And then Michael Owen pissed me off.

So you’re getting this instead.

It has occurred to me that Michael Owen and I are living very different lives.

Michael Owen has a £4 million house. I have a house where you can hear the washing machine from every room. Michael Owen has 160 acres of land. I have a garden where when my son kicks a football it goes straight over the neighbour’s fence. Michael Owen owns racehorses. I own a Tesco Clubcard and consider myself quite financially savvy when I remember to scan it. Michael Owen has played for Real Madrid. I went to Barcelona for a weekend and drank so many Bloody Mary’s that I gave myself the shits for the flight home. Michael Owen won the Ballon d’Or. I won the fireworks drawing competition in Reception and then never won anything ever again.

There are clearly a great many areas of life in which Michael Owen has me comfortably beaten. But there is one thing I think I might have the upper hand on.

I tell my son I love him all the time.

All. the. fucking. time.

And Michael Owen, despite his various accolades, doesn’t.

What am I going on about? Let me tell you.

There I was, whittling away the hours on Instagram, as one does when there are approximately 4795739 things in the house that need doing, when I came across a clip of Michael Owen talking to Jamie Laing on the Great Company podcast in which he said, and I quote:

“I never ever tell my kids I love them, but they're the most dearest things in the world, the most precious things… I don't say anything like that. I just assume that my actions would show them that I love them… If you say it all the time, does it mean anything? You know, kissing your kid and sending them to school and, ‘Oh, well done’. And no matter what they do, you just keep saying, ‘Well done’ and if they do rubbish, ‘Oh, you're trying awfully hard.’ No. I like tough love.”

And I thought, oh dear. Oh deary, deary me.

I must speak to Michael, I thought. Trouble is, I don’t actually know Michael. I don’t have his phone number or email address and short of turning up at his £4 million house and shouting through the gates this is really my only option. So, for the purposes of this conversation I’d like you all to pretend to be Michael. Go on, do it for me.

Are we ready? Okay, good.

Michael, mate. Can I call you mate? I know we’ve never met, but I fancied you in year 3 and I think you were one of the reasons I told everyone I supported Liverpool - it appears you outranked the fact that my Mum is from there in the ‘reasons to support this team’ so I feel like we’re sort of close?

I heard you say that you never tell your kids you love them because you assume your actions show it - you questioned whether it even means anything if you say it all the time.

I realise that I am simply a woman on the internet whose most notable athletic achievement is walking 26.2 miles around London with a trapped nerve and a mother who had shit herself behind a tree in Queens Park, but I am here to tell you that yes, Michael, it means something. It means quite a lot actually. And, despite whatever avoidant attachment you have been nursing, it does, in fact, mean something every time you say it.

Because Michael, this is not actually how love works. Love is not a currency that devalues with each use. It’s not a limited edition trainer that’s only worth something if you never take it out of the box. You don’t ration “I love you” like it’s the last Rolo in the packet and you’re worried your kid’s going to balloon from eating all the Rolos like the greedy little fucker he is.

You see Michael, nobody has ever been irreparably damaged by hearing their mum or dad say I love you one too many times. Nobody has grown up thin skinned and confused because they were told, repeatedly, that they were loved. But I can tell you, with a fair amount of confidence, that growing up in a house where love was implied, inferred, assumed, or gestured at from across the room like a stranger trying to get the bill is where the damage happens.

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I have watched a great many TikTok’s telling me so.

So Michael, I implore you to tell your kids you love them.

It’s not that hard. There’s a whole song about this - a song that has been streamed 56 million times, performed without irony by some very wiggly adults and a large spotty dinosaur in a hat. If you are struggling with words of your own, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind you borrowing theirs. They go like this:

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a doo
I love you.

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a doo
I love you.

I love you in the morning
And in the afternoon
I love you in the evening
And underneath the moon.

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a doo
I love you.

You’ll notice it has no verses about tough love in there at all, nothing about inference or knowing without telling. It doesn’t, for example, say:

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a doo
I won't say I love you
But you'll probably know I do.

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a doo
I made your packed lunch
So that's me telling you.

I love you in the morning
And in the afternoon
I love you in the evening
But I won’t say it to you.

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a doo
I drove you to your football
What more do you want me to do?

Skidamarink a dink a dink
Skidamarink a doo
I don't need to tell you
You should just know I do.

I do wonder, Michael, if you’ve slightly confused ‘actions speak louder than words’ with ‘actions mean you don’t need words’. Nobody’s disputing that actions matter. But actions are sort of meant to back up the words. They work together, like Ant and Dec. I’d give you a football metaphor to really hammer this home but I’m afraid my knowledge of football begins and ends with fancying you in year 3 so you’re going to have to imagine one yourself.

So, to conclude. Tell your kids you love them Michael - tough love isn’t the answer here. Therapy might be though. I hear it’s very good. I’d offer to pay but I’ve just remembered I own a Tesco Clubcard and 160 acres of land is not among my assets.

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And to any of my readers who might have thought along the same lines as Michael. Please, tell your kids you love them.

Tell them every day. Tell them all the time. Tell them so much they say ‘eurgh Daaaaaad stooooop’ or ‘God, Mum you’re soooo embarrassing’. Tell them so much they never have to wonder and they never have to guess.

To end this piece, I want to bring back something I wrote at the beginning of the year. Words I wrote after hearing my son tell me he loves me - something he is able to do because he has heard it said to him every day, all the time - so he never has to wonder and he never has to guess.

See, Michael, it really is that easy.

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I am sat on the edge of the bed having a somewhat one way conversation with his ball bag. Look, I told you to stay with me.

You may be wondering what has led me to write a mock conversation between myself and my partner’s testicles. Well, there is a reason. Unfortunately, it is not that I have lost my mind - although I appreciate that the evidence is mounting.

The reason is that I was talking to someone the other day about the prospect of baby number two (which is, admittedly, a much more conventional setting for discussing your reproductive future given the fact that nobody is having to pretend they can hear you through a scrotum) and when discussing my hypothetical next child they used the words “less needy”.

As in… My second child might be “less needy” than my first.

For anyone who’s been here a while, you can probably see why I’m now aggressively hitting my keyboard, but for those new here - hello - I should probably explain that I am one of those irritating people who thinks babies are supposed to need their mothers. I have spent the last three and a half years breastfeeding, cosleeping, napping together and being exceptionally available to a son who has had what I would consider an entirely reasonable expectation that his mother will, in fact, be there when he needs her.

Before I go on, a quick bit of background for anyone not in the know! My son has slept in my bed since he was four months old. I exclusively breastfed (and still feed now 3.5 years later) and have never once even attempted to sleep train. I have never spent a night away from him, all our naps were spent together and I was once called “extreme” for the crime of going upstairs to have a snooze with my then 3 month old rather than putting him in a cot and coming back down to sit with a guest. I have written about all of this extensively, so if you want the full case for why, there’s a back catalogue for you to go and get lost in.

Having said all of that, it probably won’t come as a surprise to know that I don’t consider any of this a parenting failure I need to address before having another baby. I know, wild! It certainly shouldn’t surprise the person who said this to me given they know the way I mother.

This is not the first time I have had the sense that people assume I will do things differently with a second child. It's as though people think that after doing it this way once and having seen just how GOD AWFUL it all is I will have surely come to my senses. I’ll have learned my lesson, realised the error of my ways and decided that this time, I’ll do it properly. Like the last three and a half years were a mistake I made because I didn’t know any better, and now that I do, I’ll surely want to correct it.

Nobody says this outright, obviously. Nobody’s ever actually said “I assume you’ll be doing things differently because you’ve clearly learned from the disaster that was your first child.” That would be insane and also extremely rude, and also very wrong because my first child is not a disaster but a fucking fabulous little guy who I would happily do all of it again for tomorrow.

But it’s sort of there - in the “less needy.” In the assumption that what I did wasn’t a choice but something that happened to me, because I got unlucky with a “needy” baby and given the choice, obviously I’d pick the other option.

The other option being what some have coined… Wait for it… The “low maintenance” baby.

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I vividly remember coming across a trend last year that made me wonder if we’d forgotten what words meant. The “low maintenance baby” was being pushed by TikTok creator Aubrey Matthesius whose bio read, and I quote, “Low Maintenance Mom” and, somewhat ominously, “Teaching moms how to be chill again” - somebody get this woman a red hat.

Her whole thing was essentially about raising a baby who would fit into your life rather than your life revolving around the baby. How? Well, a variety of things, some I agree with - like not buying the wipe warmer - and others that I don’t - like sleep training. A few of her stances are:

Sleep training from day dot because “a low maintenance baby needs to be sleep trained”.

Not cosleeping because “babies are going to push the boundaries as long as you let them”.

Moving the baby out of your room as quickly as possible via - and I promise I'm not making this up - the closet.

And doing all of this in the name of “old school, old fashioned parenting” because “chill babies” are simply “the result of chill moms”.

Low maintenance babies by this definition aren't born, they're made - not by temperament but by low maintenance mums. See also:

Aside from the fact that the term “low maintenance” and “baby” feel inherently at odds to one another - in part due to the fact that babies are, you know, fucking babies, and are by definition the highest maintenance things you can find on planet earth aside from maybe a Fiddle-Leaf Fig, it also implies that for a baby to “need” you you must have done something wrong. Because if low maintenance babies are made rather than born, then presumably high maintenance babies are made too.

Which means that when we describe a baby as needy we’re no longer just describing a baby who happens to need a lot (because they are, urm, babies). We are, whether we mean to or not, suggesting that somebody has done something to make them that way - and that somebody is generally Mum.

The baby who wants to be held has been held too much. The baby who won’t sleep alone hasn’t been trained to sleep alone. The baby who only wants their mum has been allowed to become too attached to their mum. The baby who wants to feed a lot has been given too much access to the boob. The baby who doesn’t like being passed around has not been passed around enough.

The baby is not simply a baby with a particular temperament it is a project that mum has got a bit wrong.

And if a needy baby is a made thing, not a born thing, then “you might get one that’s less needy this time” isn’t actually a comment about the baby at all - it’s a comment about me. A subtle way of saying maybe you’ll do it differently next time, and if you do, you’ll get a different result. It’s a weird optimism about what is essentially me not doing what I did the first time.

