Guardian Family: Confessions of a Full Time Mother

[morningpaper]

Confessions of a Full Time Mother

"Kirsty Gunn is not working on her next novel. She is not a columnist for the London Review of Books. She has chosen instead to disappear from the professional world and embrace a domestic life just as rich and interesting and inspiring ... "

PAH! She's opted out of the professional world - well except for this article and the book she has just written about her "year as a full time mum" - full time that is, except for the 30 hours a week that her children are at school in which I presume she fannies about writing drivel like this.

At first I thought it was an ironic joke, but sadly not. Perhaps she is friends with that woman who survived the concentration-camp conditions of Fulham after that breeze blew her wooden grapes off the sideboard...

But I don't think he's comparing it to a war zone as such - just to somewhere that's completely out of his experience, like a war zone.

your.

Sorry.

But then she does say the bit about leaving the house and 'making it out of the fire', so now I'm doubting myself...

She seems to be liking the separateness of it, I think she means, that dumbing down to mother of children level, where the brain apparently doesn't work and your interests are as dull as ditchwater. May be the Guardian did right to publish it as it will show other mothers what a foolish decision it can be to stay home with small children.

I suspect it's a bit tongue in cheek. I never read the Guardian even when it's given away free I find it hard to get through and not interesting. I can never work out whether it's because the writing isn't as good or it's just the interests different than say the Telegraph and Sunday Times I get on Sunday, that the issues written about are not my own. Telegraph eg is bound to have articles about private schools, assumes people have nannies etc so it kind of suits my own demographic.

Mind you I will need Disability Times next as I can barely hear today. You don't appreciate your ears until they go.

I think by the time I'd got to that bit I had stopped concentrating! So just picked out random phrases and gnashed my teeth at them.

Then it is bathetically melodramatic to even mention it, especially to say, 'that is exactly it' after such a peurile comment.
I'd think, 'oh be quiet you patronising loon' if anyone sat next to me at dinner and said "you mothers, when you come here, like tonight, when you enter the world to come to one of our meetings, or to a lunch, whatever ... You look wonderful, you talk, you've done your hair, you've got shoes on ..."
Yeah, I'm 43, and despite having children have not lost the ability to put fucking shoes on, you moron.
As for 'enter the world'. Like this dinner party is pure gritty life as it is lived...

Did he want to shag her, maybe?

Tbh I think that quote might have been made up. And no way was that tongue in cheek, Xenia. That poem was Deeply Felt (Drivel).

God, that would be the worst chat-up line I've ever heard - praising me for being able to put shoes on!

I think of him as Will A Wanka

Was Kirsty and her family featured on 'The Madness of Modern Families'?

Next thing you know, she'll be on here cutting and pasting a single post ad nauseum:
'I think my book is fabulous.'

Hate to burst it, Kirsty, but I've been telling myself 'I think I'm rich' for years and it never amounted to FA.

It was the "you look wonderful" line I was thinking of, aloha, not the other tosh! He probably thinks "tell a woman she looks wonderful and her mind will glaze over" (what passes for her mind)

Has anyone sub,itted this to P Eye yet? They will be swamped

Is Will A's homepage the MILF website?

xenia, i swear to you, that is not tongue-in-cheek. it's head-up-arse...

didn't know you were having difficulties with your hearing, that can't be a lot of fun.

Such a pile of pants. I hated the bit where she said she wanted to be the one to open her daughters' school bag, rather than her nanny. FFS i work full time and I'm a single parent. I open my daughter's school bag every bloody day. It's hardly bloody rocket science is it!

Xenia writes: "it will show other mothers what a foolish decision it can be to stay home with small children"

Xenia, you never give up bashing us illiterate, non-intellectual, unpaid, covered in piss and poo stay at home mums, will yeh ?

Actually I wipe my son's bottom with copies of the Torygraph whenever I get copies of it for FREE

Xenia is as reliable on the topic of SAHM's as DC is on the topic of arts graduates or catholics.

lol caligula - don't forget the arabs, philosophy or linguistics students and urdu speakers - those are dc's pet hates too !

har har har har har

stop it - my sides are hurting with laughing

ha ha ha

This article is great. It is as if a 15-year-old boy has been given a GCSE assignment to imagine what it is like to be a mother and has been given special advice to concentrate on metaphors.

Look at this though from the same section - Anne Karpf on juggling parental time and responsibilities - Guardian still has its moments (I bet you'd never see a piece this sympathetic to working families in the Telegraph...)

pmsl at all of this...I can't even find the strenght to comment...but utter tosh and along those lines does put it nicely

Cali, I now totally agree with you on the subject of DC.. what was I thinking??

Jan...I got to individual claims of time and that is where I stopped...if you work, it doesn't work like that, hence people being SAHP, not always by choice (albeit I was by choice)

"Those who rail against divorce and blame family breakdown for everything should take a peek at what current work patterns are doing to family life."

yaay, i was so pleased someone had put a link to the offending article, since my gaurdian didn't have the Family bit in, strangely, and then was so pleased that they didnt after reading it.... boooorring.

would have liked to have read the living with teenagers bit though