To feel at times that I live on an entirely different planet to other MNers?

[RozDoyle]

I'm not criticising. This place is great. I have had some amazingly advice and support from people here and it's brilliant. But sometimes i feel like I live in a completely different world to a lot of posters here. I probably won't articulate this very well but I'm going to have a bash.

Examples:

• little boys in dresses/the whole "gender neutral" thing. Literally all the parents I know irl just dress their kids in clothes typical to their sex i.e. Boys wear "boys clothes" and girls wear "girls clothes" and nothing is ever said about it. I have never seen a little boy in a dress, for example, because they'd likely be told not to wear a dress in case they were teased. Sad, but true..

• parents who cook every single meal from scratch. Always mega healthy and nutritious, and talk about it like it's the norm. In my world, most parents work and are simply too busy to cook from scratch every night (or too tired). No one "batch cooks" at the weekend. Its just whatever they can chuck in the oven after a hard day.

• how quick people are to shout "LTB". Now I should emphasise that I am not talking about cases of violence, cheating etc. But things like, a husband not pulling his weight around the house. In my experience, most people can't, and don't want to, leave their husbands, to whom they have children, for issues such as that. It's an extreme solution and it makes me wonder if these same people would really walk out of their marriage over such trivial matters.

I'm sure I have loads more examples but I can't think of them right now. Just wondered if anyone else feels this way?

The LTB, I think I would leave my partner if he was like the DH in the active thread who did not put the school application in. I would be far too angry I think to get over it. It is not petty.

I batch cook at weekends - saves me SO much time overall. The times I don't batch cook (if I have other stuff on so don't have time), I really miss it and eat crap all week

YANBU, I take a lot of it with a pinch if salt.
Examples

My 4 year old DS has a man bun.
Tonights dinner (on a what's for tea thread) - butter bean stew, kale, roasted beetroots and grilled bream.
Making veggie pots with hummus for the 5 min walk home from school.
My kids (11 and 14) have never drank anything but milk and water and have never had a packet of Wotsits or buttons.
My kids hate squash (the drink not the veg).

I often utter to myself 'only on MN'.

I agree op. I posted a while ago about my DH not pulling his weight around the house. I was told to LTB by around 70 percent of posters...we've been married three months! I was also told to put ttc on hold despite being nearly 39 with fertility issues, so clearly all the time in the world to have a baby!

Back in the real world we've started drawing up a weekly cleaning rota and things have vastly improved. Whereas on my thread most posters were insisting he was a lazy, uncaring bastard who would never pull his weight!

But see this is just another thread full of people saying how different "everyone else" is and by implication how they are actually in the right. So no different to any other in that sense. Perhaps if more people challenged or questioned on a thread it would show a more balanced view. But equally there is no rule to say it should and no-one ever said it was representative. You ARE everyone else FFS it's just that as far as internet discussions go birds of a feather etc. Which this thread goes to show.

I agree with so much of this thread. The thing which has really changed in my (far too many) years on MN is the anxiety though.

I do understand that professionally diagnosed anxiety must be a debilitating and frightening condition. But so many posts on here drop in the "oh, and I have anxiety" line.

To be anxious is a normal human condition. All of us get anxious over certain things and have things we would rather not do, especially in relation to social interaction - all of us will "have anxiety" at one point or another. But that is not the same as having a medically diagnosed psychiatric condition and yet on so many threads the two are presented as completely interchangeable.

I know one person in RL who has anxiety so powerful that it limits what she can do. Yet you can't move on here for tripping over people with it.

isthismummy Glad he has got better. People will have posted about not having a baby, because lazy DHs who don't help out, tend to get much worse when a baby appears.

I agreed mumsnet has a lot of prevailing trends that baffle me, but I'm genuinely confused about what people cook that don't cook from scratch? Like, is it all freezer food? Pot Noodles? Takeaways? I realise I sound like I'm taking the piss here, but I'm honestly not sure what you're eating if you're not cooking food. Fair enough there are nights where if I'm just cooking for me that I might just have poached eggs on toast or something, but generally I'll be like 'let's have a stir fry' or whatever, cook the meat and veg, fry it, save leftovers for lunch the next day, or make a massive batch of whatever and freeze the rest... takes half an hour, food for several meals, done.

Yes, I agree with you OooohHorlicks.