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I can see why this stuff feels seductive to people. It’s the same reason the 90s mum has become a sort of cultural icon again.

She's wearing an enormous t-shirt that definitely came free with something in 1997. She's drinking a hot cup of tea. The children have buggered off somewhere until teatime. One of them is probably building a den out of an old washing basket while another is drinking from the garden hose because the earth isn’t on fire and we don’t know what a hosepipe ban is yet. Nobody knows where the third child is and everyone seems totally cool with that.

Apparently our mothers spent the entirety of the 1990s like this. They weren’t curating childhoods or building sensory trays and they weren’t worrying that giving us a yoghurt with too much sugar would lead to a podcast episode titled “Why I cut off my mother” 25 years later.

It’s obviously a romanticised version of the decade - I’m fairly sure there will have been plenty of stressed mothers in 1997 too - but that’s almost beside the point. The fantasy isn’t really about the 90s. It’s about a mother who seems blissfully untouched by the constant pressure to optimise every waking minute of family life. And I get it!

’s viral essay about her own 90’s mum absolutely exploded because I think it tapped into exactly that. People weren’t sharing it because they wanted to buy a VCR. They were sharing it because the image of a mum who drank her tea hot, had a nap in the afternoon and didn’t appear to spend every second wondering whether she was accidentally ruining her children felt sexy as fuck.

Which is funny because the “low maintenance baby” idea is basically selling the exact same dream - the unbothered mum with the unbothered baby. She who has her own life - a mum who isn’t trapped in the confines of that dastardly blighter - motherhood. Or at least, the kind of motherhood that shrinks things for a while. We don’t want that kind of motherhood. That kind of motherhood is a real vibe killer. And no one wants to be the vibe killer, do they? Just follow these steps and you too can avoid the fate of the “high maintenance” baby and reclaim your power as the “low maintenance mum”.

It’s easy to see why people might look at the way I’ve chosen to mother and see it as the “high maintenance” option. But that feels a bit like calling breathing high maintenance. To be high maintenance means something requires a lot of attention, upkeep, faffing about, monitoring, and intervention. You have to keep on top of it. You have to actively do things that might not feel natural to you to keep it going.

Do you feel like that about breathing? Do you wake up in the morning and think, right, better get a few breaths in today. Can’t let that slip. Perhaps I’ll put an alarm on for 3 o’clock to remind myself.

Mothering in the way I have feels a bit like breathing to me.

I’m not saying it’s easy. There is no version of motherhood that’s easy. But it was what my son needed, and it was what felt right to me to give him. I’m not some sort of martyr who enjoys making everything as difficult as possible - far from it! I love low maintenance. I am not good with stress. I am anxiety in barrel leg jeans do you hear me?! For me the least high maintenance thing has always been to mould my life around what my child needs and not fight against that - to surrender.

Feeding on demand meant I never once had to think about ounces, or timings, or whether he’d had enough. There was no logging it or watching a clock or wondering if the last feed was too close to this one. The expensive shiny hands-free pump I was gifted gathered dust like the bottles I never had to sterilise.

Sleeping next to him meant I never had to train him to sleep any other way. There was no standing outside a door listening to him cry, no timed intervals, or controlled crying. There was no berating myself about whether tonight’s the night I can finally hold firm. The cot made a fabulous dumping ground and every nap we spent together was a nap I was forced to rest in. Fuck, I miss the naps.

I just had a baby who needed me so I gave him me and it was considerably less faff than trying to teach him not to.

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I know the second time around will have to look different in some ways and I can hear people lining up to tell me so. There will be another child in the mix - one that also needs their mother in different ways. My attention will be split in ways it wasn’t the first time - which is partly why I’ve waited.

I wanted my first child to have a decent stretch of being the child who could have all of that from me without having to share his mother with a newborn. And I wanted to give myself the best possible chance of being able to respond to another baby the way I actually want to respond to them instead of their needs becoming a problem because there's another tiny person attached to my ankle.

We don’t know who our babies will be. And if my second turns out to be “less needy” then brilliant - I suppose I’ll take the “win”? But if they are exactly the sort of baby I had the first time around I can promise you I won’t be sat thinking that I need to make them less needy. Because I’ll have something I didn’t have the first time - perspective. I’ll remember the last time and I’ll know something I didn’t know then.

It ends. It. all. ends. And the baby who wanted to be attached to you all day becomes the 3 year old who is quite happy to wander off somewhere while saying “you stay. staay. staaaaaaaay.” as though he were talking to the dog.

If there is anything that will change the second time around for me it is this. The knowledge that what they say is true. That everything is temporary, fleeting, impossible to retain like grains of sand slipping through your fingers.

If anything will change, it will be the voices in my own head. Hush I will say. You know nothing and I know very well that this is where I’m meant to be.

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Back again.

Boobie’s back.

Tell a friend.

Actually on second thoughts, maybe don’t do that. They’ll only have an opinion!

Yes, hello, it is I - your resident breastfeeding enthusiast, back again. Despite my best efforts to diversify my portfolio here on the old Stack, I am once once again gracing your inbox with talk of my tits.

I know, I know, I’m obsessed (or as Karen Millen famously declared - addicted!) At this point it’s starting to feel less like a niche and more like I’ve accidentally become one of those local attractions people warn tourists about. You know - “oh yes, if you’re heading over to Substack you’ll want to pop in and see the woman who’s still breastfeeding the man with a driving licence” or however the TripAdvisor review goes.

I had other plans, I swear! I’ve actually just come back from what was technically a girls’ trip with my mum, my sister and my 3 year old son (which I appreciate sounds less like a girls’ trip and more like the beginning of a Channel 5 crime documentary but whatever). I had every intention of writing about that instead, mainly because I spent most of it thinking about how parenting somewhere that wasn’t my own kitchen with a small group of other women that I love made me an infinitely better mother (more on that next week).

Anyway, at one point we were all lying out in the garden on some delectably comfortable lounge chairs - these ones to be precise…

… doing very little. My mum had a gin and tonic, my sister had a gin and tonic and I had, you guessed it, a gin and tonic… and a small child I grew, attached to one boob.

“Well” my mum laughed “thanks for taking one for the team!” And taking one for the team I was, because while he was happily having milk the rest of us got to slurp on our delectable Mediterranean orange flavoured gin, finish a conversation and enjoy 20 uninterrupted minutes in the sun.

Which is funny timing, because not even 1 hour earlier I’d been served a podcast clip by an algorithm that was clearly aware I'd gone too long without hearing somebody have an opinion about my tatas, in which two men declared breastfeeding for as long as I have been is, and I quote, “self pleasure”. I know, right? Quite an extraordinary phrase when used about breastfeeding… I mean, you don’t generally hear someone say “oooh look, Doris is over there enjoying a spot of self pleasure” and assume she’s halfway through a National Trust cream tea do you? It’s a phrase with, shall we say, urm, baggage.

It’s a phrase that could very easily get your back up when applied to nursing your child with your body - not least because when I think of “self pleasure” I don’t naturally think of a sweaty preschooler climbing me like a tree while absent mindedly yanking my other nipple off it’s areola axis.

But then the darndest thing happened! For as I was lain there, feeling the gush of my ice cold G&T hit the back of my throat surrounded by birdsong and the gentle heat of the sun through dappled shade I thought, well well well, what if they have a fucking point?

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What if two men on the internet were actually right for once? Just not in the way they thought. Because there are in fact rather a lot of occasions where breastfeeding benefits me too - and if we’re insisting on calling that self pleasure now, then well, I guess I’m pleasured. So in the interest of full disclosure - and because apparently I'm contractually obliged to milk this bit (sorry) for all it's worth - here is a comprehensive, entirely unprompted list of all the ways I continue to breastfeed my son purely for my own self pleasure:

1. Starting off strong with - so I can actually drink a fucking gin and tonic before the ice melts.

One of the great myths surrounding extended breastfeeding is that I’m doing it because I’m addicted to the beautiful bonding experience. In reality I’m doing it because my child is currently occupied, everyone else is chatting, my drink is delectably cold, the ice hasn’t melted and for approximately 17 glorious minutes nobody is asking anything of me. This does in fact sound like the very definition of self pleasure - damn lock me up.

2. Because I’d quite like to sit down for 5 bastard minutes.

People speak about breastfeeding as though it’s some enormous act of maternal sacrifice. Which I mean, yeah, don’t get me wrong, it can be. But sometimes it’s also just, you know, sitting down. Do you know how rarely mothers of 3 year olds get to sit down without immediately being asked to locate a tiny plastic tractor or break up a situation with the dog. Exactly.

3. To lie down in the middle of the day.

Remember lying down because you fancied a lie down? Me neither. But hey, whacking a tit out does in fact enable that. Who knew? Me. I knew.

4. To finish reading a Substack article.

Do you know how many words I’ve consumed one paragraph at a time over the last three years? Thousands. Heck, probably tens of thousands.

I’ve become extremely familiar with the first 400 words of a lot of very good writing. Offering up a boob occasionally buys me enough time to discover how the bloody thing ends in one sitting. Bliss.

5. To hear the end of a conversation.

The amount of gossip I’ve missed out on because somebody has suddenly remembered they own legs is criminal. Breastfeeding is, if nothing else, an excellent way of finding out whether Sharon ever did leave Steve. And if she did, where she went, who she went with and whether she took the good sofa. This is all very important stuff and I’ve got a right to know.

6. To scroll my phone guilt-free.

Nobody can accuse you of mindlessly scrolling when you’re technically providing nutrition. Checkmate bitches.

7. To drink my coffee while it’s hawt.

He can have a feed, I can have my cup, and for a brief period we’re both occupied with our respective beverages. It’s all very civilised and dare I say it? PLEASURABLE.

8. To postpone making one more fucking decision.

Blue cup? Green cup? Toast? Crumpet? Wellies? Sandals? Let’s pause all that a moment with some… Milk! One less decision for me to make and, crucially, one less thing I have to give a shit about for the next ten minutes.

