I have a group of girlfriends and we call ourselves the DMC. It stands for Delinquent Mothers Club.
It was named as such after we met at a 40th birthday of a school mum. We’d never met each other before but for reasons we only discovered later, we gravitated towards one another after a few glasses of champagne.
We realised we were the only full time working mothers in the room.
Of course I’m not speaking for all schools, and in fact our kids are at three different schools, so there were a big group of mums in the room, but we realised we were the minority. We agreed to meet up purely because we found we had a lot to talk about. We have a common set of challenges which are unique to the working mother.
DMC was born! (I’d like it noted, we aren’t actually delinquent, well not all the time!)
This group of incredible women meet every couple of months and share and chat about all we juggle. We rarely discuss our children and we rarely discuss work. We talk about everything that surrounds it:
- How we cope when the school play is the same day as the board meeting
- How we feel when we are stuck with a patient at the hospital and it’s parents evening
- How we feel when we are pitching to a client and it runs on, and in the back of our head we know, it’s the one day we are meant to be collecting from school.
We share top tips, how we can best support our kids when we are with them less than the nanny, how we can find the right balance between our careers and our little people and sometimes how we can stay sane!
One of the things that is always interesting about these evenings is hearing us all comment when things go wrong.
We do miss pick ups, we do find no milk in the fridge for breakfast and we do sometimes let our babies in our beds. What intrigues me about this is that ultimately we have high standards at work and at home yet we have learned to drop the ball and accept it’s ok. The pressure of being perfect at everything all of the time is a slippery slope.
For those of you who have read ‘Having it all’ you may remember the part when she pops to the supermarket, takes the cakes out of the packet, gives them a bit of a squash and sends them in the cake sale at school the next day. To be honest, we in the DMC feel it’s fine to miss cake sale altogether once in a while.
Sometimes you can’t do it all.
The moral of the story is that cutting yourself some slack can help with those feelings of pressure we all have. My eldest daughter was told by her teacher, after I missed parents evening, that her Mum was Supermum. I think the email to the teacher explaining I was stuck at work was all it took.
Working mums will often hear ‘I don’t know how you do it’. There are of course the ones who say ‘how can you leave your children every day?’, but that’s for another blog on another day….
For now, keep being Supermum and create your own DMC!
Image: Sergejs Rahunoks © 123RF.com