I was the worst monster mum at the school gate
As a BBC comedy exquisitely captures ultra-competitive mothers, RACHEL HALLIWELL (who served sushi at a playdate) admits...
THERE’S a mum in our village I always try to avoid, because I cringe every time I see her. We used to stand together at the school gates when our now adult daughters were little.
She’s lovely — sensible, kind-natured and easy-going. Nothing like the sharpelbowed, uber competitive and often downright mean middle-class mothers made flesh each morning outside primary schools up and down the land.
My problem is that whenever I see her I re-live the mortifying moment, ten years ago, when she sat in my kitchen looking aghast at the competitive spread I’d laid out for our then nine-year-olds for a playdate tea. There wasn’t so much as a slice of pizza or a chicken nugget in sight.
But there was enough sushi to feed a small Japanese army. Yes, I know, sushi. I hate me, too.
Or at least I hate the daft woman I once was, who would morph into an overtly competitive lunatic if I found myself within ten paces of another mother.
In other words, someone able to turn what ought to have been a friendly couple of hours bonding with a new mum from school into a showcase for my own children’s sophisticated taste buds. (Children who, in reality, would have picked a sausage roll over tuna sashimi any day of the week.)
I suspect I’m going to be reminded of that moment, and countless others when I fell short of my best self, in the weeks ahead as I sit glued to the TV each Tuesday night watching the BBC’s brilliant new show, Motherland.
I think it’s meant to be a comedy. It certainly had me roaring (if uncomfortably at times). But the fact that most of us watching will recognise ourselves, and various peers, throughout makes me wonder whether it’s actually a social documentary.
Motherland couldn’t ring more true if it had been filmed on secret cameras at the school fundraisers, children’s birthday parties and child-friendly coffee shops of middle England.
It navigates a hellish suburban landscape where every personality type of mother is represented — women brought together for no better reason than they have children in the same class.
And anyone with a school age child knows how that tends to work out. It firmly puts to bed the misnomer that there’s any such thing as ‘having it all’. Our anti-hero is Julia, an embattled working mum with perpetual childcare issues, overstretched to the point that she comes across as uncomfortably unhinged.
In this week’s episode she came up with the genius idea of hosting a kids’ party for the whole class, building up child-minding credits with other parents for the rest of the year.
But like so many great ideas born out of desperate need, the plan spectacularly backfired, leaving poor Julia as stressed and encumbered as ever. STIll,
at least she has liz, the polar opposite of the show’s alpha mums who add to Julia’s misery by turning motherhood into a stick to beat her with.
liz is a no-nonsense single mum who takes an uncomplicated approach to child rearing.
Her idea of a good party game is to chuck a pound coin into a room and leave the children to fight over it.
‘Then for the big finale, play Gangnam Style and give them undiluted squash,’ is her accurate, if dodgy assessment of what constitutes a damn good time for a bunch of nine-year-olds. God, I wish liz had been my mate when I was in the early days of my 18-year- stretch as a school run mum. What a reality check she could have provided.
She might even have saved me from myself, by refusing to let me get embroiled in the kind of playground one- upmanship that turned me into the kind of mother any sane person would abhor. I look back in horror at the money I haemorrhaged on over-the-top birthday parties and Christmas gifts for the teachers, at paying through the nose for a magician AND a bouncy castle.
And let’s not forget the bulging party bags — under the pretence that I didn’t want my child to feel inferior among her classmates, when actually, the only people I really cared about impressing were their mothers.
Dear me, what a bitchy spot the school gates can be at 3pm on a weekday. During my time there I had to hold my own among women who smiled sweetly as they stabbed me in the front.
Choice comments made to me by other mums include: ‘I wish I could be more like you, and not care about my appearance’, ‘that’s an interesting haircut; did you do it yourself?’ and, my alltime favourite, ‘you’re pregnant? I thought you’d just got a bit fatter!’
They’re lines that might so easily fall from the lips of Motherland’s Queen Bee Amanda — every school’s mean mum personified. Her genius for devastating one- liners was summed up this week when she turned to a flailing Julia and sweetly enquired: ‘Do you need a hand, just to make the party a bit better?’
Perhaps I should be a bit more forgiving of myself over the sushi buffet, after all. I was so desperate to impress a new face.
I must also point out that I did rehabilitate myself during a yearlong break in my epic school run stint, between my middle girl leaving her primary and her little sister starting at another.
That time out from other mothers made me realise that the only person allowing them to bring out the worst parts of my own psyche, was me. I could do better.
And so, seven years ago, I turned up to a new school gate determined to stay out of the cliques, march to my own beat and make a genuine effort to get on with everyone.
And I’m pleased to report that I made it all the way to my youngest daughter leaving with my dignity intact, and without having ever offered any visiting child a plate of sushi for their tea again.
But it would have been more fun if liz from the show and I could have been friends.