9. To lie in bed for another half an hour.

Every morning, without fail, breastfeeding buys me more time in bed. Yes, I am technically being climbed on by a small boy while this is happening, but I am still horizontal and that, frankly, is the important bit. I get an additional 30 minutes of lying down while my child happily has a little milk and I don’t have to get up because if you haven’t noticed by now, much like my article 21 things I want to say to DINKs, a surprisingly large proportion of my maternal pleasures seem to involve sitting or lying down.

And who can argue with that?

10. Because I can’t be arsed.

There. I’ve said it. Sometimes I simply cannot be arsed to do the harder thing. Because despite what the internet seems to think, I don’t wake up every morning looking for fresh opportunities to make my own life harder. Shocking, I know. If I can choose the option that benefits my child AND me, you can bet I will. I have absolutely no interest in turning every part of parenting into a character building exercise. Sometimes the easy option is the best option. Self pleasure? Sure! Sue me.

11. To preserve what remains of my sanity.

People keep asking when I’ll stop breastfeeding. Probably around the same time somebody invents a quicker way of calming an overtired 3 year old while simultaneously allowing me to do what I apparently enjoy more than anything else in the world - sit down. If a boob can achieve this in approximately 30 seconds, I’m not sure why we’re pretending this is a problem.

Until then - self pleasure it is.

12. To do absolutely fuck all.

I don’t think mothers do this enough. Sometimes I don’t want enrichment or a sensory activity or a bloody teachable moment. Sometimes I really do just want to sit still and contribute nothing to society for 11 minutes.

Thank God for my tits.

And there we have it. 12 entirely selfish, self serving, self pleasuring reasons I continue to breastfeed a 3.5 year old, and I haven't even scratched the surface. A cold G&T, a hot coffee, a Substack article, a bit of gossip, an additional half hour in bed and 11 minutes of doing absolutely fuck all. Filthy stuff really. I can see why people might be a bit concerned…

But, to get a bit serious on you for a moment. Why’s it so bad if something I do in my motherhood gives me ‘pleasure’?

And I don’t mean pleasure in the way these two men meant it. I mean actual, ordinary, deeply unsexy pleasure. The pleasure of sitting down. Of finishing a cup of coffee. Of lying in bed for another half an hour. Of hearing the end of a fucking conversation.

Why is that somehow bad?

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There seems to be this strange expectation that anything a mother does for her child must involve a degree of personal suffering to be considered worthwhile. If I’m still feeding because it actually makes both of our lives easier, and occasionally means I get to enjoy myself a little bit too, why is that a problem? Why you gotta make it weird?

There are a great many things I do because they benefit my son - obviously, I’m his mum. That is rather the point. But sometimes something can benefit him and make my life a bit easier. Sometimes I breastfeed because he’s tired, sometimes because he’s upset, and sometimes because I am absolutely knackered and would quite like to sit down in peace.

Why must every decision a mother makes be framed as either heroic self sacrifice or some sinister form of selfishness? After 3 and a half years I’m increasingly convinced that one of the great joys of motherhood is finding the things that make everyone else’s lives a little bit easier including your own.

If that means my son gets comfort and I get to sit in the sun with my family and drink an ice cold G&T well - everybody wins. And if that is, according to the experts on the podcast, self pleasure... Well, ladies…

Get your tits out - we’ve cracked it!

And if you’ve ever been made to feel like a bit of a weirdo for the way you parent, there’s more below.

For paid subscribers, I’ve added a little list of the things I remind myself whenever somebody’s raised eyebrow, unsolicited opinion or particularly c**ty internet take makes me wonder whether I’m, in fact, doing motherhood completely wrong.

Until next time,

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Are you cut out for a big wedding? A self assessment:

Question 1: How many people could you invite to your wedding without including:
a) Your entire street
b) The staff at your son’s nursery
c) That woman from the Post Office you once had a nice chat with about the weather

If your answer is “7 and I actively dislike 5 of them” congratulations! You are not cut out for a big wedding.

Question 2: When asked to be maid of honour at your sister’s wedding, did you:
a) Immediately start a Pinterest board
b) Offer to help with anything and everything
c) Nod enthusiastically while internally panicking, then proceed to be roughly as much use as a teapot made of chocolate for the next 18 months

If you answered C, brilliant news! You’re me.

Question 3: The thought of giving a speech in front of 80+ people makes you:
a) Excited - you love all eyes on you
b) Mildly nervous but manageable
c) Wake up in a cold sweat at 3am having dreamed you turned up naked and forgot your own name

If you answered mostly Cs, I have bad (or good depending on how you look at it) news - you may have been engaged for nearly 4 years and the sum total of your wedding planning is ‘registry office, maybe.’ A big grand wedding is likely not on the cards.

My sister is getting married this year and I am her maid of honour. She is a braver woman than I.

When she asked me I said yes immediately because she’s my little sister and I love her and obviously I want to be there for her. But I did warn her. I told her my uses would probably peak at “oh yes, that’s nice” and “it cost HOW much?” That I would spend the run up to the big day having stress dreams about standing in front of her guests forgetting my own name, let alone being able to form a coherent speech about how lovely she is. She said yes anyway. As I said, she is a braver woman than I.

When it comes to planning, my sister is Type A. She is organised. She knows what ‘favours’ are and why we need them. She sends me links to bridesmaid dresses and asks for my opinion, which feels like a lot of pressure for someone who wears the same jumper for 4 days in a row.

I am, you may have guessed, Type B. Type “I’ll get round to it”. Type “it’s on my list” except it’s not because I’m Type B and we don’t make lists. Type “is that this weekend?” Type “I’ve been engaged for nearly 4 years and could not tell you a single concrete detail about our wedding except that it will probably involve me and my partner” (though if we could both not be there we probably wouldn’t be).

I don’t have a Pinterest board. I don’t have a vision. I don’t even have a vague sense of a season. Summer? Winter? 2027? Your guess is as good as mine. My most detailed wedding plan is quite simply - “not that.” Not the stress, not the spreadsheets, not the standing up in front of people I’m supposed to know enough about to seat strategically, and DEFINITELY not the £28,610 average UK couples spend on what is essentially 6 hours and a photoshoot.

Watching people in my life plan their Big Day while I realise I’m temperamentally unsuited to my own has taught me what I have long suspected - we’ve completely lost the plot about weddings.

Behind all the carousels of golden hour photos and lace table settings it seems most people planning a wedding are having a pretty miserable time.

The initial “we’re engaged!” excited energy lasts approximately 3 weeks before it morphs into “okay but why the fuck are napkins so expensive?” and “my future MIL has opinions about literally everything” and “if one more person asks me if they can bring a +1 I have literally never met I am going to pull a Katie Prices boyfriend and fake my own kidnap”.

I started wondering if it was just the people I know - maybe we’re all just catastrophically bad at this (not my sis mind, she’s great at this!) - so I went looking for some stats. And it turns out that no, most people planning a wedding really are having a terrible time.

84% of brides report feeling stressed ahead of and during their wedding day. More than a quarter say it’s the most stressful event of their entire lives. Personally I'd rank trying to get your child into a car seat while they're lying face down on the driveway screaming about how they wanted to open the door themselves up there but, whatever.

Nearly half of couples - 49% - say their biggest source of stress is “making sure it was perfect”. And more than a third of those same people - 37% - later regret spending so much time worrying about it. They look back on their average nearly 30K spend (*eye twitch*) and think “why did we do that to ourselves?”

So why are we doing this to ourselves?

I think for many it comes down to the need to be seen to be doing it properly. And by properly I mean - will it make the girls from school who never liked you jealous?

“Seen” used to mean something much smaller than it does now. The performance element of weddings feels like it’s on steroids these days. Of course weddings have been performances for as long as there have been weddings - it’s just that they were originally performances for the people on the guest list. The concept of a wedding as a full scale production isn’t some new phenomenon caused by Instagram. Long before the social media ghouls arrived to turn brides into their own content cronies Hollywood had already figured out that weddings make excellent viewing because everyone becomes completely unhinged when there are flowers, family politics and a ridiculous amount of money involved.

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Father of the Bride is essentially 90 minutes of Steve Martin losing his mind over the guest list going through an actual physical contact book working out who can be cut (“He died? That’s great!”) before finally unravelling entirely over the fact that hot dogs come in packs of 10 and buns come in packs of 8 (an injustice he cannot let go of, ever, at any point, for the rest of the film). Franck the wedding planner with the unplaceable accent is a man who agrees the day should be “not too fancy” while simultaneously booking 3 live swans. He spends the whole film finding new ways to make George Banks’s bill bigger while George’s family adore him for it.

Fast forward a few years to My Best Friend’s Wedding and we’ve got Kimmy Wallace (aka 90s Cameron Diaz) getting married while being outrageously, offensively wealthy. Her dad owns the Chicago White Sox, there’s a mansion, enough flowers to trigger hay fever from several postcodes away and a guest whose tongue is stuck to an icy cock belonging to an ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David. As you do.

Julia Roberts’ character Jules (who is supposed to be the ‘normal’ one in all of this madness despite the fact that she is trying to steal the groom) spends most of the film wandering around looking faintly bewildered by the whole thing.

In the 90s these weddings were funny precisely because they were ridiculous. They were the kind of weddings most people watched from the sofa thinking “imagine spending that much on a wedding” before going back to their buffet at the local golf club and a DJ called Kev who also did children's parties.

The extravagance was part of the fantasy - it was something we watched rich fictional families do on screen - not something we expected every ordinary person to recreate on a nurse’s salary. The performance had an audience yes, but it was a contained one - the people attending.

Someone might go home and talk about the dress, someone's aunt might have opinions about the flowers, the VHS might come out at Christmas and everyone would cringe at Uncle Dave doing the Macarena with his tie round his head. But when the guests went home the performance was over.

What’s different now is that the performance we put on isn’t simply for the guests anymore and increasingly, gathering content isn’t just a byproduct of the day but almost the entire point.

I was scrolling TikTok last year - procrastinating, as one does - when I got served a video of Grace Beverly on her wedding day. For those unfamiliar, Grace Beverly is the founder of Tala (activewear brand), has about a million Instagram followers, and is generally quite successful at being beautiful and aspirational for a living (I jest, she is pretty successful at being a businesswoman too).

