You’re a super mum, and so am I.

A couple of weeks ago I answered a Q&A interview for an influencer network called Audience Mojo, it was all about how I got in to being a digital influencer, social influencer, blogger, instagrammer… whatever you want to call it and how I achieved my “success”. I answered the Q&A and left the bio, intro and everything else to the wonderfully talented people over at Audience Mojo, and when they sent me the link they had written some really lovely things about me, including one that made me chuckle. They called me “super mom”…

Am I a super mom or super mum?

As I look at my mountain pile of laundry, kitchen counters scattered with dishes and remember that I didn’t spray the kid’s hair with the nit-away spray I spent an arm and leg on because we can’t get rid of the creepy crawlies little bastards (the nits, not the kids) before school, almost guaranteeing that they will have nits tonight… I don’t really feel like one.

I shout a lot. I swear a lot, and as much as I might profess that I would never swear at the children, I’m pretty sure we can still count it if my teeth are gritted and it’s said in a slightly guttural mum-language. Yeah, we can count it. I have at least one moment every day where I wonder if anyone should have to survive, let alone work and provide for small children, on 5 hours sleep every night and I am constantly wondering if I could just grab a quick snooze in between somehow designing a self cleaning house because god knows that’s the only way I’m going to maintain an ounce of clean here.

Is any of this super mum-esque? Not really. Sure, I work a lot of hours, but so do countless other parents and as someone who has said many times being a stay at home parent isn’t a job because that undermines how very difficult being a parent actually is, I would refute the argument that managing to work, for myself or anyone else, makes me more “super mum” than the mama slogging her guts out as an unemployed parent raising her kids and bringing up the future generation.

Once I started to think about it, between the countless hours where I’m wrenched out of my bed to go and present a boob to a tetchy two year old whilst my arse dangles out of her new divan bed because she’s starfishing and I question my life choices as a 4 year old “early bird” runs into the room to talk at 6am, what the hell would make me a super mum?

The answer? Just being a mum who gives a shit.

Being a parent is HARD. Being a mother, in my experience, can be isolating, it can be wearing and it can make you feel like you have lost all sense of yourself. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad – it’s the most rewarding thing at times and I wouldn’t change it for the world, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard or sometimes incredibly difficult. It doesn’t mean that sometimes you wish you could break free and just be a different person – I do, and I know plenty of women who do too.

And yet, here we are, fretting over the laundry pile, the dishes, the fact that we forgot nit spray, whether we are spending enough time support our kids with homework, whether we are changing the baby often enough, how could we have prevented that scrape they have on their knee because they were being total shitheads and not listening when we said don’t fucking climb on the wall, you will hurt yourself. Are the meals nutritional enough or have we become team fish finger? Did I do this right? How can I be better?

All these questions I guarantee most mamas ask themselves time and time again, and the term super mum becomes just another way to dive us in our sisterhood and support of each other, implying that someone like me who has an Instagram account with a few followers and shares a few select snapshots into my life, is a better mum than others, which just isn’t true. So with that in mind: cool mum, insta mum, attachment mum, free range mum, sweary mum, prissy mum, hippy mum, lonely mum, ecstatically happy mum, depressed mum, cry it out mum, pushy mum, hipster mum…

You’re all super mum. And so am I.

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