Those cool, messy, usually wealthy mums

[Shessodowntoearth]

I want to be one 😅
Does anyone know the type?
Usually quite a few kids, at least two, kids are lovely, but generally quite messy/put together in a kooky way.
Houses are beautiful, but messy/disorganised, beautiful pieces everywhere/decoration but with a lived in/messy vibe. The mums are the same, usually seem quite disorganised but chilled out at the same time, generally away somewhere every school holidays and don’t work.
I know quite a few mums like this near me and wonder what this life is like, mainly the having more money. I’d love to be as laid back if people come around, to not care about the mess as the house is so incredible, to not worry if my kids clothes look scruffy in a cool way and to be comfortable in myself. Is this what happens when you come from money?

I've never claimed to be cool, and everyone knows who Mrs Hinch is and what fabulosa does. If memory serves they even sell it in Waitrose 🤣

I'm only a caricature to you because you live a different life. I could instantly introduce you to 20 or so women all living the same life round here. I genuinely don't give a shiny shite and could never, ever, be called cool. I'm just untidy with great hair 😉 and won't be bullied by anyone.

There was one mum very like this at my sons’ school, her youngest free range messy child was good friends with mine, she was charming and liked by all, had big laid back parties for her children’s parties at home, always effortlessly entertained the parent while the children had fun. Her husband was famous rock star and she was a music producer.

such an interesting thread
i don’t know what “fabulosa” is though
Or Mrs Hinch
is that cleaning products?

I love the usual mumsnet wailing of, ‘this is me, I’m like this’. Yes dear, I’m sure that you are’.

It's not "messy" it's EcLeCtiC.... What, this pile of rags in the corner? Ah, we brought these tapestries from Morocco last spring break - never properly got to hang them!

@Comedycook

Absolutely true but the lower classes are judged far more harshly and are far more likely to have ss intervention

Yes this is the nub of it for me.

A parent living in a multimillion pound house in a very middle class part of town exhibiting "free range" parenting is very unlikely to attract the interest of social services because they have a six year old running around half naked with "adorable" dreadlocks. A parent living on a council estate with an identical child would.

That doesn't, by the way, mean I want to live in a sterile, Mrs Hinch-inspired show home where everything is bleached and colour-coded. I can't think of anything worse and there's no way I would waste time being on a hamster wheel of perpetual cleaning and tidying even if I had time (which I don't).

I don't think the middle class parents who make a virtue of their "feral" children are doing anything wrong per se. I don't think it particularly harms kids to have odd shoes from time to time or not to have their hair brushed twice a day.

But I do also think its fairly nauseating when parents who have a lot of financial security and social capital try to turn it into a stealth boast about how chilled they are. They usually aren't at all chilled about other things they value in life (such as what universities their kids get into and what dinner parties they get invited to). They just have a different and much more obscure set of social markers from the people who obsessively brush their kids' hair and shine their shoes.

Skirting boards would take ages to wash and frankly they don’t get that dirty so what’s the point. These are mine. I cleaned them around 2 years ago post builders as they did get messed up during the work. What is wrong with them that requires me to do anything about them. Is our house just weirdly lacking in dust as if not I genuinely am mystified why people think this is a necessary thing to do.
I think most people do clean bathrooms though standards will differ.

In any case the OP wasn’t about not cleaning it was about being cluttered/messy and chilled about that. It’s really a very different thing to never cleaning or kids being in dirty clothes

@TheSnootiestFox --- I literally had never heard of fabulous until just now... Not sure what that says!

Fabulosa is the name of a range of cleaning products, used to be specific to Home Bargains type of places, but now sold in Waitrose, apparently.

Oh and Mrs Hinch is an instagram influencer who is famed for her tips on cleaning and running a tidy home.

@CharlieBigPotatoes1

All these excuses are hilarious. Just clean your skirting boards and scrub your bathrooms, it won’t take long and be so much nicer for everyone. And yeah, you do care. Of course you care!

On my daughter's life I have literally never cleaned a skirting board in my life. And I couldn't give a shit. I do scrub my bathroom but life is too short to clean skirting boards. Judge me if you want but I really don't care. And I'm not a free range parent at all.

Even if I was absolutely loaded, I would still want the house to be clean and tidy, disorder fries my brain!

Cheers @RubyBoozeDay - I grab cleaning stuff from homebargains - but NGL I have never checked the brand, just that it does the thing. I have to confess we have cleaners come once a fortnight to do the big clean bit. But I have ADHD and am horribly disorganised (plus DH and I both work FT).

I genuinely give not one hoot!

😂 and yet you’ve fallen all over yourself to go into great and graphic detail about your life. And your hair.

You’ve written yourself like a Jill Mansell character, with glossy tortoiseshell hair. I can’t help but picture you writing all this from your Bernondsey council flat…

If I saw someone who was on a low income working FT but being disorganised and had messy kids, then I’d think it was less than ideal but I’d assume they were doing their best given their circumstances.

But If I saw someone who was wealthy and didn’t work but they were disorganised with messy kids, then I’d assume they had MH issues like depression, addiction issues or were just a crap parent.

Being disorganised or messy is never something to aspire to be.

If my partner didn’t work whilst I worked FT but he couldn’t get his shit together and tidy the house and not make the kids look messy then I’d get rid of him asap because he sounds like a bad partner and a bad parent.

@CharlieBigPotatoes1

I have honestly never cleaned a skirting board. Do people honestly do that? Why?

It means you are genuinely posh, and someone else buys your cleaning products
The Fabulosa lemon sherbert cleaning spray is lovely btw, and yes, I do use it because my house isn't a shit tip and I like the smell of lemons.

