to feel guilty that I'm not a stay at home mummy living next to the sea who bakes and knits?

[ObsidianBlackbirdMcNight]

Well. I just looked at the mummy blog of an old uni friend. She has called it something really quite twee. I was scoffing a bit at the lentil weaveryness of it [bitchy emoticon], it's very 'we love to live as naturally as possible, today we knitted our own home baked bread' but actually then I thought it looked lovely and her DCs are probably having an incredibly lovely childhood. They live in a little village near the sea, she posts every single day with pictures of crafty lovely activities, unlike me who works and is lazy with DS and lets him do 'free play' (apparently that's an actual thing, not just being lazy) and we don't even have a garden DH takes him to the park and nursery do crafty things but I feel a bit lame.

Tell me that DS won't mind? I'm having my first serious attack of mummy guilt and I feel a bit crappy actually. Also I'm going back to work full time in May, DH will have him 4 days and 1 day in nursery, I need to for financial reasons, if I do we should be in a position to have DC2 next year, it all makes sense but I'm wobbling about only having DS 2 days a week

The bigger the front the bigger the back!

I grew up in the countryside beside a farm with our own little forest for me to run freely in. My mum cooked whole foods and ran a montessori school from home. We would cycle to the nearby lake or takes walks up the mountain I did lots of crafts and and all that! Picture perfect? maybe from the outside! but in reality I was stuck in the middle of nowhere with a lonely woman who a really dreadful temper!

I live right by the sea BTW, just counted and its been 10 days since I actually took LO there though, we mostly go there when we have visitors

Maybe I'm just super cynical, but if I have a FB friend who constantly writes stuff on their wall/status about loving their wonderful husband and thinking being a mummy is the best job ever, its just makes me think "oh dear, someones marriage is on the rocks and they're on the brink of a breakdown"

I am also a little suspicious of mums who are ALWAYS doing craft/baking with their LOs and never just let everyone in the house do their own thing for half an hour!

I've done blogging. It spells one thing for me - too much time on your hands. Like my baking and knitting endeavours, it lapsed with the arrival of DC's and crashed completely with going back to work.

Fair play to anyone who makes the most of their situation, I say. When we were small my mum baked, jammed, grew veg, sewed and knitted like a possessed woman. Later she revealed it was all out of boredom and extremely tight finances and she looks back on it as a difficult period of her life!

have mentioned on here before that my own ds (15) asked me a while back if i went to work when he was little or stayed at home with him..

fwiw, i was a sahm.. but his comment made me realise (like others have said on this thread) that what we remember about our childhood as we get older are just a few select bits

agree with others re: the more people go on about how wonderful their life is/how happy they are the more i start to doubt the truth of it!

i am sure you are a fabulous mummy

Thanks for all the lovely posts people. I actually took DS out for a walk and to the park today! (and to a cocktail bar where I drank three cocktails while he napped )

hey Kat, this is a bit bizarre actually I know how you feel! Having had a few really rough weeks I was a bit gutted to see that someone not particularly nice from my old uni days is doing very well. She's been all over the press and radio giving interviews, up for awards and lots of recognition.

I should be happy for her really (she wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things )

I think it just amplified all the things I wasn't happy about myself, my lack of confidence about possibly retraining/going back to work/not being a brilliant mum/having jam shmooshed onto my clothes whilst she wears £3000 suits and jets around the world. like many have said "grass is greener" etc.

I dealt really rather well with how I was feeling by eating chocolate cake and taking long brisk walks in the chilly sunshine.

There are some smashing posts on here that have really cheered me up. Thanks ladies!

hey!The beauty of life is that we are all different and feeling guilty doing your best seems completely mad....now I feel guilty for writing this!

lolol @ cocktail bar

The grass is always greener...

Apart from a few hours a week working for a charity I am that knitting, baking, rural living SAHM.

And sometimes (only sometimes) I would love to put a suit on, drop my kids in daycare and go and do something that involved managing more than the bloody breadmaker!

And to top it all, on his last birthday my eldest shunned one of my delightful homemade creations for a cake from bloody Morrisons. Just because that's what his friends had. Pah!

I am inflicting a homeknitted cardi on my daughter though, serves her right for being too small to fit in the standard school uniform

At the end of the day if the woman has time to blog in great detail she is hardly rushed off her feet is she? Although come to think of it I have time to post on here...

I'm good at multi-tasking, me

Sounds it. After three I would've forgotten I had a child to be fair.

This thread has really cheered me up - I'm about to go back to work full time too Kat after a year's maternity leave with ds2, and I've been feeling really glum about it, even though it's the best solution for us, my Dh will be a SAHD and I'm a teacher so I even get good holidays to spend with them.

What I keep trying to do, in between feeling sorry for myself for all the things I'm going to miss out on, is look at my situation from the other side of the fence, and when I can manage it it does work.

