little bit too much, say, in a newspaper column, you might then reassess that friendship. Possibly. Or just think they were incredibly self-obsessed and not-very-nice people.

To be clear: Just because we are mothers and talk about our babies to a greater or lesser extent, doesn’t mean we have all transformed into brain-dead, lactating cows with no outside interests. Even we get bored by other mothers talking about babies sometimes. Guess what? Some people are just boring, parents or not.

And the thing is - we truly don't care if our own friends have children or not. If we get on with someone, we get on with them, regardless of our progeny. OK, if they do have kids, we might have extra common ground in this particular area, but if they don't, we have plenty of other stuff we'd love to talk about as well. Remember, we do know what it's like on the other side - we didn't actually have children for the vast majority of our life thus far.

And on the subjects of baby websites. Of course, there are all sorts of websites dedicated to babies and motherhood, some of them catering to the kind of ordinary mother you’d never perhaps want to be. Big deal. There are also plenty of websites variously dedicated to music, literature, automobiles, hardcore porn and lots of other subjects you might or might not be interested in. No-one’s forcing you to read them if they’re not aimed at you. Complaining about the fact they exist is akin to complaining that not everyone in the human race fits your criterion for being a worthwhile, interesting person. I don’t like canoeing, should I then complain that someone on a canoeing forum made a comment that I didn’t quite relate to?

By the way, we’re the first to admit that the media seems a bit too obsessed by babies, and fertility stories and older mothers and ‘can-wimmin-have-it-all debates’ these days. Is that our fault? Or is it, I don’t know, partly the fault of newspaper journalists like them who endlessly commission these features and force the issues down our throats so that we’re left in a cycle of endless maternal navel-gazing?

Perhaps the fact that these childless-by-choice female journos are sensitive about the fact that everybody seems so baby-obsessed is simply a) A function of their age - most of their friends inevitably have kids now. Get over it. b) Made worse by the industry they work in, as described above. c) The fact that secretly they are haunted by whether or not they’ve really made the right choice. We sympathise with this as they wouldn’t be human if they weren’t. But our real sympathies lie not with them but the women who would desperately like children and can't, but also have to put up with the endless baby talk in our culture. For them it's not merely dull - it's painful.

Anyway, on the evidence of it all, seems like these journalists are even more baby obsessed than we are.

25 Not Talking About Babies

I’ve always found the words ‘mum’ and ‘mummy’ a bit cringy – they’re just, well, so mumsy. It took me a good few months to associate the term ‘mummy’ with myself (OK I’m still getting used to it). And even now I sometimes wince. Let’s be honest, the very fact the word ‘yummy’ had to be stapled onto the word ‘mummy’ to begin with, suggests our culture reckons that usually they’re not.

But at some point during your baby’s first few months you realise a fundamental change has happened, not so much to you, as to others' perception of you. While you are pretty much the same person you ever were, albeit a bit tireder and with slightly worse hair, to the man (or woman) on the street, you are defined by your ‘mumminess’.

I’m not sure exactly when I had the uncomfortable realisation that, when I walked down the road, strangers no longer saw a young woman (OK youngish) who coincidentally happened to be pushing a buggy with a small person inside it. They saw a mother, and that was it.

But while new mothers are famous for boring single friends to tears by droning on about breastfeeding and nappies and the price of childcare, the truth of the matter is that we don’t just want to be mummies. We do, desperately, want to talk about other stuff. We want to start sentences that don’t begin with the words ‘I think little Felix has pooed, or that don't involve the words 'breasts', 'sleep' or 'crying'.

We were a person before we had children, and dear readers we are still that person. It’s just that all the other thoughts and worries and passions we had before have had to jostle along a little bit so some new thoughts and worries can fit into our heads as well. Think of our brains as an extremely crowded Tube carriage. On the Central Line. Think about your own brain during the first flurry of love, while perhaps you also have a really important meeting at work to prepare for. That’s our brains, all the time.

But we still love seeing our single friends and indeed our married friends without children. And let’s be hones, while we do love, love, love talking endlessly about our children and all their infinitely fascinating little habits, we – or certainly the mummies I know at any rate - also particularly love not talking about them. We love talking about books and films and fashion and politics and music and new hot restaurants (even if we probably won’t go to them).

In fact all the things we talked about before we had children. Funny that, us still being the same person isn’t it? With basically the same interests, the same personality and the same sense of humour, just some new interests and concerns too. Who on earth would’ve thought.