Liz Fraser - The Yummy Mummy’s Survival Guide

What about my career?

This is a very tricky one, and, depending on what you do for a living, this could be more or less of a real worry for you.

Some types of work just don’t allow for Yummy Mummyhood at all, because they require your presence fourteen hours a day, 365 days a year (if, say, you are the Prime Minister), or because there are physical factors to take into consideration, like being an astronaut or something.

Assuming you are neither an astronaut nor the Prime Minister, then having a baby should not mean the end of your career, and any employer who suggests it does should be hung, drawn and quartered. Or something else which isn’t very nice. The only effect that becoming a mother will have on your career is that everything you do will be enormously more difficult and complicated forever: there will be logistical and practical hurdles involving childcare, illness and just getting out of the house on time, and every day will now carry a huge emotional burden.

If you do go back to work, three things will be different:

You will have to work harder than everybody else to prove that you are not a waste of company time and money.

You will feel guilty because you are not with your baby.

Your career progression will probably slow down.

If you can handle all of that, and can accept having to take a step back—or sideways—for a while, then some of the worry will be eased.

The real rub is that you, like most other women these days, have probably decided to think about having a baby at exactly the point in your career when things could really take off. You have worked hard throughout your twenties to reach a certain rung on the career ladder, and the last thing you want to do is jump off the ladder, only to be begrudgingly allowed back on somewhere near the bottom again.

This is fair enough. But a Yummy Mummy knows that having a baby is something important that she wants to do in her life, and she will find a way to make it work for her, somehow.

It all comes down to one question: which is more important to you—furthering your career now, or having a family now?Only you can answer that, and deep down you know the answer already. In this country we can, at last, have a career and a young family without drowning in other people’s scorn and too bloody right. But this long-overdue progress can’t solve the central issue: you can’t do both of them 100% of the time or give them both 100% of your energy and care.You just have to decide where the balance lies for you.

The only thing which is not OK is doing something you are not happy with because you feel pressured, worried or guilty, or because somebody forces you to. You do what you gotta do, and all will be wonderful.

I’m just not that organised!

No you’re not, and why should you be? I wasn’t, no mum I ever met was always as frighteningly organised as she is now, but by some as-yet-unexplained process you will become highly skilled at getting a hundred times more stuff done in a much more efficient and effective way than you can at the moment. You’ll still forget half of what you need to remember, but you will become more organised.

Chrissie Rucker, founder of The White Company

Don’t worry if you are not a very organised person yet—I was never organised at all, but having a baby changes all of that. You learn very quickly how to keep on top of things, and you develop your own system of doing things which works for you.

Isn’t it selfish to be a Yummy Mummy?

No.

Real Yummy Mummies dedicate huge amounts of their time and emotional energy to loving and caring for their children—but always reserve some time to make themselves feel special too, which generally involves bottles of sweet-smelling lotions and gorgeous things to hang in their wardrobes.

Real Yummy Mummies would rather spend time with their children than anything else—but realise that spending no time away from them is very unhealthy and can lead to lifeless hair and a deeply wrinkled brow.

If you are simply too selfish to look after your children properly then you are a Rotten Mummy, not a Yummy Mummy, and you don’t need a book, just a good telling off.

I’m too embarrassed about people poking around ‘down there’

Not much I can say to this one, except ‘Oh grow up.’ Doctors have seen it all before, and they really don’t (or shouldn’t) get a kick out of examining your cervix. Your vagina looks like the millions of other vaginas your midwife has already inspected, and there’s almost nothing which can embarrass them.

That said, there does seem to be an unfeasible amount of prodding, poking and measuring involved throughout pregnancy, and also well after the birth, and even the least prudish and most patient of you will be pushed to the limit. I never got used it, and I still hate being asked to ‘lie down on the bed and bend your knees up’. Except by my husband. Unfortunately it’s just part of being a woman, and the only way to deal with it is to stop thinking of yourself as a person and throw yourself into the glamorous role of ‘car going in for a service’. If you can be an Aston Martin rather than a Ford Mondeo that will also help.

I’m scared of all the pain

This is a very good sign. It shows you are a normal, healthy, sensible woman who knows that squeezing a hard object the size of a basketball through your very small and delicate parts will hurt like hell. It also shows that you have put some considerable thought into the ‘motherhood’ issue, and have already reached the critical stumbling block. Good. Now you progress past this point by realising the following:

Giving birth is the most painful thing you should ever experience. It is agonisingly, excruciating, faint-inducingly painful.

Once you have done it, no other pain will ever seem as bad (until you do it again).

Doesn’t the fact that some women go through it more than once show it can’t be that bad? Actually it is that bad, but Mother Nature has solved this by ensuring that…

You will forget how awful childbirth is almost immediately.

Not all women find childbirth terribly painful.

The drugs work. No pain; lots of gain.

Put it in perspective: when the result of this pain is your own baby, who will grow into a child, an adult and then the bearer of your grandchildren, and will fill your life with more joy and love than you can imagine yet, what’s twelve hours of pain, really? I would go through a month of pain to get the children I have now. Ahhhhh.

The pain stops abruptly once the baby is out. Most discomforts and pains linger on for ages and gradually just peter out. Not childbirth: it’s excruciating one minute, and then it’s completely gone the next. And that feels fantastic!

Going through childbirth gives you the automatic and unquestionable right to have the tapless end of the bath, never take the bins out and have a foot tickle every night for the rest of your life. If he does question this right, suggest you shave his testicles with a cheese-grater, and see how fast he moves.