fragments
This morning Chris found me sitting on the floor of our daughter’s bedroom, swearing luxuriously, and throwing clothes into the air in the manner of a harrassed cartoon character.
‘Um,’ he said, cautiously, ‘everything alright?’
No, I told him, everything is not alright. I cannot find her sodding Pudsey top and her sodding Pudsey ears. How can we lose things so often? We live in a small house. It’s not like we’ve got acres of land to worry about misplacing things in. Each child has a bedroom. In theory, all their items should live in their respective bedrooms. But that doesn’t happen, does it? Instead, we end up with assorted glittery crap strewn all over the place. And I’d blame the kids but it’s not them, it’s me, somehow. It’s us. And no matter how hard I try to be organized, I end up here, half an hour before the school run, sitting cross-legged in a giant t-shirt and my hair in a wild tangle, unable to find anything because nothing lives where it is supposed to live.
At some point, Chris backed away and left me to it. And I found the Pudsey top tangled up inside a Christmas jumper in the ‘seasonal clothes’ box. Which makes sense. But where were the Pudsey ears? I asked my daughter if she had seen them. She thought she had seen them in the drawer with her hair things. I checked the drawer: not there.
I eventually uncovered them inside one of my old handbags in the fancy dress box, which makes sense, because she has a habit of playing imaginary games that always involve packing a bag. Doesn’t matter what the game is. Doctors, vets, ‘going on holiday’ (an obvious choice), schools, Mums and Babies. Every game begins with a packed bag. And so at some point, she probably played a game that involved pretending to be the kind of grown-up that needs to keep novelty bear ears stashed in her handbag just in case.
I looked down at the fancy dress box, trying to gather my thoughts. Old dresses and superhero outfits and sparkly silver bangles and pen-stained scarves and Hawaiian flower garlands leftover from a wedding, all spilling everywhere, the guts of a million other imaginary lives exploding out onto the carpet.
I looked at it, and I thought, this box perfectly represents my life.
There are two categories of online Mums. You’ve got the organised Mums, the Stacey Solomons of the world. The ones that decant their pasta and lentils into neatly matching glass jars, the ones that love label makers as much as their love their husbands, the ones that have all their Christmas presents bought and wrapped in September. The type that throws elaborate birthday parties for their oblivious bald babies, the type that buys matching Christmas pyjamas not just for their children, but for themselves and their husbands and all the grandparents too.
Then you have the other type. The sweary, casually alcoholic, ‘does my thermos contain coffee or gin?’ type Mums. The ones that post pictures of their kids lying mid-tantrum with their face pressed into the floor of the magazine aisle of Sainsbury’s. The Mums that want you to know they’re not like normal gushy Mums. They are cool Mums.
I have been both of these Mums at different times. But I definitely thought I would be more like the former. I remember neatly folding my daughter’s babygrows in her newly painted bedroom, fondly cradling my giant bump. I would be organised! I would be the type of Mum that ironed her kids’ school uniform the night before, obviously. A lot of my online life has revolved around me coming to terms with the fact that I am not actually that Mum after all and saying things like isn’t it stupid that I used to think that way? But actually, upon reflection, I don’t think it’s stupid that I used to strive for this idealised image of motherhood at all: I think it was inevitable.
I have a Notion account (for those not in the know, Notion allows you to write stuff in a series of linked documents. It’s like Word only fancier). I got influenced into it by an earnest twenty-year-old juggling the pressures of university life, an enormous online following, and a full-time YouTube career. Notion saved her life! Obviously, she was being paid to say this but I’m a student so I get Notion for free so I was sold, albeit without having to actually part with any money.
Notion helps me to keep all the separate strands of my life in some kind of order. Everything lives in Notion: my uni deadlines and notes. The books I’m reading. Everything to do with freelancing and the million sub-strands that go along with that. House stuff. Future dreams and plans. It’s like Ashley Olsen’s day planner in New York Minute. (Not that I’ve seen it.) It’s incredibly boring to read, obviously. But it almost works.
Notion has one fatal flaw. It helps me to remember things, but it doesn’t actually get the tasks done. Just like having a family calendar pinned to the wall with ‘CHILDREN IN NEED’ written in big letters on today’s date doesn’t actually enable me to find the Pudsey clothes more easily.
Notion distills all the separate parts of my life into tasks on a checklist. It allows me to think that I have it all together. Even if I don’t.
Most of my life is spent trying to keep everything together. And I think this is a common problem among the women I know. Because ‘having it all’ it turns out is not the same thing as ‘managing everything perfectly’. It’s actually a lot more complicated than that.
Nearly every woman I know has a lot going on. The mental load is outrageous. Careers. Pregnancy, small children, school-aged children, teenage children, grown-up children, grandchildren. Marriages or new relationships or single life. Ageing parents. Siblings. Friends. Mental health issues. Physical health issues. The mental and physical health issues of everyone else.