I tick a lot of these boxes, mostly because I have adhd.
The part I’m missing is the relaxed, don’t give a fuck vibe so I think I’ll work on that.

You should read the book 'people likenher' about one of these mums

I have a friend like this and she hasn't come from money but they have a nice place - she's just arty so appreciates design and beautiful things and has great taste but also is scatty so never tidies home or kids

I've cleaned for people who fit into this category and the truth is pretty grim if you scratch the surface. I've picked up dirty pants that have been left skid mark up on the landing floor, cleaned up behind pets - including a house rabbit that shat everywhere, fished used dental floss out from behind grimy bathroom taps and collected fag end, mould-filled crockery from bookshelves. I could go on. Not cool.

I've never claimed to be cool, and everyone knows who Mrs Hinch is and what fabulosa does.

No, everyone doesn't know who the Hinch woman is or what she does, it's a name I see bandied about but I've no idea why, there's also someone whose name crops up about tidying, she's apparently even conned people into buying books to further clutter their homes. As for fabulosa, absolutely no idea.
Does that make me 'cool'? Never thought that word would come back!

I knew someone like this. Always dressed in a very cool but quirky way, house full of arty stuff, children fairly feral and free range, several dogs with whimsical names.

Superficially she seemed achingly sweet and humble but in reality she was a nightmare - always late, always cadging last minute childcare when a spontaneous desire to go raving/ to a festival arose (and needless to say the promised reciprocal childcare never happened. If you refused childcare she'd feign genuine amazement that you didn't want to hang out with dear sweet Magnus and Hephzibah.

Always told people they were 'like a brother' or 'like a sister' to her, and then treated them as disdainfully as she treated her blood family. Forever borrowing fivers here and there but would then turn up in new wacky limited edition Nike's. Seemed genuinely affronted if you asked for the money back because 'whats a fiver between close friends?' making you feel vulgar for mentioning money.

I could go on, but the gist is, you can be incredibly cool and carefree and messy if you're spending other people's time and money and energy.

@Hibiscrubbed because, as so often on Mumsnet, one writes something and then eleventy billion posters pile on and maintain it's not true, even though what is being described is lived experienced and actually happened or is happening.

Apparently I can't possibly be more bothered about making sure the kids are where they need to be than cleaning, I'm lying about what the firstborn gets up to at cadets although I imagine that information is freely available online, I'm a caricature because I'm living the same semi rural busy existence as most of my social circle and now even the hair that has been sprouting out of my head for 50 years is a thing of fantasy, although it's a greying chestnut now not tortoiseshell 😁 but the entire point of the thread has been missed (ie, there are those of us who have better things to do than clean and iron and who go through life giving off an impression of trying to be cool when actually we're not, we just have different priorities,) by nit picking and cross examination. I have never lived in Bermondsey or a council flat and find it incredulous that the lifestyle I live and witness every day around me is just so alien to some of you 🤣🤣🤣 God, you should meet the properly posh people that I know , who spend most Saturdays at this time of year shooting pheasant for about £800 a day or hosting said shoots and driving about in their ancient defenders while wearing breeks and garters. I'm just the poor scruffy one making a fuss of their dogs in the pub!

Now, for clarity, I don't give a shit about being judged for being untidy or going out having just pulled my hair back into a bun, thats how this conversation started, I DO very much mind being called a liar. There is a distinct difference and anyone with a modicum of intelligence and integrity will understand that.

This is the sordid reality behind these messy posh homes. Some of them don't have a cleaner either.

A woman I know complained her beautiful detached Victorian house stunk of dog shit after one of her free range children trod in it and traipsed it all over the place. She didn't clean it up, she said she'd scrape it off when it had dried. As far as I know, it's still there.

She walks around with a whiff of wet dog and stale sweat following her, but it's okay because she's wealthy. She doesn't have great hair though so she's not posting on here about her effortless lifestyle.

And I'm sorry but I will not drink coffee out of a cup that has been used as an ashtray and just rinsed under the tap, even if that coffee is made using a bean to cup coffee machine

I grew up with a mother like that. We were exceptionally well off (private education etc) in a huge detached country pile. My mum was exceptionally loving, but she was free spirited and felt she had better things to do than housework or any kind of order or organising. She mocked people with meal plans or any kind of structure or routine in their lives, preferring to do what she wanted when she wanted, floating around meeting friends, doing sports, dashing into London for the day etc. She was a great mother, cared for us deeply and was always there for us, but I HATED the chaos and disorganisation. Swimming kits/PE kits were quite of misplaced or dirty when needed. School letters that needed signing were lost if you didn't hold on to them and actually make them sign them straight away rather than them ending up on some pile of papers or another, dinners were often random (but always lovely top quality products), thing were always getting lost or forgotten. There was always money, always love, a value of education and a host of experiences, but life was too unpredictable and disorganised and at a young age I had to learn to take care of managing a lot of the life admin that most parents do for their children, because my mum was too flakey to be relied on, which made me anxious.

As a result, our house is ordered and organised, and I actually have quite a lot of anxiety around clutter, particularly around subjecting my children to a dirty cluttered home or lack of organisation. I'd have felt terrible to be the mum who forgot to wash the PE kit, or didn't sign the permission slip or was late collecting from school or sports fixtures. I still hate visiting my parents in my old childhood home which is still cluttered, dusty etc. I do have some similarities with my parents - they were great role models for being loving and kind, for valuing education, giving me great experiences and for making me believe I could be whatever I wanted to be!

It's not a lifestyle I would want to go back to, and I don't think it's a good environment for children either. That said, my children, now teenagers, who grew up in our clean, tidy organised home appear to be pretty messy and free spirited by nature - so who knows?