Anyway, there she was on her wedding day, stood in her wedding dress, lip syncing to a TikTok sound. Cut to her husband in his suit, lip syncing his bit. Back and forth they went. Grace. Husband. Grace. Husband. Until finally they were both stood posing against golden hour sunshine at their French chateau looking like they’d been lit by god himself.

She’d captioned it something about managing to get her husband to do his first ever lip sync on their wedding day like this was some adorable milestone rather than a completely bizarre thing to be doing while you’re supposed to be, you know, getting married.

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Naturally I went to her page because I’m nosy and have the self control of a toddler near the biscuit cupboard. There were videos of her and her mates in bed the morning before lip syncing to Mamma Mia. Her floating down some stairs like an ethereal goddess while her friends bounced around on balconies above her like they’d been choreographed by someone who’d watched too much Mamma Mia. Four more locations around the chateau, everyone lip syncing to Get Me To The Church On Time.

Then there was all the standard wedding content we’ve come to expect - bridesmaids crying on cue while fixing her veil, her filming herself in her dress having her “moment she’s dreamed of since she was a little girl”, montages of dress fittings, all soundtracked by Lana Del Rey and the poet with the lovely voice that just makes you feel safe when you hear her - Josie Balka.

One caption read;

“Ok so my drafts are the fullest they’ve ever been, let’s start at the beginning.”

There was more!

All filmed on her wedding day, which means she spent part of the day actually getting married and part of it setting her phone up - multiple times - doing takes, making sure everyone was in sync, checking the lighting was right, the angles worked, the backdrop looked good. Her brain split between experiencing the thing and documenting the thing.

But Grace Beverly is a millionaire Jennie, she’s not exactly Everywoman is she. No - not in the sense that most of us aren’t getting married over 3 days across two French estates that have never hosted weddings before in custom Kate Halfpenny gowns, dripping in Boodles, with a converted barn afterparty and a pool day the next day with branded towels because “you can’t ask your guests to fly to the South of France and not take them to a beach club.” But in the sense that everyone’s a content creator now? Absolutely she is.

There are videos all over your timeline just like these.

We’ve all got camera rolls bursting with things we haven’t posted yet, captions we’re mentally drafting in the shower, or conversations we've half stopped listening to because we've suddenly thought, this would make a good reel.

And weddings, it appears, have become the biggest performance of all.

There’s the engagement announcement, ring angled to catch the light, 47 takes and counting. The venue reveal, captioned like you’ve discovered Narnia rather than paid a deposit on a barn where you have to bring your own cutlery. The dress shopping content. The hen do carousel. The countdown posts, each one recycling a photo from the £500 engagement shoot where you laughed at a hedge for three hours.

There’s the getting ready reel complete with dressing gown and prosecco you’re not drinking because it’s 9am and you’re already freaking the fuck out. The choreographed bridesmaid reveal, and now, God help us, the choreographed entrance dance - because just walking into your own reception is no longer sufficient. (Please, someone extract my eyes with a spoon. I watched one the other week that was a bunch of blokes who might as well have been Neil, Simon, Will and Jay from The Inbetweeners, going full Papa Americano in what looked like Chatham. It haunts me).

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Then the “we did it!” post, followed by the professional photos and wedding film, released in careful instalments over the next 12 months and then every year after that. A wedding isn’t just an event for you and your loved ones - it’s a whole content schedule (which is probably a good thing given how much you’ve spent on it. Bang for your buck and all that!) And every single decision - the flowers, the venue, the dress, the sodding napkins - gets filtered through how it’ll look when you post it.

Which is, I think, the only way to explain this comment I saw on threads the other day:

As someone who is 33 and in her fourth year of being engaged, it appears this person may consider me the bridal equivalent of gone off milk. By the time I actually get round to booking a registrar I’ll be collecting my pension in one hand and my order of service in the other. I won’t be walking down the aisle so much as being wheeled down it. The “do you take this man” moment will need to be said slowly, and directly into my good ear, and my “something old” will just be… ahem, me.

Oh, what an embarrassing state of affairs. 33 and practically compost.

If I were to put aside the fact that this was clearly written by someone who has never heard of B*Witched, and have a go at working out what exactly is meant to be so embarrassing here, I’d hazard a guess it’s got something to do with the performance we’ve turned weddings into.

Embarrassment is a funny emotion because it only really exists in relation to other people. You don’t tend to feel embarrassed because you’ve done something objectively wrong. You feel embarrassed because of an audience - an audience seeing you do something embarrassing. Without an audience (real of imagined) there can be no embarrassment. Embarrassment is what happens when you become painfully aware of what other people might think.

To say being a 30+ year old bride is embarrassing only really makes sense if being a bride has stopped meaning “a woman who's getting married” and started meaning something else - a character, almost. Someone performing “bride” to an audience of onlookers. Onlookers who will judge you and the show you put on.

And as I sit here writing this all I can think is - excuse me while I opt the fuck out.

When I was little I had a costume wedding dress. I'd parade around the house in it marrying whichever boy from school I happened to fancy that week.

Like most little girls, I had a very clear idea of how my life would go. I’d meet someone, get engaged, get married, buy a house, have children - all in that order. Nobody ever sat me down and explicitly told me that was how it had to happen but it was the story everything I saw seemed to tell - wedding first, life afterwards. The wedding was the beginning of the happy ending.

Ageing, far from being embarrassing, meant learning who I actually am - what I’m good at, and what I’m spectacularly shit at. What brings me joy and what makes me want to crawl into a hole and never emerge. And it turns out I am not cut out for Big Wedding Energy. Not one little bit.

I’ve come to understand that for me to plan and execute a traditional wedding would guarantee a relationship breakdown before we even made it down the aisle.

I’m terrible at being the centre of attention for longer than about four minutes. I’m terrible at managing other people’s expectations while also having my own. I couldn’t give less of a shit about napkin colours or whether the flowers coordinate with anything. And I am catastrophically bad at trying to keep a hundred people happy simultaneously while also attempting to enjoy myself - which, as we established earlier, is a moot point anyway, since I couldn’t invite a hundred people without including my entire street, the staff at my son’s nursery, and that woman from the Post Office!

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As with all of life’s best laid plans, the order in which I did things went wonky.

I met the man I’ll marry on a Tinder date in which we got paralytic drunk. We liked each other enough to date for some months before moving in together. We bought a house. We got pregnant. We got engaged. We had a baby. And 4 years later we’re still engaged because life life’d and it’s just not been a priority.

25 year old me may well have been horrified by that - but 25 year old me didn’t know 33 year old me.

33 year old me couldn’t give less of a shit.

Maybe that’s because becoming a parent has a remarkable way of stripping away your capacity to care about things that don’t really matter. Once you’ve breastfed a child in the middle of a café and caught their sick in your bare hands and slept body to body with them for over 3 years despite what other people think, the idea that somebody might decide your wedding is too small, too simple, too late, or too “embarrassing” starts to lose its sting. So too does the urge to perform it all perfectly. The older I've got, the less interested I've become in making my life look right to people who aren't living it.

When I picture my wedding now, I don’t picture the things I used to. I picture my son. A son who wouldn’t have been in attendance had we married before I was 30. The most important person in our lives would have existed only as a figment of our imagination. A vague hypothetical we’d talk about having “one day.” We talk endlessly about child free weddings, about whether children spoil the atmosphere, whether they belong there at all - and of course everyone should have whatever wedding they want. But for me there’s something incredibly lovely about the fact that our little boy will get to be there when we eventually tie the knot to cement a life lived mostly off camera.

A wedding isn’t a big show to kick off the beginning of something for us. It’s just confirmation of something that’s already there, load bearing and very much lived in.

If that makes me an embarrassing 30+ bride then I suppose I’ll just have to live with the shame.

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Do you buy chocolate? A hot water bottle? Take over bedtime? Nod sympathetically while she explains, through tears, that she has just watched a video about how pigeons were once domesticated by humans before we abandoned them to fend for themselves on city streets with only Greggs crumbs and discarded vape cartridges for sustenance?

You’re thinking like a loving partner. This is not the vibe. You must think like middle management.

You must sit her down and ask the lord to make her less emotional, more ambitious and, above all else, more productive. If there's one thing every woman wants while her uterus is trying to claw its way out through her abdomen and her emotions are as batshit as they come, it is this.

Sorry what was that? You think that sounds like an objectively terrible way to support someone you love?

God, you’re old fashioned. We’re not comforting women anymore. We’re KPI-ing them (Keeping Periods Invisible). Duh.

Every now and then I think, right! (in the way only British people can say ‘right’!) That’s enough internet for today. I’ve extracted the last remaining ounce of batshittery from the algorithm. Surely there’s nothing left for me to write about.

And then Instagram looks me dead in the eye and says “actually Jennie, have you considered a man praying over his wife’s period so she remains productive?”

No, Instagram. I hadn’t. But I’m sure you’re going to show me…

And show me it did.

So there I was, watching a Christian influencer announce to the camera that his wife had started her period before explaining that they like to “start her period in prayer.” Fair enough, I thought. I'm not a religious woman myself. Personally if I'm menstruating I'd probably lean more towards a bar of Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut and 45 minutes of uninterrupted silence than divine intervention but hey ho, each to their own, I’m not here to judge.

Perhaps he’s going to pray that she’s in less pain or that she gets some rest or that she feels comforted, that would be nice wouldn’t it? As I said, I’m not religious myself, but I don’t think you need to believe in God to appreciate someone hoping your uterus might stop behaving like it’s trying to escape your body.

Unfortunately, this is not the direction we were headed… Instead I watch as a man thanks God for his wife’s healthy body that is “working properly” (good to know) before asking that she “wouldn’t be driven by her emotions” or her feelings, praying against “the enemy” who would try to make her “unproductive and unfruitful”, and speaking “life”, “blessing”, “ambition”, “energy” and “productivity” over her.

Now, I appreciate that as someone whose own prayers generally begin and end with “please let there be some Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut in the cupboard”, I may not be the ideal person to critique somebody else’s conversation with the Almighty. But I have to admit that “please maximise my wife’s output while she’s menstruating” wasn’t where I thought this was going.

