I’ve never been one to win awards. To be honest, I’ve never really been one to enter competitions* to win the awards, but for about eight months now I have worn the title of Flawsome Mum with pride.
And it fits. I own it. It stops me from feeling like everyone else has this mum thing completely sorted. Except me. It stops the shame at always being the one with wet hair/frazzled nerves/half a box of raisins scattered throughout her bag.
In a nutshell, being Flawsome means I’m flawed but I know that this doesn’t make me any less of an (awesome) mum than one who has a brand new manicure, can find a baby wipe in three seconds and doesn’t forget about Book Week 4.2 minutes before we leave the house.
It’s owning your own life and not being ashamed. It’s loving your kids fiercely and deeply but loving their bedtime almost just as much. It’s serving the kids mini canape spring rolls for dinner and posting it on Instagram because that’s your reality and hell, they eat it. It’s saying that you’re one of the millions of mums who just scrape through a week fuelled by coffee and wine and you’ll flop on the sofa at 8pm on a Friday night and fall asleep at 8.34pm.
It’s certainly not (as I have been accused of) celebrating being a bad mum because I don’t think I am. I think I rock, I think my kids are amazing and I tell them that every day but I also think parenthood is hard bloody work and sometimes we all get it wrong – I just happen to gravitate towards the people who admit that they find it tough but don’t think that’s a character flaw. Because it isn’t.
And how do you know you are a member of this tribe (that at current counting seems to have about 30,000 other mums on The Flawsome Mum Facebook page)? That’s the easy bit…
HOW YOU KNOW YOU’RE A FLAWSOME MUM!
1. You don’t have unlimited depths to lie on the floor, absorb everything your child says and enter their imaginary world of Lego Friends for 15 hours a day. In fact, you can barely last 15 seconds of “playing” before you zone out and surreptitiously look at your phone.
2. You don’t listen to your child when they’re telling you one of the 22748493 stories about how Barbie and her friends are going camping this weekend. But you can periodically nod your head and throw out a “That’s lovely darling” while thinking what’s for dinner and wondering if you’ve got any wine.
3. You rely on ANOTHER MUM. ANOTHER MUM is the one who has a phone calendar that says things like, “Three weeks until school bake sale. Don’t forget!” ANOTHER MUM will always text you with this info. You want to throw her organised phone down the toilet, but this woman is your lifeline. She’s the reason your kids make their school assembly dressed a Mexican Bean when you had forgotten it was even Wednesday.
4. You eat the kids’ dinner off their plate and it tastes better than yours.
5. Most of your texts, emails or phone calls (if you even use your phone to make calls) start with the word, “Sorry”. “Sorry I forgot to text you back but…” “Sorry but do you know what time karate starts on Saturday” “Sorry but do you have a spare leotard I could borrow.” “Sorry, I forgot we were meeting for coffee today. Wine another time instead?”
6. Wine is your friend.
7. Coffee is your best friend.
8. You shout. You don’t mean to but you do. It’s usually about shoes and where the car keys are, but sometimes it veers into why no one has put the washing out/done the washing up/bought milk. It’s often at your husband but everyone cops it.
9. You spend four hours a night trying to get your kids into bed. It’s like a war no one wins. Wine helps.
10. You’re always late. To school, to daycare, to visit friends, to visit the doctor. You end up thinking that as long as you leave at the time you were meant to arrive, you’re on time. Your friends just accept this and work around it.
So, that’s it. In a nutshell. This is the world of Flawsome that I’ll be sharing every week here, but please don’t be offended if one day there’s just a message that says “Sorry, couldn’t find the laptop and don’t have time to write this before school pick-up. Got any wine?”
*apart from the time I won a crate of Dolmio Bolognese Sauce with the slogan “Yipeee-o, it’s Dolmio for me-o for my tea-o” (dinner-o didn’t really scan)
Join The Flawsome Mums here on Facebook
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
