Lucky friend telling me my life is easy

[Sheila]

Forgive me for this but I'm steaming from Saturday night when I spent an unedifying evening with a friend who's got a husband, a nanny, a nice house in the catchment area of a great school, works part-time and has 2 great kids.

She spent the whole evening complaining about how hard her life is and how tough it is having 2 kids (by implication how easy it is being me with "only" one, even tho' I'm a single parent who works 4 days a week.)

Now I know that compared to many I'm lucky - I don't have too many financial worries as long as ex-dp continues to pay me maintenance, and I'm very glad (although I would've loved to have had more kids if the situation was different) I don't have more than one child to care for without a dad, but it infuriates me when women who I think are really lucky start telling me I've got an easy life.

I supect it looks easy from the outside because DS is a gorgeous, happy, well-behaved kid (in public anyway!) and I'm not obviously sinking under the pressure of looking after us both on my own. What people don't see is how bloody hard it is to keep us both that way.

Why do some people have to try to claim the moral high ground about how hard their lot is - a sort of maternal one-upmanship?

Incoherent rambling over - grateful for any comments.

Lol bobthebaby....
I have a very dear friend (which means I always bite my tongue and forgive her) who is childless and who always seems to justify her several holidays a year with "well I do deserve it because I've never not worked". Which is imo a pointed remark because I have taken 'time off' or worked part time at differing stages of my childrens life. We never have a holiday but firstly it saddens me that she feels she has to justify it but secondly it just makes me laugh ... (having children is such a holiday ) When friends with children stay for the weekend my friend has been known to take the Monday off to recover from her exhausting weekend.

Bumped into someone today that I haven't seen since DD was 3 (now 8). I chose to distance myself from this person and associated gang as I always left their company feeling a bit unhappy - so competative and 'up themselves' IYKWIM. Final straw was when we went for a Xmas do (in place of office do, as all SAHMs at the time) and I discovered they were all going out with kids next day to see Santa, and hadn't invited me/dd/ds. Went home and cried to dh, then got sensible and found some nicer friends (eventually).
Anyway, this ex-friend was full of questions about my job, interests, children etc, and I realised she is such a martyr to motherhood. Apparently I am so lucky that my (averagely-paid, NHS manager/clinician) dh is home every night, 'cos that enables me to go out once a week. Her (highly-paid) dh is away such a lot and babysitting so expensive in her village (just moved, large house, great catchment area) that she can't possibly go out. Anyway, she says, you have to have the house tidy and kids in bed for babysitters, so it's not worth going out, is it?! Eldest ds piped up that he can get himself ready for bed, but was quickly silenced (bless him!)

I read once that one of the greatest gifts you can give your children is the quality of your own life - enables me to have my own time and not feel guilty, though it still takes organisation, what with day job, evening job, kids, elderly mother.

I'm far from the perfect mother, but I'm not going to saddle my kids with a martyr! Feel I made the right decision 5 years ago.

Happy christmas everyone! I love mumsnet!

I had a 'friend' who told me how fortunate I was not to have suffered as she had done with her ds. And this was in the year after I had a traumatic mc that left me needing surgery and hormone treatment to correct the infertility it had caused! She also told me how awful it was that she now had to shop in M& S (after giving up her work post child, Jaeger before), she then went on to say, 'well it's alright for you, you like shopping there' I could have punched her lights out.

For that matter my mother used to tell me post M/C how lucky I was not to have children because 'After all, they only grow up and leave you. What you never have , you can never miss'

What I hate are the round robin Christmas letters that make me feel such a lousy mum. Maybe if I hadn't been working full time all my kid's lives to support the family they too would have grade 5 oboe, clarinet, organ instead of digimon, pokemon and yu-gi-oh ... I know it's daft and I know I've got great funny and imaginative kids ... but every time I get one of these letters I always feel so unhappy ...

Copper - have a look at the Round Robin thread and you'll see you are not alone.

Thanks Roscoe - raised a laugh instead!

hmb, what a terrible thing for your mother to say. Sounds like the sort of thing mine would say

She had her moments.....

I guess we all have things in our lives that aren't going well and sometimes they blind us to the reality of other peoples lives and problems. There are also people who do seem to suffer from a "poor me" attitude to life and sometimes dwell on past problems as if they were still major issues. I can think of at least one very close and dear relative of mine who spent her whole life re-living the tragedy of her husband's early death and couldn't see how blessed she was with her children, friends and relatively comfortable financial situation.

I agree with buzzybee that some people are destined never to be happy because they don't want to be, or don't know what happiness really is. I suspect that Sheila's friend has everything that she ever thought she wanted but somehow she's still unhappy, therefore the cause must be the difference between her and you, which is you only have one child. If you had the same number of children she would find another difference and think that was the cause of her unhappiness, in reality she's probably just bored with her life.