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I used to be one of those annoyingly smug women who thought people made a bit too much fuss about periods. Mine were inconvenient but manageable - nothing to write home about. Then I had my son, and now there are a handful of days a month where I stand at the sink sobbing, genuinely convinced I am the shittest mother and the shittest person to have ever lived, wanting to burn my entire life to the ground. Is this PMDD? I ask myself every month without fail.

So to watch a man gather his wife and their daughter onto the bed before praying to God, but very much within earshot of his wife, that she wouldn't be “driven by her emotions”... Well, I must admit, it got my back up ever so slightly - not least because of the pass agg nature of it all. You know, the way old ladies at the supermarket tell you off about your child's freezing feet by cooing “Ooh, did Mummy forget your socks today? What a naughty Mummy!” at a 1 year old who cannot answer back and was never actually the intended audience. This guy isn't talking to God. He's talking to his wife, via God, which is somehow worse than just saying it because now nobody's allowed to be annoyed without also being annoyed at the Lord.

Anyway, as someone who has menstruated for getting on 2 decades and who has recently had a glow down in the period stakes, what helps on the hard days is not being told this is shameful or something I need to suppress or an inconvenience I need to pray my way out of. What helps is actual support.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but when somebody tells me they’re in pain or feeling emotional, my instinct isn’t usually to wonder how efficiently they’re going to tackle the admin that afternoon. It’s giving less “Lord, ease her suffering” and more “could we perhaps circle back to those deliverables?”

At one point I genuinely forgot he was talking about his wife and not an underperforming regional sales manager. And I thought what in the Jesus, Mary and Joseph is going on here then?

And then I had one of those deeply irritating moments where your own brain starts making connections you'd really rather it didn't. Because I felt like I’d heard this bloke before. Not him specifically - although, given the state of my Instagram algorithm, there’s every chance I have. I mean I’d heard this way of talking before.

A few months ago I wrote about Clavicular explaining that female orgasms are “low ROI” as though women everywhere were NFTs nobody wants to admit they bought in 2021.

We’ve got men all over the internet popping up to tell us about “sexual market value” and “high value males” which, you’ll be interested to know, rests on three pillars - physique, resources, and status. I don't know why but I pictured this on a slide. A man called Dave from Strategy clicking through a PowerPoint presentation at an away day in a Premier Inn conference room gesturing at a triangle. “So if we can just leverage our synergies across the three pillars going forward...” before someone at the back writes “low hanging fruit” in their notebook with the free pen. Nobody in the room is talking about romantic relationships… and yet…

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Every week another man appears, ring light on, podcast mic out, ready to explain that human relationships are actually just an under monetised branch of business studies.

Which raises a genuine question. Is this actually happening in offices? Are there men out there right now, with commutes and lanyards and a normal boss called Steve, going home and asking their wives to be more “fruitful”? Or is this specifically a tripod problem?

I've been thinking about this far more than any sane person should and I honestly can't picture it. I can't picture a bloke leaving a day of meetings, driving home, kissing his wife hello and saying “before we put the tea on, I'd just like to have a quick conversation about maximising your output during menstruation.” I think most men would die of embarrassment before the words even reached the end of the sentence.

Maybe that’s because if you’ve got a normal job, you’ve already had your daily allowance of corporate bollocks. You’ve spent eight hours discussing productivity, efficiencies, deliverables and quarterly targets. You’ve already asked whether we can “circle back” and whether something is “adding value”. You’ve scratched the itch so to speak. The last thing you want to do when you get home is start speaking to your wife like she’s an underperforming branch of Currys.

And yet online it feels like we’re surrounded by men who simply cannot help themselves. Every conversation about women ends up sounding like a shareholder update. Relationships have become investments. Attraction has become market value. Sex has become ROI. Periods have become productivity issues.

I genuinely wonder what these men are like on first dates.

“So... tell me about yourself.”

“Well, I’m really looking for someone with strong long term growth potential.”

Christ alive.

Or perhaps “I think there's a really exciting opportunity for us to leverage our existing chemistry.”

No mate, you’re in All Bar One, not presenting a merger. Fuck sake give it a rest.

Love isn’t a business. It isn’t supposed to be efficient. If the person you love is ill you don’t ask how quickly they can get back to full capacity. If they’re grieving you don’t wonder whether they’re still being sufficiently ambitious. If they’ve had an awful day, you don’t sit them down and ask what the ROI is on listening to them cry for half an hour.

You make them a cup of tea. You pick up the slack. And by golly you order the fucking takeaway. You let them have a moan without trying to turn it into a personal development exercise. That is, quite literally, the entire point of loving another person.

The moments that matter most in relationships are often gloriously, wonderfully unproductive. Sitting beside somebody in silence, rubbing their back when they're sick, taking over bedtime because they've got nothing left in the tank, listening to the same story for the fourteenththousandthmillionth time because it's still upsetting them. None of these things would make a particularly inspiring graph in a PowerPoint presentation.

Thank God.

Because human beings are not projects. Which is why this language feels so strange when used in this way. Men online really do seem to have accidentally wandered into relationships carrying the vocabulary of a corporate retreat and the women in their lives stopped being people to love and became something they were managing.

Which brings me back to my original question.

Is this a man problem? Is this an internet problem? Or is this what happens when you spend so long consuming content that tells you everything in life can be improved, optimised, ranked and measured that eventually you start looking at the person you love and wondering where the growth opportunities are?

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These men are obsessed with talking about traditional values. About men being providers and women wanting a strong, masculine man who knows his purpose. But there is something very modern about all of this.

I mean, there is nothing remotely traditional about treating your marriage like a start up. Nothing traditional about spending your days talking to a phone propped up on a stack of protein tubs. Your granddad did not do this. Your granddad went to work, came home, and, whatever else he got wrong, did not narrate his wife’s uterus to a camera for content.

These men don’t need another podcast about masculinity or another book about becoming high value and they certainly don’t need another man on the internet explaining the secrets of female psychology while standing in front of a Lamborghini he definitely does not own.

Maybe they just need somewhere else to put all this energy.

A job.

A proper one.

Somewhere they can use all these beautiful business words in the environment they were designed for.

So, with that in mind, I have put together a helpful list of careers for men who are desperate to talk about ROI, value and optimisation but have accidentally started applying them to their girlfriends.

1. Recruitment - You already talk about people like they’re assets to be placed. Might as well get paid for it.

2. Middle management, any industry - You’ll get to say “let's circle back” and “what's the ROI on this” to actual colleagues, about an actual project, in an actual meeting, about an actual spreadsheet, and nobody will ever have to hear about anyone’s uterus again.

3. HR - You’re already conducting unsolicited performance reviews on people who did not ask for one. You’ll fit right in.

4. Estate agency - You clearly enjoy describing things in terms of “potential” and “value.” There’s a 3 bed semi in Woking with your name on it.

5. Motivational speaking, but the boring corporate kind, not the leggings kind - Full days. Whiteboards. A lanyard. Somewhere to put “unlock your potential” that isn’t your girlfriend’s bedside.

6. Life coaching - You already have strong opinions about how strangers should live their lives despite having no qualifications, so congratulations, you've actually been training for this one.

7. Literally anything with a quarterly target - Anything. A Vodafone shop. A Nando’s. I don’t care. Just somewhere that isn’t your relationship.

And if you really must pray, how about this instead.

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And rightly so.

Unsolicited prophecies of doom are not, generally speaking, what any of us want to hear. And for some reason it is, more often than not, the stories of doom and gloom that we just can’t wait to share.

“Just you wait until they say I love you mummy for the first time” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “just you wait until they catch virus number 184763483 and spend 3 days shitting and vomiting on you simultaneously while you descend into sleep (or lack of) induced psychosis”.

That one makes for a much more riveting story… One that paints you as a brave warrior surviving croc infested waters - or if you're in the UK, Thames Water's finest. (For non-brit’s - that's our water company who are currently pumping literal human shit directly into our rivers and beaches while charging us more for the privilege. Crocodiles would be preferable).

Yes, “just you waiters” are some of the most annoying kinds of people. And while it is natural to want to share your experience, it is true that it is entirely possible to keep some things to yourself. I know this because I have heard many a new mother say, in absolute seriousness, that her newborn is just such a good sleeper, that she's been so lucky and that she thinks she was just blessed with an easy baby while I have been sat there like this:

That shit is tough. But I have managed to keep my mouth shut, because A) I am not a c**t and B) because I know they will likely find out the truth on their own (or with the help of their no longer sleeping 4 month old baby).

Sometimes we really do need to just shut the fuck up.

Anyway. I got one recently. A “just you wait”. It was a good one - not the boring, overdone kind about sleep or bad behaviour. This one was about me.

More specifically - my boobs!

Established readers will know my boobs have been working hard for a while now. A long while, actually. And when your boobs work hard for a while in the way that mine have, they can show up a little differently. Less watermelon, more two raisins in a carrier bag.

The answer to this, I have been informed, is not to simply accept that this is a natural part of the human experience - it is to - you guessed it, get a boob job.

The brief encounter went a bit like this:

Just you wait person: “Are you still feeding?”

Me, about to be ‘just you wait-ed’: “Yes”

Just you wait person ready to hit me with it: “Just you wait until you stop - they’ll disappear completely and then you’ll need a boob job.”

“Need.”

That’s a funny word to put next to a completely cosmetic absolutely not in any way necessary surgical splicing is it not?

Need like the way I need oxygen? Need like the way I need water? Need like the way I need food and shelter? Need like the non-negotiable, without-which-I-will-perish kind of need? Need like the way I need someone to give me a million pounds and a crate of wine and a lifetime supply of crisps? Oh sorry, I got a bit ahead of myself there.

Need, as our parents liked to remind us, is a strong word! ‘Need’ when used in place of ‘want’ makes a fool of me and you.

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I am poking fun at this, but the idea you might one day “need” cosmetic surgery is not just being floated by one random chick showing concern for my bazungas.

We are not, as it turns out, talking about fringe thinking here. Cosmetic surgery is booming - it’s increased by over 40% in the last 4 years alone - and breast procedures are among the most commonly performed operations worldwide.

