To notice a new brand of 'cool wives' on mumsnet

[Penhacked]

They are not 'cool wives' in the original sense, I.e. because they let dh go drinking with leggy blondes on a school night and rock into bed hammered at 2am.... but they are so damn competent as mothers that they are fine for dh to go away for a week without notice leaving them with five under 5s, cook dinner every night while simultaneously batheing the children with a baby in a sling breastfeeding etc etc.
Is it just me that has noticed this new trend of 'I can manage it blindfold, stop complaining op and suck it up'??

Aw, Queen please don't be discouraged. MN is a strange bubble.

Most men are perfectly happy to/capable of sticking dinner on every other night without a fuss.

Penhacked Feel free to tell other posters what to write though, won't you

Quite, Hyacinth. OP comes on, I'll use an actual thread. Has a 4-week-old and two other children. Says the PIL's have invited themselves over along with 5 other relatives and her husband has suggested to his father and stepmum that they get a takeaway for dinner. Cue 200 posts castigating the OP for not 'slinging in a pizza' after she wrote in the OP that these people are not the type to settle for that type of meal, others with tales of how she can whip up or rustle up a spag bol for 9 adults, a lentil soup, etc (again AFTER the OP mentioned that these univinited people have not given a timeframe for their arrival except all day), how awful she is to the ILs but would be totally different for her parents, 'poor man', how they should pay for a takeaway for 9 adults, why can't she just nip into (Waitrose, M&S, etc) and pick up what would total about £50 worth of food, 60 anecdotes of how they welcomed 100 people upon arrival from the hospital with a placenta lasagne, garlic bread made from fairy dust and Jesus has nothing on them with his 2 loaves and fishes.

The man again told his family it was takeaway. Off his own back.

Yes exactly, penhacked coming on here and asking for women to show empathy for other struggling women definitely makes her a 'bitter cunt'. Yay the sisterhood!

Why do some people struggle with the idea that there may be different opinions? Just because a person has a vagina doesn't make them any more deserving of support than a person with a penis. Women can be twats too.

I can speak three language. I 'don't get' why everyone can't. I had to learn as I had parents with different languages. Just can't see why people don't get on with it and learn Mandarin .
To me, that's what these posts sound like when I read them

Penhacked I've wondered about this...but have come at it from another angle. It always strikes me reading Mumsnet just how very different people's lives and circumstances are. I think it's very hard to put yourself in the shoes a) of someone you don't know and b) whose life is actually radically different from yours. No excuse for bitchiness, obviously, but I think a lot of it comes from a genuine lack of understanding.

But why start a thread telling everyone to be more supportive?

99% of people in real life wouldn't support a total stranger so why do you hold other posters to a higher standard.

Haha expat I remember that thread.

On the thread the op is talking about, that op asks a question 'do you think this job should be shared?'
That's a yes or no answer, presumably with a reason to validate your response.
Do you think you should only respond if you agree with an op then?

If the op (of the thread we're talking about), has said 'im really really struggling, baby is hard work, I just want dh to cook dinner sometimes' she would have had near on unanimous support.

But she didn't, she asked 'what do you do'. Therefore it's perfectly reasonable for posters to respond with what they do.

Although in fairness mycats I do see what you mean as well, damn you and your reasonableness

If you want unlimited support and everyone being up your arse, maybe another site would suit you better?

Every week we get someone whining about how people are so mean etc etc - you can post your opinion but so can everyone else. Get over it.

Meh. I've never got the need to fuss about looking after my own children on my own.

agree

To be honest there is a gazillion threads on here, where people admit that a) parenting is hard work ( however rewarding it isn't) b) they take short cuts.

i have yet to meet a truly cool wife in real life. Most of us just muddle through and hope we don't get found out.

A lot of people do say "why can't you look after your own kids?" but in most of the OPs the other parent is not away fighting in Afghanistan or anything similar, they are dicking about on the computer or "networking" in the pub after work.

If my Dh was in hospital for a week is cope without a word of complaint no matter how tiring I find it. If he's away on a holiday then yes I might moan at some point when things are tough. It's only human.

Exactly MycatsaPirate

I'm very much a 'get on with it' type of person but I totally understand what you mean. It's just basic empathy. I don't get why people can't be nice. I don't find it difficult at all so not sure why some people struggle so much with it.

