I hate yummy mummies
They've become the ultimate symbol of the have-it-all Noughties; beautiful, fashionable and fabulous parents to boot. So what's not to like? Everything, says Nirpal Dhaliwal
Having coffee at my local Carluccio’s on a weekday afternoon is, in effect, a kind of noninvasive vasectomy. Nothing hardens my resolve to abstain from parenthood more than the herds of posturing yummy mummies who congregate to slurp lattes and share the tedious details of their offspring’s development. I can feel my sperm count falling through the floor just thinking about these idle heifers and their conceited, boring lives.
Preened to perfection and wearing the latest designer outfits, these women ape the glossy-mag images of their favourite celebrities, who are pictured with their children in poses that make parenthood seem the most effortless and glamorous of undertakings. Liz Hurley, Victoria Beckham and Claudia Schiffer are just some of the high-profile women who parade their trim figures, expensive wardrobes and immaculately attired children in front of the cameras, giving the absurd impression that being a great mum and a walking fashion advert is both natural and the new benchmark for acceptable parenting.
Motherhood has been rebranded as the ultimate middle-class pastime. In the old days, the bourgeoisie simply ignored their offspring or farmed them out to boarding schools, imparting to them the repression and neurotic zeal that had built the empire. But the empire has gone, and so has the sense of mission that shaped the middle classes and their attitude to child-rearing. Their kids, like everything else in their lives, have simply become another way to flaunt affluence and strike a pose of moral perfection.
In contemporary Britain, parenthood is a lifestyle choice. It is not a self-sacrificing favour to the rest of mankind. Unless you are stunningly beautiful or a certified genius, your DNA is of no relevance and does not require reproduction. But most people never look in the mirror and acknowledge their profound ordinariness — they regard the continuation of their genetic lineage as important, if not vital. Given the enormous damage done to the planet by the billions of humans already in existence, there’s a sound moral argument for not creating any more of them, especially in the hyper-consuming West. Parenthood is a selfish choice that individuals make for entirely their own ends, and, like all other lifestyle choices in today’s Britain, it has become a parlour game of competing vanities and one-upmanship.
The yummy mummy, whose life is bankrolled by a husband working himself to death in the City, who dresses in designer outfits and carries the latest must-have bag, whose hair and nails are perfectly groomed, is the epitome of the fraudulent charade that passes for being a parent these days. I watch them while I sip my coffee, observing the way they dote ostentatiously on their infants as they chitchat with one another, paying overt attention to every uninteresting thing the child says and does. Every chaotic scrawl it makes with its crayon, every meaningless noise it burbles, is praised and discussed as if it were the revelation of a prophet. Sometimes they catch me looking, and at these moments, they always assume that I’m a broody young man, smitten by the sight of mothers with children and aching for babies of my own. They smile at me and coo over their children, pleased by the thought that someone is looking on admiringly. They have no idea that I see straight through them.
These bourgeois charlatans, whose children are delivered through elective caesareans and raised by nannies, who hire night nurses so they don’t have to get up to soothe their infants’ teething pains, have no right to call themselves mothers. The chavvy mums of the underclass get blamed for all of society’s ills, but at least they give birth naturally and raise their children themselves. Unlike yummy mummies, they are the real deal. The coffee-shop performance of the yummy mummy is no doubt the closest thing to quality time she has with her children — and yet its sole purpose is to give her peers the false impression that she actually enjoys being a parent.
In private, the middle classes can’t bear being around children. As soon as their kid is old enough to communicate, every waking second of its life is taken up by a ceaseless cycle of activities: horse-riding, painting, music, football, swimming and drama. Yummy mummies talk about wanting to give their children “enriching experiences”, but the truth is, they want their kids out of the way so they can go shopping and get on with their lives. Whenever a yummy mummy prattles on about the plethora of after-school activities her little ones are engaged in, she is merely hinting at how much she hates the brats and cannot stand being near them.
Children are tiresome, stressful and boring. For the first 20 or so years of their lives, they bleed you dry and cause you fraught and sleepless nights. If a woman loves her children, that trauma will be written on her face. But yummy mummies have outsourced love to their au pairs and to the staff who run the tennis clubs to which they send their children at weekends. They bear none of the battle scars of those who have genuinely raised a family.
Fat, dishevelled and exhausted mums are the ones that matter. They’re the ones who clearly carry the worries of the world on their shoulders. The heaviest burden the yummy mummy has ever borne is the latest Prada handbag.
I pity the kids, stuck with mums who are too fixated on their figures to know what’s going on in their children’s heads; mums who are so obviously terrified of appearing imperfect that any flaw their child exhibits will disgust them. Yummy mummies are praised to the skies as living proof of female emancipation, managing to look sexy and glamorous despite the drudgery of motherhood. It’s only when their children grow up into obviously neglected and maladjusted freaks that we will realise what a disaster the yummy mummy was, and rue the day we started fawning over her.