YUMMY MUMMIES


The mummies on ads and in the fashion pages and the celebrity magazines are really starting to get to me. They all seem to be snapping back to their pre-baby figures like industrial strength rubber corsetry. And there seems to be hundreds of them on TV selling Panadol, or bars, and not the sort of bars I'd rather have anything to do with. You can keep your Muesli "health" bars made of sawdust gummed to the consistency of a Mintie, and give me flattering lighting, a menu featuring lychee martinis, and a flirty barman who knows where his next tip's coming from.

Of all the modern insults, isn't "mumsy" an absolute pearler? Movie actress Kate Hudson's not mumsy, oh no, she's sprayed skimmery golden, and has floaty blonde hair and teeth like as white as a bathroom basin and wears a size 000 (which as mothers know fits a newborn up to 3 months old.) Goodness, those advertising world mummies are all madly fit and tanned, where do they get the time to do their fingernails? Angelina Jolie manages to steal husbands (boo), save the third world (hurrah), shut down Namibian airspace over her holiday house (what?), go adopterama (um) AND give birth (okaaaaay), all while looking like a Bratz doll with tatts and a rock chick wardrobe. No elasticised waists for her, by jingo.

Uncle. Which is an old fashioned way of saying I give up. I am waving a white flag, made out of a standard lamp and a pair of Cottontails. While society (or at least your Aunty Pat) demands you become a mother, you will not be allowed to look like one. You must be a secret, unidentifiable mother. You can look like a very glamorous aunty or friend of the family who has popped by from the perfume launch to pat the children from on top of your high heels and then drive them home to their down- trodden, wren-like, fossilised progenitor.

While my Nanna's generation was judged on their ginger fluff sponges and lack of dust in the crevices, this one's needs to do all that, and pull down a wage, but most of all be a "yummy mummy", a trim-figured youngster, up to pussy's bow with topiaried pubes, pedicures, hairstyles, fashions, facials, light-reflecting make-up, coloured hair, and high-hoisted bosomry, always poised for public view and approval.

Mothers, as well as working outside and inside the home, for pay and not for pay, and cleaning up other people's sick, should look like sex workers, or Nelly Furtado in her music video for the single Promiscuous. Nelly's a mother but has the good commercial sense to writhe about like a stripper.

"Mumsy", on the other hand, suggests cardies, dowdy tracksuit pants, being built for comfort, not for speed, being a little thick around the middle and unkempt up the top. Me, actually. "Mother of all...somethings" (battles, wars, underpants) suggests a gargantuan event, or all-consuming, enormous...well, me, again, thankyou for not calling me Fatimah Boombah.

Being a mother - no, wait, looking like a mother - has become a badge of dishonour. "Motherly" kind of sounds caring, but there's no such word as "Dadsy". "Fatherly" always goes in front of "advice" and has nothing to do with the insinuation that you've got a paunch and bags under your eyes and your waist will never again fit inside a size 34 trouser, and everyone's eyes will flick past you, lickety split.

Here's some dictionary definitions of mumsy: old fashioned, drab, frumpy, dowdy, kind and motherly, disagreeably mother-like, Australian word similar to "mommy", a lady who looks like a mother, a way to describe something your mother would do. The Cambridge dictionary helpfully explains that mumsy "describes a woman with an old-fashioned appearance, like that of a traditional mother" and supplies this delightful example,
"As she became more successful, she changed her mumsy hairstyle for something more glamorous." The Oxford chaps say it means "homely and unfashionable", adding "chiefly humorous, one's mother". As in "Oh, mumsy, why don't you look like Pamela Anderson? By the way, I think there's a bat in the east balconade".

In the garment world, Mumsy is not, as you may have thought, a pair of leopardskin print crotchless one-piece lingerie-style corsetry (that's a "Teddy"), but a crocheted brooch in the shape of a crysanthemum.

Judging from school drop-off and pick up most mums make a decent but not full-on effort in the grooming department before 8.30, unless they work outside the house and must put on a good show for the customers or in the office. Some don't need to go to much trouble, bless 'em, they're just naturally young gorgeous, slim mums who show their tummies. To use a Kimmism, old groganny, mumsy ones, like me, would only show their tummies if they fell over in an unexpectedly involved manner and were then so embarrassed they closed their eyes and pretended to be dead.

I tend to be either in pajamas, sarong and gumboots or in "meeting clothes". Once in April, my hair was done. I have no idea what I look like from behind, and I'm so not asking you to tell me. I think I know if my bum looks big in this, and frankly I don't care to dwell.

There are some dads, I am pleased to say, holding their end up marvellously in the let-yourself-go stakes, with mismatched sideburns and wearing quite disgraceful, misshapen old handknits and pants which have never been taken up to the right length and just go that accordion shape round the ankles, with that frayed, billy-goat's beard at the bottom back of the jeans. It makes you like them. If they looked like those poncy bastards in the male fashion ads you'd hate their guts.

Rather than a huge rivalry between Mums, I've always felt a camaraderie with most of them; I don't care whether they work at home or not, whether they're half dressed, or all frocked up, and whether or not they're 20 years younger, 12 per cent less confused, 76 per cent firmer and 93 per cent more radiant. Probably because I need them to tell me stuff, like whether it's curriculum day and that I seem to have sat in something.

"Mumsy" is the most hurtful word snarled with disdain by those fashion harpies Trinny and Susannah, who have their own TV show 'What Not To Wear' in which they harangue and literally prod women to buy new clothes, and force them to stand in front of endless 360 degree mirrors in their pants until they cry, and make them say things to the camera like they should try to make more of an effort for their husbands. Women described as "mumsy" know they are at the bottom of the pecking order, and Trinny and Susannah are just the chooks to get the message across. "Don't hide your tits!" was one of their charming BBC bon mots.

No, by all means, ladies, take the hokey-pokey approach, get your breasts out of your bodice and wave them all, wabbity wabbity. And get a pair of thigh boots, and some hot pants and chandelier earrings and a carroty fake tan or you'll look like a big mumsy mum-mum. And how embarrassing would that be?

The Monthly magazine, October 2006