The one thing I genuinely don't understand and it's not a mumsnet thing but an internet thing, I don't understand what people get by being gratuitously rude and offensive. I'll never get that. The idea of sitting down to spend an hour being fucking vile to posters asking questions on the internet is baffling to me. Yet there they are, everyday.

I know one person in RL who has anxiety so powerful that it limits what she can do. Yet you can't move on here for tripping over people with it.

This is such a dangerous and unnecessary statement.

Butterbean stew isn't weird is it? It's just home made baked beans.

I cook from scratch every day. I work from home so it's not that hard - just a question of having a set of meals planned in advance, buying the ingredients from the supermarket and then spending about 45 minutes preparing the meal in the evening. I realise it's harder if you go out to work, but I don't think I'm that unusual, tbh. But then, I mix with people in broadly similar circumstances to my own, whereas you, OP, probably mix with people who have similar circumstances to you.

The exaggerations on here are quite funny.

OP: How often do you bath?
A few posters: Once a day.
Someone who obviously doesn't: I knew before I opened this thread that it would have eleventh squillion people saying that if you ever get out of your bath water, you stink.

I do think sometimes on the lb threads, it's projection.Cause half of them advocatingit, just haven't the balls to do it themselves.

Agree with the posters who say we notice what's different to us.

I'm amazed at how few people cook from scratch most days. Dinner yesterday was a stir fry. Chopping veg took max 10 minutes as things like sugar snaps, baby corn, bean sprouts don't need chopping. On the table in 20 minutes.

Dd wore mainly boys clothes until she was about 3. Ds2's favourite pyjamas as a 2 year old were a pair of girls ones he'd inherited from his sister. I'm amazed at the number of people who wilol only dress their kids in gender specific clothes. Ds2 used to dress up in princess outfits or his sisters old dresses. I can't understand how many people have an issue with this.

To my mind mumsnet is a hive of people who do the opposite of me because I'm surprised. I pay less attention to those who do the same as me as that's "normal" behaviour.

It annoys me too. I have very real, diagnosed anxiety disorder and PTSD. Not just on here, but in real life, people claim to have anxiety when they do not. It's a debilitating condition that prevents me from leaving my house at the moment and I've had to take a (hopefully brief) career break.

Being anxious about something is a normal human emotion. Having diagnosed anxiety disorder is a completely different kettle of fish.

So anxiety is only valid if it's diagnosed? Is that the response to someone who posts for support?

Here's my menu for today until Friday.
Tonight - sausages (albeit from the butcher), jacket spuds and probably frozen sweetcorn and a tub of coleslaw. DD is doing it as I'm at work.
Wed - five spice chicken thighs, noodles and veg WFH tomorrow so easy to prep during lunch hour.
Thursday - DP off - so he will bung some stew/veg in the slow cooker and boil some spuds for mash.
Friday - Curry (again I'm WFH) so will prep (jar of paste, tin of coconut milk) during lunch hour and nuke some rice pouches to go with it).
That's as good as cooking from scratch gets for us some weeks but seems normal to me.

Anti Social behavior from families, neighbors and especially children constantly justified as being mis-understood, un supported, blah blah blah.

Horlicks

Of course not. Where did I say it wasn't valid? Normal anxieties are very different from mental illness anxiety, however still very valid.

I understand the difference and I understand anxiety as a condition. I just think it's dangerous and unnecessary to be dismissive. If someone posts for support then they need support irrespective of the label.

I have learned a lot on mumsnet

Many different lives and experiences

What cheeses me off is the 'if it was a man the comments would be diffferent/double standards'

A) unless its exactly the same poster saying one thing on one thread and a different thing on another then its not double standards

B) i read that there are 7 million subscribers to mumsnet, so again i dont see hiw a website can even be said to have double standards

The thing that gets me about MN is not folk doing things differently, it's the number of posters who take time out of their day to be unpleasant to others. I really don't understand it at all.

This phenomenon isn't unique to MN of course.

I don't know anyone who works from home but on MN the suggestion to anyone having difficulty with work flexibility is to try to work from home.

I don't cook because I fucking hate it. My husband cooks once or twice a week. For those confused about what I eat: frozen pizza, fish fingers, chiclen nuggets, toast, Heinz soup, super noodles, M&S ready meals or go to my nan's house as she likes cooking for me. My daughter is 9 months and mostly has pouches, cereal, toast and chopped fruit sticks.

@Horlicks

Of course - that was never disputed.