To be fair there are some damsel in distress threads where I just want to say 'you're a grown woman, handle your shit and crack on!' but I feel I'd be kicking someone when they're down so I just keep it zipped.

I'm aware that I'm pretty driven and can juggle a lot of shit (sometimes inside screaming, outside beaming) and not everyone can do this, empathy is important.

But if someone is complaining that it's not fair that you speak three languages, and why can't they speak a foreign language? So, you say why not get up 30 minutes earlier and study? At which point, you get eye-rolling and being accused of being a smug bitch.

There definitely are threads where women are being a bit hysterical. You know, my in-laws have invited us to lunch on Sunday, but it's a 15 minute drive each way and the baby has had a bit of a blocked nose and I have to be up by 9am on Monday and we won't be home until 5pm. WIBU not to go?

I agree OP, there seems to be so much more competitiveness, and less kindness than there ever was before on MN. Not sure if I'd describe it as 'cool mum' (that's another thing altogether to me) but definitely seems a huge rise in stealth boasting going on. Whether or not it's actually the truth - well, who would ever bend the truth on the internet?

And the irony of this happening on this very thread

I think it's several things; a form of one-upmanship, but some women do it because they have given up workplace ambitions and are a bit frustrated by the home environment (and treat it like a competitive job) - often your London "cool mummy wives" or home counties wives. It's all their ambition and frustration being channelled into it. This kind of cool wife/mummy often has loads of financial help which she isn't that open about. The second kind are women who have just found that it's something they're good at - either they never found their niche before in life, or they happen to have tractable kids, and they just find themselves good at something. Like some people are good at running a home, and others aren't but they are great at something else.

For lots of reasons I think - either competition or an inability to see what other people's lives are like - these cool mummy-wives then look down on other people who don't have the advantages/luck/amenable kids/good situations that they do.

I hate it too - I'm good at lots of things, and I used to be super-competent at work and running a house, but when I had DD I got ill and was exhausted and needed a lot of help. I also work full time so just don't have the energy to do everything myself. DD wasn't a difficult baby, she didn't cry much and wasn't fussy, but she was high maintenance, needed almost constant stimulation and interaction and didn't sleep. I often felt like I could no more have managed without DH than I could have flown to the moon. I'm sure if I had to, I'd have managed to do everything myself, but why should I? There are no medals being handed out! Plus most of my friends were more of the exhausted-harried-mum type than the super-competent type. (The one friend I know who is super-competent actually had her mum move in to look after her kids during the week...it's all home baking and mountain walks with baby in a sling on Facebook, but the reality is very different...)

Which brings me to the final type of cool mummy-wife - the pretender. Very good at putting out an image of herself, but the reality isn't quite what she claims/what you see on social media/her blog!

I consider myself pretty competent, I have my shit together. DH works away often, always has, so the DCs and I have our own routine and I'm organised to the point of ridiculousness (the only way I can keep my balls in the air, so to speak). They do after-school clubs every day, have busy social lives and I work full-time in a school.

Last Thursday morning I'd had an awful week with work, the DCs were squabbling and being deeply unkind to one another, we'd had a bereavement and the usual shit life throws at you. I shouted at the DCs, lost my shit completely and sat on the bathroom floor crying down the phone to MIL. She appeared like a slightly deranged angel from on high, took the DCs to school, washed up from breakfast, made me a cuppa and took the dog for a walk while I had a nap.

I have never been more grateful to have someone on my side when juggling everything got too much. It happens, of course it does. And it's a wonderful feeling knowing another woman has your back when you need a little nap.

What sort of lives do some of you lead where everyone is kind? Of course it would be lovely if people were, but this is a site full of random people with nothing in common and generally people are asking for opinions. So it shouldn't be that much of shock if people sometimes disagree.

Even though, I did love the story of the super-mum who prepared a full Christmas dinner a few days after giving birth on that pizza thread. That was just nuts. I've never made a full Christmas dinner in my life.

I do agree there are threads where someone is struggling and need to be told that it's ok to give themselves a break rather than hearing how easy they have things. But, I think that's just individuals being twats, rather than "cool mums".