Mothers are, of course, prime targets or as the industry themselves might say, a “key demographic.” Mothers completing their families - that's the phrase they like to use. Like there's a loyalty card somewhere and having a baby gets you enough points to redeem against a boob job.

And it doesn’t stop at boobs. Oh no.

Entire surgical bundles now exist specifically for women who have had children. The “mummy makeover” is in fact a multi-procedure surgical reconstruction package you plan for, save for and schedule around your childcare. We’re talking breasts, tummy, liposuction and - Christ on a bike - fanny lips.

Yes. Fanny lips.

I discovered this while researching this very piece a while ago and before I knew what had happened I had written an entirely separate article about it because it simply could not be contained. I’ll leave it here. You’re welcome. And I’m sorry.

Anyway, boobs. Back to the boobs.

The words of a woman telling me I will need a boob job once I’ve finished feeding my son whir around my head. Not because they have offended me or because I think she is right - they haven’t and she is not. I have the self esteem of a woman who’s tits have fed a child for over 3 years and the general give-a-shit reserves of someone who hasn’t had an undisturbed night sleep for nearly 4. You might say that I am a woman who has bigger problems than her baps. The reason her words whir around my head is because of how normal all of this has become. How casually we now talk about cutting, lifting, tightening and restoring parts of ourselves like we’re discussing taking the kids to Build a Bear.

There was a time we would at least have had a little shame… Do you remember when Kylie Jenner swore blind her suddenly enormous lips (the ones on her face you dirty little bugger!) were just the result of lip liner while the rest of us were sat there like…

That whole era feels almost quaint now. Because fast forward a few years and she’s not just admitting to cosmetic procedures - she’s giving out implant specifications on TikTok like she’s recommending a good air fryer. Size, placement, surgeon’s name. “Hope this helps lol.”

Cosmetic intervention has moved from celebrity secret to consumer content- from scandal to lifestyle. From something you might do if you were rich and famous - to something you, the average Jane next door, plan for, save for and document in a “spend the morning with me, mum of a 16 month old, 3 days post boob job” vlog while your toddler potters about not understanding why you’re wincing and can’t pick them up anymore. (This is a real video I watched).

I saw one the other day and it slowly dawned on me that I was watching a woman recover from major surgery in exactly the same format I used to watch people show me what they'd bought in Primark. Somewhere between Zoella's £3 slogan T-shirts and now we appear to have normalised post-operative recovery as lifestyle content.

I can’t tell you the amount of videos I see like this. Women who look like they’ve been in a near fatal car accident casually rocking up on Instagram to share their ‘journey’ like they would if they were recommending a TV series. Some even arrive crying over eyes that have gone wonky or something not sitting right and the sudden realisation that they don’t actually recognise themselves anymore.

The comment sections on these videos are full of other women who have had the same procedures - piling in with don't worry girly you're still swollen, mine did exactly the same, everything settles, you're going to look incredible, just give it time. The kind of warmth and solidarity you'd want if you'd just had a really bad smear test or your cat had died, deployed entirely in the service of reassuring each other that the face or the body they voluntarily paid someone to cut open is going to be fine.

Meanwhile I’m sat there thinking fuck, wouldn’t it be great if this kind of energy could be levied at women before they end up under a surgeons knife?

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It's funny because when I was growing up, cosmetic surgery in pop culture meant one thing. You were the villain, or the cautionary tale - or both.

Entire characters were built around it. Think Regina George’s mum in Mean Girls whose boobs are introduced by Gretchen Weiners when she told us they were “hard as rocks” before her Chihuahua starts casually gnawing on one of the implants through her top while she chats away, blissfully unaware (a detail I have since learned was achieved by pinning a cocktail sausage inside Amy Poehler's bra. Hollywood baby!)

That was the joke. The fake boobs were the joke and the woman who'd had them was the joke. She was sad and vain and desperately trying to be her daughter's best friend and the dog was eating her tit and she didn't even notice.

Then there was Jennifer Coolidge's wicked stepmother in A Cinderella Story, who spends the entire film frantically chasing youth while at one point barking “Not my face! It's much newer than the girls! Go for the girls!” when she was about to get lamped by Rhonda.

These Real Housewives types existed largely to remind us that chasing eternal youth would eventually leave you orange, overfilled and divorced. Cosmetic surgery wasn't lifestyle, it was satire.

Now not getting anything done feels weirdly performative - like you're trying to prove something - almost as though you’re taking a position. Like being vegan. Or refusing to get WhatsApp. I sometimes wonder whether in another ten years saying you’re still in possession of your original face and tits will carry the same vibe as announcing you don't own a television. Like, ohhhhh, you’re one of them are you? Think you’re better than us do you?

And while I genuinely couldn't care less whether women I've never met get their tits jacked up, I do care about the subtle sell of it. We're very fond of blaming the beauty industry or the patriarchy and fair enough - they've all had a right good go over the years. But I think they can all just put their feet up for a bit because it seems we've got this one covered. Covered in conversations and passing comments and advice between women given in the practical, slightly exhausted wisdom sharing of women trying to help each other get through the day.

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN’T GOT A EWAN THE SHUSHING SHEEP? HE KEPT MY LITTLE KENNETH ASLEEP 7-7 AND I ONLY HAD TO SAY NO TO A DRINK 16 TIMES.”

“Don’t remortgage your house to buy Pampers - their poonami ads are LIES. The Sainsbury’s own brand nappies are actually really good at containing shit.”

“Just you wait until you’ve finished feeding, they’ll disappear and you’ll need a boob job.”

Casual.

When this woman with her unsolicited prophecy of doom leaned in to tell me what was coming for my boobs once I stopped feeding she was not delivering news or pulling back a curtain. I did not come to this conversation fresh. These are not the boobs of a woman who doesn’t know what’s coming. They have gone from full to flat and back again more times than I can count. I have woken up at 6am looking like Katie Price circa 2001 and gone to bed looking like I have two socks on my chest with a grape in each.

She is also not the first person to notice that breastfeeding changes the shape of your breasts, a fact that has been known to women since the beginning of time and was definitely known to me given that I have been at this for 3 and a half years and have had a fairly front row seat to the whole thing.

The only difference is that I simply do not care. The fucks to give jar is empty like my tits will one day be and there is absolute radio silence from the part of my brain that is supposed to be troubled by this.

Because those boobs she was worried about on my behalf, well, they’ve been working hard.

They were working hard when I was pregnant, leaking in the night, leaving damp sheets and fake tan streaks. They were working hard when we sat in our living room at 38 weeks, milking me like a cow. Colostrum into tiny little syringes, labelled with dates and put into the freezer next to the frozen blueberries. They were working hard when at minutes old, my baby in his knitted green hat, latched for the first time. They were working hard through those first days and nights at home when nothing made sense and everything was a bit scary and the only thing that worked, reliably, without fail, was them. They have worked hard every time he has fallen. They have worked hard every time he is sad. They have worked hard every time he is sick. They have worked hard as a pillow, a comfort, a twiddle toy (god help me), and something to reach for in the night when the room is dark and unnerving. They have worked hard after days apart and they have worked hard during days together. They have worked hard at being the most reliable thing in his world and they have done so for 3 years running.

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I actually saw a video recently of a woman describing her post breastfeeding boobs and I have thought about it every day since. She said they’d become French. Old lady French. And I knew instantly what she meant. The kind you can wear a vest with and no bra not because they are all perky and young but because they are just tits. The kind you see on a woman in her seventies in a village in Provence who has lived a full and excellent life and is absolutely not thinking about her boobs because she is too busy drinking wine and being chic. She is free.

When I think of my tits I think of two old pals. Wise and experienced and lived in. Like a really good leather jacket that fits perfectly because you've worn it everywhere or a book with a cracked spine and dog eared pages that you've read so many times you know exactly where all your favourite bits are. I think of them like I think of an old house that has stood for centuries and seen everything - multiple families and babies born within its rooms, people coming and going, and trees growing tall outside windows that have watched it all. Walls that have absorbed decades of noise and life and love and loss until the very bricks seem to hum with it. A house that when you walk inside of it you feel something - something you cannot manufacture or install or purchase on a payment plan. Something that exists only because of everything that has happened there.

You cannot get that from a new build. A new build looks like everyone else’s - identical to the one next door and the one next to that. Everything in the right place and nothing out of order and absolutely no sense that anything has ever really happened there at all.

Perfect, maybe. But dead inside.

To get a boob job would be to make me a new build. And I am not a new build.

I am a Georgian house. The kind I grew up in - wonky walls filled with horse hair and creaking floorboards and a sprawling garden where children have always played. Where the grass is worn thin in the places that matter and the trees are tall and gnarly and welcoming and filled to the brim with fruit.

Nothing that has held this much life needs renovating.

I am Grade II listed bitches, you can’t touch a damn thing.

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That was the worst of it, 10 years ago. Brain dead. Nothing behind the eyes. A tragedy, but a fairly simple one.

Dating now appears to have evolved into something closer to a game of Avoid The Alpha.

Behold, a thread I saw on Reddit a few months back of messages between a man and a woman - the kind of exchange that reads like he's working from a Red Pill dating coach manual, possibly with a highlighter.

If you listen closely enough, you can almost hear the podcast this man's been bingeing in the background. She's shit-testing you, bro. Hesitation isn't a no, it's an invitation. The moment you back off, you've lost. Push through. That's what separates the alphas from the betas.

I have to feel a bit sorry for these men. Not a lot. Not, like, sustainedly. But a bit. In the same way I feel sorry for someone who's been given catastrophically bad directions and is now confidently, furiously lost. Lukewarm sorry for them, if you will, because they have been told that this is what women want.

There are reels, podcasts, books, forums, and a whole content economy built on telling men that women want a man who makes her feel, at any given moment, that she could lose him. They want a man other men are intimidated by, one who never shows doubt, never shows need, never adjusts his plans because of how she feels - because adjusting is weakness, and weakness is the one thing a woman can smell on a man the same way you can smell, the second you walk into an office, that someone's microwaved fish.

