Motherload

I Don't Know Why She Bothers has just been published by Daisy Waugh, to join the Mummybook pile. I read it at a couple of sittings, like a bag of sweets in front of Strictly Come Dancing . Nice to gobble, but not particularly nourishing. I Don't Know Why She Bothers , to be fair, wasn't intended to be a heavy read — its whole raisin d'être is that time is precious, and shouldn't be wasted agonising about one's children. Loving them, yes, but not agonising pointlessly about them. It's meant as an antidote — the cure of laughing at one's self — to killjoys, health and safety mongers, self-appointed experts, meddlers and misogynists. It's a joy manifesto. So far so good, I applaud mightily the motivation to write this book. It's important — so important, in fact, that I have been thinking about the same issues for a decade. It's not that Daisy Waugh is wrong — it's that she doesn't go nearly far enough. The book purports to be

Yesterday Motherload led me to commit a bad thing. Like that’s unusual. No, hear me out, this is what happened. I was running late to collect the children, because I’d been working very hard on something… for the children (go figure). It was pouring with rain, and everyone else had also decided to drive to school. The reason I was increasing the world’s carbon footprint was because we have to get to a swimming lesson within half an hour on a Friday, and the only way we can do it is in the car.  Plus, frankly, I’m always running late, because I’m always trying to snatch a few seconds extra from the jaws of the playground wasteland. Those futile minutes spent just… waiting around for your children to come out of school, because, these days, you HAVE to be seen by the teacher so that they will release your kid (as otherwise they are bound to be snatched/run over in the gap between the school gate, and your waiting arms). Minutes usually taken up with sub-competitive non