For example, a mum who I talk to during ds1's swimming lesson is always beautifully dressed, has a lovely house, is a SAHM who even has a day on her own each week whilst her dcs go to nursery (for the social interaction dontcha know)and I've always had a bit of a green eyed monster for her.

She was telling me the other day though how she feels she'll never get back into work as she's been at home for 4 years, she feels really deskilled, hates the career she left but can't face just doing any old job when she was a professional, wants to retrain as a teacher but it all seems too much...you get the idea. She probably looks at me and thinks how lucky I am to have a career that I love.

For every blissfully happy, baking knitting SAHM there's a bored and frustrated woman desperate to get out of the house!

Please don't feel guilty about going to work, you have said that you need to financially. So long as he knows he is loved and you enjoy time when you're there he will be just fine. You can have special time bathing and have fun, read bedtime stories and to be honest you will probably feel more likely to want to and not feel its a chore when you are back at work x

Kat, you live in Brighton. I would love to live in Brighton

This thread reminded me of a blog which I was linked to via MN:

www.froginthefield.blogspot.com/

See second entry down

omg electrofagz - is that for real

indeed

Nah, it's got to be a joke. Hasn't it?!?!

lmfaoooooo that sounds just like my life

lol sorry that was for Tittybangbang. Everynight I go to sleep and promise that tomorrow I will do things better, but I never do )

titsferbrains, even dooce gets me all Other Life Envious, though. With her fabulous photographs and gorgeous children and friends, and her big house and handsome husband and she herself is so pretty, and she works fulltime from home in her own business. I like her writing, but she's not a good example to take the edge off the envy!

My poor mother, she spent so many years doing crafty things with us on weekends, and all I remember is the bad cooking. But I do remember it fondly; it was her least favourite part of motherhood, and yet she did it, and kept doing it, because you do.

every time I look at someone's facebook page, blog etc, I think about this ruddy hilarious thing

I had a dad who worked away all the time and was grumpy when he was home with four noisy children, a sister who had a club foot and a mum who had to do everything and dreamed of a life where she had qualifications and could go out to work. I remember that a lot of the time she was bad tempered and we always had 'free play', Mum and I fought like cat and dog and back in those days parents used slippers and wooden spoons to discipline children. Sometimes when I talk about it to other people they look at me as if I was a beaten child and wonder why I still talk to my mum.
But the truth of the matter is, those times when she was bad tempered are outweighed by the times she was my lovely smelling mum with a beautiful smile that made my heart leap. And I always knew that if I could tell her anything.
When I got pregnant at 18 she was the one I told, she was the one who held my hand every step of the way and looked after my son so I could go back to work pt in a supermarket. Now she has five grandchildren and all of them know they are as loved as I knew I was.
Being a parent doesn't come with a handbook. We all do the best we can and that's all anyone can ask

fab thread, thank you kat

this morning I was lamenting that I'm just soooo grumpy & shouty with my DCs & really want to try to stay more calm.

then I read on here about thinking back to our childhood & guess what? I remember my mum being very shouty & generally quite grumpy with my sister & I!

I have often thought she was probably a bit depressed but too stubborn to ever deal with it... so I am going to try to deal with it! I too suffer from lots of mum-guilt & it's hard, but thank you to everyone on here who has shown it to be normal & also a bit stupid really!

I had a similar idea for a (spoof) blog a bit like Frog in the Field. I wouldn't want to put photos of my children on there though etc, are they really her children? As for The Grove, isn't it a bit chavtastic and footballer's wives for such a cultured, terribly upmarket, yummy mummy type??

I am a SAHM and this is what my blog would look like:

Day 1: "I am making chicken stock for a lovely homemade soup. The kitchen floor is covered in bubbles from DS1's oh so creative pre-nursery craft activity, but I'm a lovely mummy who doesn't waste child-centred time clearing it up" (All true, but I don't mention ignoring DS2 whilst MNing and secretly eating Creme Eggs with my head in the cupboard)

Day 2: DH is totally fed up that I'm uploading airbrushed photos to my blog instead of tackling the midden my house has become.

Day 3: Oh what a twat I am

Am I the only person who finds being near the sea in this country depressing?

It's often grey and dismal and most of, or lots of, places by the sea have a slightly derelict wear-worn sad looking air.

Houses by the sea often seem to ahve nasty huge single pane UPVC glazing that reminds me of nursing homes, and they've often been rendered and just look souless.

OK I grant here are a few lovely villages by the sea, but there are ALOT with depressing architecture, a chip shop, a Spar, a rather grubby pub and two cold youths sitting on the sea wall.

Is it just me who has these expereiences/feelings? Everyone else seems to dream of living near the sea.

Give me the Yorkshire dales, or moors, anyday.

Or, if I lived in Greece, well that's another matter...a white washed villa overlooking a crystal blue ocean would be bliss, but grey sea through a UPVC double glazed window? No thanks.