My 2022 resolution? To act more like a man!

BOXING day. My husband, a surgeon, was at the hospital operating on an emergency case, leaving me and our three children (aged three, two and nine months) at home. would we spend the morning watching cBeebies and playing with new toys? Hell, no! as a woman reared on the tales of enid Blyton I knew we had to go out for a proper Boxing day walk in the countryside. Brisk air, rosycheeked cherubs, what could be better? I packed gingerbread men and planned for us all to have a jolly old time.

alas my children didn’t get the memo. the baby was so hangry that I had to sit on a wet tree stump to breastfeed her, playing the very Hungry caterpillar on my phone to stop the others running off.

My two-year-old son scented danger (as they always do) and hurtled towards a fast-flowing stream. there followed the undignified sight of a woman running across a field with her top pulled up and a baby clamped to her chest, jumping into the water to haul out a wet toddler.

I turned back to see my threeyear-old standing with her trousers by her ankles, trying to answer a call of nature while singing ‘underpants are falling down’ to the tune of ‘london Bridge is falling down’.

a cheery family in santa hats passed, the mother on her phone. was she dialling social services?

ANOTHER attempt at perfect parenting, another parenting disaster. I had a sudden epiphany: I had fallen into the very female trap of trying to do everything, and trying to do it perfectly.

once I had dragged the children home I looked at my whiteboards. I have three large boards, all scrawled with lists that are the evidence of this perfectionism.

the lists contain orders to do a hundred squats a day, to research nutritious meals for my children, to learn baby sign language, to apply fake tan daily, to bake a showstopper cake for new Year’s day tea, to make a rewards chart, to start chapter two of my young adult novel, to make a shadow puppet theatre for the children, to run 10k for charity, and on and on.

as well as the mega to-do list, there are several sub-lists, including seasonal things I should do to give my three the perfect childhood, from blackberry picking to making easter bonnets.

Fed by social media images of perfect mothers and ‘have-it-all’ career women, we set the bar ever higher across all aspects of life. It is not enough for us to just feed our children fish fingers any more; they’ve got to have home-cooked meals every night.

we can’t just look half-decent; we’ve got to be toned and stylish into our 50s and 60s. we can’t just bumble along in a 9-to-5 job; look at all those influencers, ‘mumpreneurs’ and business owners realising their dreams.

we can’t just have bog-standard magnolia décor, our home’s got to look like something out of a magazine, scattered with cool objects ‘we just picked up on our travels’.

My husband is baffled by all this. He doesn’t make lists, doesn’t worry about being a good enough parent, doesn’t fret about how he measures up to other people.

But then he is a man, and men — excuse the generalisation — tend to sweat the small stuff less. they fret less about their appearance, regarding their pot bellies with indifference or even affection (as opposed to the selfloathing women often have for their bodies).

Men tend to apologise a lot less, too. while many women can barely seek a supermarket worker’s attention without apologising — ‘sorry, do you know where the tabasco is?’ — I know men whom I have never heard apologise.

Men seem to be better at feeling ‘good enough’, at refusing to feel guilty about their shortcomings as a husband, parent or worker.

so here is my new Year’s resolution: to be more like a man.

no more sweating the small stuff, or apologising for things I haven’t done wrong. no more writing endless lists, cramming 48 hours of activity into 24, or feeling guilty about not being a perfect mother, wife or size 10.

From now I will do my best to think like a man. My lists have been wiped clean. time for a new slate (or whiteboard).