Another week, another award slips through my unmanicured fingers. I’m devastated to announce that I did not – sob – make it on to the list of the nation’s top five Yummy Mummies. I mean, what have Nigella Lawson, Myleene Klass, Angelina Jolie, Kate Winslet and Davina McCall got that I haven’t? I’m utterly inconsolable and I just don’t understand it. In fact, if I cry any more I’m going to get snot all over my shapeless fleece.
Okay, so maybe it’s not such a newsflash.
The only real surprise about the survey results was that the Material Girl wasn’t on there. Madonna? Definitely a top Yummy Mummy. She was even spotted last week, all glammed up, leaving an upmarket London hotel clutching a bag containing a sex aid. And no, I don’t mean a can of Red Bull to keep her awake. She had one of those things that makes strange buzzing noises and gives you a beamer when it sets off the security alerts at airports.
Surely that kind of equipment is the true, true measure of a Yummy Mummy. A Slummy Mummy doesn’t have the energy or the inclination, and she knows the chances of finding spare batteries are up there with the chances of locating her make-up bag without a search party and a compass.
I try to make time for a little spot of preening and pampering. I do. But somehow I’m one of those women who finds that running a house, two children under six and a full-time job puts me firmly in the grooming category labelled ‘Dressed in the dark – washable fabrics only’.
I have no idea how the organised mums do it. It’s like there’s a secret race of Supermothers out there who have twenty-nine hours in the day, several assistants, and the ability to pause time while they reapply their lippy every fifteen minutes.
Everywhere I go, I see these tanned, lithe women with yoga mats under their arms, breezing past in co-ordinated outfits with a two-week-old baby strapped to their backs. When my boys were two weeks old, I was still commando-crawling to the corner shop in the hope that no-one would spot that I was wearing a dressing gown, sporting two-inch roots and slippers in the shape of elephants that some comedian had bought me as a witty jibe at my pre-birth physique.
It’s not that I don’t have a thorough understanding of the criteria and the required standards of Superior Motherdom – I just don’t seem to be able to attain the entry-level qualifications.
Yummy Mummies don’t save their dry-clean-only clothes for weddings and funerals. They cook organic meals from scratch. They smell of Eau de Really Expensive. Their hair has never seen a split end and they have a house, a social schedule and a waxing regime that run to military precision.
My clothes are black and shapeless, alternated with black and shapeless, and if I’m feeling really daring I might go for something that’s, er, black and shapeless. Mealtimes are punctuated by the ping of the microwave. There are hikers halfway up my ironing pile. I carry a faint whiff of Eau de Flash-for-Bathrooms. And my legs have applied for a lottery grant and official status as Scotland’s national forest.
A Yummy Mummy’s stomach muscles ping back like overstretched bungee ropes the minute she gives birth. I’m taking a far slower, steadier approach to losing the baby weight, and plan to do it before my youngest son’s next birthday. His sixth.
I know I should disregard the whole Yummy Mummy ethos as a media-generated stereotype designed to make the more normal, exhausted, multitasking mother feel inferior, but the thing is, I want to be one of them. I’ve had five years of woeful mismanagement of my personal presentation standards and it’s time for change. Yummy Mummies of the world, I’m coming to join you… just as soon as I can get a make-up bag, a beauty therapist, a yoga mat and twenty-nine hours in the day.