They want a man who leads, never follows, and treats her emotions not as something to listen to but as something to push through. A man who does not check in, does not show vulnerability, and absolutely does not ask permission to do anything because all of that is beta behaviour and beta behaviour is, they will tell you, the single fastest way to end up alone.

Which is an awkward theory to be touting at the exact moment several million women have simultaneously lost their fucking minds over a fictional hockey player who asked a woman if she was open to hearing a suggestion before he’d even made one.

If you have somehow avoided the current internet obsession with fictional hockey players, congratulations. I assume you have been outside, speaking to real people, living a balanced and healthy life. The rest of us have not been doing that. The rest of us have been watching (and rewatching) Off Campus, a Prime Video series about a college hockey team that isn’t really about college hockey at all - a bit like how Love Island is supposedly about love but is actually about wanna-be influencers saying “my type on paper” - and we have all collectively lost the plot.

For those who do know what I’m talking about - don’t pretend you’re annoyed at the recap. You’ve watched that scene four times this week. I’ve seen your search history. It’s the same as mine.

Anyway, I was roped into this new lifestyle by who recommended the series without so much as an utterance of horn, which I now understand to have been a significant act of restraint on her part. I watched the first episode mostly to be polite and I have not been the same since.

What you can miss when you’re on the outside of this looking in is the sheer scale of what’s happening. My mother who’s in her 60s watched the entire thing before I did. I found this out the way you find out anything from your mother, which is mid conversation about something else entirely and at the time, having not yet seen it myself, I thought almost nothing of it. Sounds like a nice little show… Lovely… Good for her. I now understand this to be one of the funniest and most damning pieces of evidence in the entire case and tells you everything about the scale of what one made up man is doing to women - even women who are old enough to be his grandmother.

That man, for the uninitiated, is Garrett Graham. Captain of the hockey team. Male lead of the show. Ruiner of millennial mothers lives having done nothing whatsoever to deserve that title beyond not actually existing, and not being an option for women who are, in fairness, married with kids and not exactly available themselves.

Since I watched, my Instagram discover page has become almost entirely Garrett Graham. Not as one of several interests alongside my actual hobbies. Oh no. Wall to wall Garrett Graham. I open the app to look up something completely unrelated and I am instead shown 12 consecutive clips of a fictional 20 something hockey player saying “show me”.

My partner walked in on me mid rewatch the other night and asked, not unreasonably, why I was watching it again. I told him it was for something I was writing, which was technically true - you’re reading this aren’t you? But it was also not remotely why I was watching it in that exact moment and we both knew it and neither of us said anything further because most relationships survive on precisely this kind of tact.

Anyway. The point I'm trying to make, in amongst all of that, is that women the world over are frothing at the bit for this man and this show, and I can assure you that not one bit of the frothing has anything to do with what the ‘alpha’ males are selling.

So, are these men just confused?

I saw a clip recently of a man whose wife is, like most of the country, completely deep in it being asked to explain who Garrett Graham is. He thought about it for a second and said “I don't know, he's some ice hockey jock.”

If you don't know what you're looking for, I suppose that makes sense. He is, on the outside, a hockey jock. Captain of the team, athletic, confident and wanted by more than one woman before the plot's even worked out who's with who. But ask any woman who has watched this show to describe Garrett Graham, and I would bet everything I own that “hockey jock” is the last thing out of her mouth. His position on the team would not come up. His athletic ability would not come up. The fact that he is exceptionally, almost aggressively, hot would come up - yes, fine, we're only human - but that's not it either. It's not the six pack or the curly locks. It's not even the height, though God knows it doesn't hurt!

If you asked her to explain who Garrett Graham is she would talk about him showing up at Hannah’s workplace and helping her set tables just because she was doing it and he was there. She would talk about the moment early on when they're setting up their deal and he says “this is perfect - you're not interested in me, and I'm not interested in a relationship” instead of “you're not interested in me and I'm not interested in you” because from a woman’s perspective the latter would feel like a sting.

She would talk about the fact that he heard Hannah singing through the tunnels during a game, followed her voice, and watched her grinning before telling her about it later because keeping things from her wasn't something he was particularly interested in doing. She would talk about the fact that at some point, while still technically helping her pursue another man entirely - he went away and listened to The Beaches, a band she'd mentioned once in passing because he wanted to understand what she liked.

She would talk about the sealed can of drink handed over at a party without comment, because he'd noticed without being told that an open cup wasn't something she could trust.

She would talk about the karaoke night - the pinacoladas, the guarding her drinks with his life, the blanket put over her sleeping friend before he followed a trail of clothes up the stairs, picked every one of them up, said no to the thing she was offering because she'd had too much to drink in a way that didn’t shame her whatsoever, and LEFT HER CLOTHES FOLDED on the bedside table for the morning.

She would talk about him going to a friend to ask for advice on how to make it good for Hannah - because of course he did - and his position, when informed that she might not come, being - that’s simply not an option.

She would talk about that scene. The moment he said they should stop so she didn’t have to. She would talk about Hannah saying she's broken, and him saying she isn't and genuinely meaning it. She would talk about him asking - before he'd even made the suggestion - whether she'd be open to hearing one. She would talk about the fact that the suggestion was ultimately that they'd be vulnerable together. Equally.

She would talk about him finding out who had assaulted her, dealing with it at great personal cost to himself and his season, and then when asked why he did it not telling a single person because that story wasn’t his to tell.

…

Annnnnnd breathe. Fuck, that sounded a lot like a love letter didn't it? I told you we’re ruined.

The point is that not one woman talking about this show is talking about his status, his confidence, or his rank in the team. They are talking about the fact that he is emotionally intelligent, that he respects and genuinely likes Hannah - not because of what he wants from her, but because of her. He does all of these things because he wants to know her. To understand her. And he does this not as a strategy to get in her pants and not as a route to something else but because he genuinely enjoys her as a person.

You see, women are very good at working out when care is a shag strategy. We’ve been field-testing this our whole lives and this is not that. You can tell, and that’s the whole point - you can tell because he does it when there’s nothing to gain, when she’s not watching, when it costs him something, and when the only audience is a band he’s listening to alone because she mentioned them once.

The scene women cannot stop talking about is built around a man who, at the moment every dating coach on the internet would tell him to take charge, handed it back to her instead. His entire approach to Hannah’s pleasure - to her comfort, her safety, her experience of being with him - is that it is non negotiable. It’s not an afterthought or something she should have to ask for. It is, as far as he’s concerned, the whole point.

I’d like to contrast this attitude with the man who went on a podcast to explain that the female orgasm is low ROI, and note that one of these men is currently being edited into love declarations by several million women, and the other one is, urm, not.

And it isn’t just Garrett. He lives in a house full of them. Four hot men who are, without exception, also this. Tucker makes his friends home cooked meals - HE MADE GARRETT SMOKED SALMON TO HELP HIM STUDY. Dean - who I initially wrote off as the love child of Ryan Gosling’s Ken and Ellen DeGeneres - is big on consent and trust. And Logan, the friend of the century, who appears to pine for his best friends girl without ever making it anyone else’s problem. The show portrays masculinity absolutely wonderfully. And this is why women are losing their shit.

Should one of these ‘alpha’ men clock Garrett Graham, he may for a moment feel vindicated. He’d be reaching for his ring light before the opening credits finished. This, he’d say, leaning into the camera, is exactly what I’ve been telling you. High value. Men want to be him and women want to be with him. But they'd be misdiagnosing it. We have seen plenty of shows about good looking jocks. We have watched confident, dominant, “high value men” on our screens for decades and guess what? Nobody was baking cakes about them.

These are men who have built whole businesses around the idea that a man loses value the moment he becomes too available, too accommodating, too willing to care. That the single most catastrophic thing a man can do - the thing that will tank his value, lose him the girl, expose him as a beta - is respecting women in the way you respect them because you actually like them. A man who knows his own sexual market value, they say, refuses to let it depreciate by doing something as ruinous as that.

But Garrett Graham has done nothing but that, from the first episode to the last. And several million women cannot stop thinking about him.

So to answer my own question - are these men just confused?

Maybe. Or maybe it’s simply easier to tell men that women want dominance and scarcity than it is to admit that what women actually want is something no course and no ring light is going to give you if you were never taught to notice whether someone wants the cup open or closed.

I’ll leave you with this… They say women want a man who knows his value. But women are losing their shit about a man who noticed hers.

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Not for any of the reasons you’re meant to go off sex when you’re pregnant - you know, nausea, exhaustion, feeling like a beached whale - that kind of thing. I went off sex because I could not for the life of me stop picturing my partner’s penis poking my unborn child in the eye from the inside. Yes, you read that right. I went off sex because I developed an intrusive, unshakeable image of my partner's willy poking my unborn son in the peeper like some sort of grim game of Operation.

Of course I knew this wasn’t actually how wombs work - but it didn’t matter. There is, I would argue, nothing less arousing on God's green earth than that image. My partner could have come towards me with candles, Barry White playing, and a glass of my favourite crisp, chilled, sauvignon (New Zealand only!), and I would have immediately started shrieking “NOT THE EYES. NOT HIS LITTLE EYES. GET AWAY FROM HIS EYES!” like the Gingerbread from Shrek and his gumdrop buttons.

You could say this is one of (many) reasons I know that me and Bonnie Blue are never going to be mates. We are, as they say, living in separate worlds, singing from different hymn books, speaking different languages, operating on entirely different wavelengths, marching to the beat of two wildly different drums. If we were ships, we would not just pass in the night, we would be sailing in different oceans, possibly on different planets, in different millennia. You get the jist!

Because while I spent my pregnancy freaking out over an anatomically impossible image of my partner poking my unborn son in the eye with his dingdong, Bonnie Blue has been spending hers inviting a load of men she’s never met to have sex and urinate on her as part of a themed celebration of her pregnancy.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s lovely for you - now let me ruin your day.

Bonnie Blue - who you probably already know unless you’ve somehow managed to successfully avoid one of the internet’s most determined attempts at getting your attention - is a few months pregnant following her controversial (see also: find yourself a sick bucket) “400 man breeding mission” - and earlier this month, to mark the occasion, she turned her baby shower into what she called a “golden shower.” Now if that’s not the kind of branding instinct most marketing departments would kill for I don’t know what is.