And we glamorize it. We make it sound fun. We champion the have-it-all-woman because we know so many other women in the generations before us fought for her right to exist. And so we imagine a woman that can rise before the dawn, arranging everything and everyone in her life in the manner of a woman conducting an orchestra. With just the right balance of warm availability and brusque efficiency.
She doesn’t exist. Obviously. Reams and reams of words have been written about the non-existence of the perfect woman by many a millennial before me. We know that she’s not real, but she still hangs around at the edges of our consciousness like an obnoxious ghost. We live in the shadow of her.
Why does she feel so real to us? Is it advertising? The combination of previous generations’ expectations of women with the current demands of modern life? Representations of women in the media? A lot of the time it is a pressure we put on ourselves. Because ultimately, no one really cares that much what other people do, not really. Most people are too busy drowning in their own day-to-day lives to care about what anyone else is doing.
But she’s still there. Our ultimate goal. Our checkpoint. The optimal version of ourselves. Just, tantalizingly, out of reach.
I want to talk about optimisation for a minute. Because this is something that has been undoing me recently. I’ve had to unfollow a lot of productivity-related Instagram accounts and minimalism YouTube channels. Nowadays, we believe that every single strand of our lives can be optimised for maximum efficiency.
And I mean everything. Everything. From our fitness routines to our freelancing careers to our capsule wardrobes to our diets to our spirituality to our family lives to our mental health management. Everything needs to be fine-tuned, a well-oiled machine. And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Look at all the stuff we’re doing. If one part of it lags behind then we risk everything tumbling down around us. No wonder we yearn for solutions, no wonder we want to know how we can achieve more in less time. We feel like we have to.
This is why I don’t like books that claim to increase productivity. Because I have tried this before. I’ve tried to be more productive. I spent most of my twenties trying to be more: more productive, more beautiful, more organised, more confident, more clever, more sexy, more feminine, more extroverted, more spiritual, more well-behaved. And now I’m in my thirties and I’m very tired. And I keep thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ I want to be a human. Not a machine measured by the quality and quantity of my output.
The problem is that we’re (generationally, although I’m sure non-millennials feel this too) trained to really pick at our weaknesses and analyse them. We’re introspective and self-critical. And so all these videos and guides on how to function as a high-level human really appeal to our natures. We want to be better. If we could just fine-tune ourselves a little bit more.
I suppose I should wrap this up soon. It’s Friday afternoon. You’re probably thinking about what you want to have for your tea. I suppose what I am trying to say is this:
Life is messy and fragmented. Humans are messy and fragmented. We live in our sometimes-faulty bodies and think with our sometimes-damaged minds. And it’s exhausting. It keeps ticking along, incredible and mundane. We get sick, people die, we lose ourselves, we find ourselves again, we fall in love, we hang onto grudges until they percolate into bitterness, we make friends, we let them go. We study and work and lay in bed and fight off panic attacks. We pray, we dream, we hope, we wonder about our purpose, and sometimes we try to avoid thinking at all.
Our lives are made of a million fragments that somehow come together, held together into some kind of whole. But it’s not meant to be a tightly-woven, shiny, neatly packaged thing. Our humanity is loose. It has to be. We shift and lose parts of ourselves and take on new ones, and a huge part of us is formed by how we relate to other similarly tangled humans, and sometimes that is very complicated indeed.
I mean, think about it! Of course it’s messy. Life is wild. If you expect it all to run like clockwork then you’re going to be in for a very rude awakening at some point.
No matter how hard we try, we can’t hold everything together neatly all the time, we can’t contain so many things and feel nothing but peace and tranquility and happy thoughts, and we can’t manage everything in our lives without feeling the strain and the struggle.
No matter how hard we try, we can’t optimise ourselves into perfection.
No matter how hard I try, sometimes I end up sitting on the floor in my husband’s t-shirt shouting into the air about a missing Pudsey t-shirt.
That’s okay. It’s okay to be human. Heart and soul and skin and bone.
I handed my daughter her freshly-ironed Pudsey t-shirt, her Pudsey headband, and two options in terms of jeggings: a pretty pair with embroidered flowers that feel a bit stiff to wear, or a comfortable plain blue pair. That age-old problem: style, or comfort?
She emerged from her bedroom moments later in the dark blue jeggings (comfort) and gave me a big hug.
‘Thanks Mum. I love you.’
And she skipped off to school with her eyes just visible under her too-long fringe and a big goofy smile on her face.
I hope she realises one day how much I love her too. I mean, I tell her all the time, but I don’t think she really gets it.
And I hope she realises that no matter how she chooses to navigate her walk in the shadow of the imaginary, ever-present perfect woman, her life will always be meaningful.
And she will always, always be worthy of love.
