The lighter sides of motherhood Finally the truth comes out One feeds her daughter Cheerios for breakfast, but in the mad rush to get to daycare and work, doesn't always have time to clean up those that drop on the floor. More than once, her hungry toddler has polished off the floor Cheerios hours later as she frantically fixes dinner. Another, in the middle of cleaning and organizing her house, greeted some police officers investigating break-ins in her neighbourhood.
The cops interpreted the in-the-midst mess inside as evidence her home had been broken into and ransacked as well. And then there is the teacher who recalls "crazy, hellish days" when she commuted to a teaching job and daycare in downtown Toronto. It wasn't just the endless traffic, or that her 14-month-old threw up nearly every day (which prompted her to cover most of him up in a large green garbage bag).
It was that one particularly frantic morning, when she didn't double-check the car seat. While navigating a particularly busy street, she felt a little hand on her shoulder and turned around to see her boy, a huge grin on his face, standing in the back seat, ready to climb up in front. Boy does Lucy Sweeney, the heroine of British newspaper columnist Fiona Neill's new book Slummy Mummy, resonate.
She's also a refreshing antidote to the kind of self-righteous overparenting that has been in fashion every since "playpen" became a dirty word. Those in the publishing industry say women who loved Bridget Jones-style "chick lit" of the 1990s are now turning to the sort of "mummy lit" tales told through the likes of Neill, Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It and Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic Baby. Lori Walker, a Toronto mom of two who works full-time as a business manager in a buying division, says she has slummy mummy moments like this one all the time: "Messy hands on your outfit, and you do not realize you have food all over your suit until halfway through the day," she says.
Slummy mummys are increasingly reflected on the big and small screen, too. At first Felicity Huffman's beleaguered Desperate Housewives mom Lynette was a direct contrast to the horror that was Marcia Cross's Bree. The viewer couldn't help but root for Kate Winslet's character in Little Children when she faced down an all-knowing uber-mom trifecta at the park every day.
And an entire episode of last season's Grey's Anatomy was constructed around a female doctor forced to take her baby to work one day. Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who one suspects had very few slummy mummy moments of her own, even championed the cause in the magazine's June issue. Not only did the magazine print an excerpt, Wintour praised Neill's book for capturing "the chaos and comedy of 30-something metropolitan maternity.
" A little humour -- and a lot of long-overdue honesty -- can only help but ease the perpetual guilt most mothers feel these days. Even Jessica Martin, a gorgeous Toronto mom who started a Facebook group dedicated to posher-sounding "yummy mummys," can relate. "I think we all have a little slummy mummy in us," she reports.
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