112 attendees, several hours, sex with a select few, everyone else queuing up to urinate on her instead, and - somewhere in amongst all of that - nappy pong.

People are, obviously, cross about this.

This is the kind of story that gets Linda from Stoke-on-Trent who has a profile picture of a Yorkshire Terrier called Buster, and Bartholomew, whose profile picture is him holding a sign at a protest about late stage capitalism, agreeing on something for the first time in their online lives. Left, right, and the people who just shout at Question Time for once, united!

Aside from the obvious - what the fuck is wrong with her? - the general criticism is that this baby hasn’t even entered the world yet and has already become part of the content machine. People are uncomfortable with the idea of a child being involved in a spectacle before they’ve had any say in it. There are concerns about safety, exploitation, and what it means when a pregnancy itself becomes part of a public performance. There are questions about bullying, what it'll be like at school, and what this child is going to inherit once they're old enough to understand any of it.

It shouldn’t surprise you that I totally understand those concerns. As someone who burst into tears on Christmas Day when I was 8 months pregnant because my dad accidentally gave me a glass of proper mulled wine instead of the alcohol free version bought especially for me, I find the whole thing deeply uncomfortable. From the second I found out I was pregnant, my entire job was, as I understood it, to keep my unfinished person safe at all costs (including from things that weren’t actually dangerous as it turns out!)

So the idea of having some sort of piss fest with strange men while pregnant (or not for that matter!) for content sounds abhorrent to me.

While sex during pregnancy is, for most people, perfectly safe - this obviously doesn’t feel like that.

I’ve written about Bonnie Blue before, after her documentary 1,000 Men and Me.

I had a few “pick me girl” comments. Why are you kink shaming, Jennie? Let women have fun, Jennie. Not everything's about what men think, Jennie. Read a book, Jennie. You know the vibe.

I don't think I'll be getting those this time.

Because whatever camp you're usually in - sex work is empowering, sex work is exploitative, or somewhere in the murky middle - everyone seems to have arrived in the same place on this one. Even the people who'd normally rush to defend her right to do whatever she wants with her own body will admit this feels wrong. Including, as it happens, Bonnie herself who described the whole thing as “disgusting” which I think says a lot coming from someone who snow angeled on a floor strewn with used condoms after her 1000 man gang bang.

Anyway, none of this is really what I’m here to talk about. Let’s go on a journey shall we?

You're in your semi, telly on, cup of tea going cold, half watching Molly-Mae's Amazon Prime documentary because everyone's watching it so you might as well. And then her daughter, Bambi, is screaming. She's naked, she doesn't want to sit on the potty, and there's a room full of grown men standing around her with cameras. Minutes later, she does a poo in the bath instead. Also filmed. Also broadcast, to however many million people are sat on their sofas, watching.

Somewhere else, someone's laying in bed, their face is lit up with the blue light of their phone mid scroll. A toddler, mid-meltdown, face purple, fists clenched, filmed by their mother. The caption says something about “the truth nobody shows you about mum life” which is ironic because this is what everyone shows you about mum life. There’s hundreds of comments underneath, all saying a variation of “relatable”, “I needed this today!” and “Best advert for birth control I’ve ever seen”. Scroll down the same account a bit further and there’s the same toddler, doing a fart. A fart that was also filmed and also broadcast, to however many thousand people were sat on their sofas, laid in their beds, watching.

Somewhere else, someone's on a train, headphones in, thumb on autopilot, landing on an account they've followed for so long they can't actually remember why they started. There's the gender reveal, two years ago. The bump update, week by week. The hospital bag, packed and unpacked on camera. The birth itself. The first cry. The first nappy change. The first word. And then it just keeps going and going, because the baby became a toddler and the toddler became content, and now it's a video most days, a full and complete account of someone else's whole life - from utero. All filmed. All broadcast, to however many thousands of people sat on their sofas, laid in the beds, travelling on their trains, watching.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

No? Fine. Stay with me. I am, by my own admission, someone who cannot tell a story in under 17 years. Ask my partner. He has, on multiple occasions, asked me a simple yes or no question and ended up 45 minutes later somewhere around a childhood anecdote involving my nan, a school disco in 2003, and a full explainer of a woman called Carol who he has never met and never will.

I’m going to do that to you now - but I promise this has a point.

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I’d like to take you back to 2008. I’m 16. I think I’m the coolest person who has ever lived. My fringe is doing exactly what I need it to do, and I am, in my own mind, untouchable. And then I’m on my mum’s Facebook for some unrelated reason and I find a photo of myself, age 11 or so, on holiday in the South of France - goggles on, looking like a deformed seal having some sort of episode in a paddling pool. I am, instantly, destroyed. 40 of my mum’s friends have seen this. 40.

At the time, this felt like social death, even though nothing bad was going to happen. No one I actually cared about would see it, but it felt that way because I did look very much like this man:

(Wait for my mum to arrive in the comments of this piece to tell me I looked beautiful despite knowing in her heart of hearts that did not).

Looking back, we had it so easy. So embarrassingly easy. 40 people. One (admittedly horrific) photo. A locked platform full of middle aged people sharing links to Friends Reunited. That’s the entire scale of what my generation had to deal with.

Children of mumfluencers don’t get one bad photo. They get the lot. The bump, the birth, the first of everything - every milestone and meltdown and unflattering bath time moment, uploaded in real time, captioned, monetised, sitting there forever, searchable the second they’re old enough to type their own name into Google.

Anyway. I told you there was a point to all this, and I am a woman of my word. Even if it's taken a paddling pool, a fictional man called Bartholomew, and a stock photo of an overweight man in goggles to get there, there I will get!

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My point is this… Bonnie Blue might make you recoil but her latest stunt is simply the most extreme version of something thousands of mothers are doing online right now just with less urine and a Boden discount code in their bio.

“Woaaaaaaah there Jennie. Are you really comparing Bonnie ‘sex pest’ Blue to Mrs Wholesome, baking sourdough with her kids in matching linen aprons?”

Yes. Sorry. I am.

Obviously her stunt and a sourdough video aren't the same thing on the surface. Nobody's weeing on anyone in the bread video - but underneath it the basic transaction is near identical - a child who never asked to be part of any of it is being used to build someone else's audience, income, and brand.

I put it to you that the difference isn’t the act - it’s the woman.

Bonnie gets to be the villain because nobody was rooting for her reputation in the first place. There’s no fall from grace to be horrified by, because there was no grace there to begin with. In the words of Joey from Friends:

Mrs Wholesome doesn’t have that problem. She’s not a whore, she’s a mother. A good one. She’s not selling content, she’s sharing her journey. So the exact same swap - a child’s life, for clout, for cash - breezes on through, because we’ve decided being a Good Mother is a kind of moral immunity, and nobody fancies being the person who points out that, actually, it isn’t.

And before someone begins furiously typing to tell me I am, in fact, the photo police, and have personally ruined Christmas by suggesting their nan can't post a snap of little Henry in his Rudolph costume - I am not the photo police. If you want to share some nice pictures of your child with your 200 followers, most of whom are your actual aunties, carry on.

We are proud of our children. I think my son is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life (he is I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules), and I do post photos of him sometimes set to close friends. I am proud of him. I want people to see his face. That is a completely normal, healthy thing for a parent to feel, and I don’t think wanting to share that makes anyone a monster (though with AI now destroying our lives I think it’s something we all, unfortunately, need to mull over).

There is a difference between this and mumfluencer content - and the difference is the bit where the child stops being a person you’re proud of and becomes the business. Where the account exists because of them. Where the algorithm needs them to keep performing.

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The critisism that Bonnie’s unborn child can not consent to what they’re a part of is true. But neither can any of those on your TikTok FYP. Ultimately, none of these children asked for any of it. Not Bonnie’s, who’s still in utero and already the centrepiece of someone else’s disordered content calendar. Not Bambi, naked and crying in front of a room full of strangers with cameras. Not the toddler with the purple, furious little face, labelled “the best advert for birth control” by hundreds of people who’ve never met her. Not the child who’s been narrated, week by week, since before they had a name.

They’ll all grow up eventually. They’ll all, one day, type their own name into Google, the way we all eventually do, out of boredom or vanity or morbid curiosity, and will they like what they find?

I don’t know what they’ll deem worse - that a stranger weed on their mum at a party, or that their entire childhood was a business and nobody stopped to think for a moment about how that might one day affect them.

And because I can already see someone sharpening their keyboard, this is not me saying Bonnie Blue is somehow a misunderstood pioneer of motherhood content. If she is that then I am Morgan Freeman.

The woman has spent the last few years turning sex, outrage and people’s inability to look away into a business model. The whole point of what she does is that people are horrified, people talk about it, and then she gets exactly what she wanted - attention. Turning a pregnancy into another chapter of that is why people are rightly angry. It’s worse this time because it’s not just a woman doing something people find sexually shocking but a child being used as part of a story they did not write, did not agree to be in, and one that they will eventually have to live with.

But underneath all of that she has inadvertently made the thing we are usually happy to ignore completely impossible to ignore by taking the whole concept of children becoming content, putting it in a wheelie bin, setting the bin on fire, and then livestreaming herself standing next to it in a gimp mask.

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It is very easy to point at Bonnie Blue and say what kind of person would do this? Much less comfortable to admit that we are all much better at spotting something when it looks completely fucking unhinged. When it is a woman doing something so extreme that even Bonnie Blue herself admits it’s disgusting, well, everyone can agree.

The conversation gets much more awkward when it’s someone we like who seems normal. Someone with a nice kitchen and a ring light and a caption about motherhood being hard but beautiful.

Anyway, that’s my TED Talk. Please feel free to send me hate mail for likening your favourite mumfluencer to a woman who looked at the concept of a traditional baby shower and thought “lovely, but what if everyone was naked and someone brought a jug?”, but if you could avoid mentioning my 11 year old holiday photo again, I’d appreciate it, I’ve already suffered enough.

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If you’re new here, you’re currently reading that sentence like someone who has just arrived at a party and been handed a very specific inside joke with absolutely no context.

Who is Sandra? Why is she back? Where did she go? These are all reasonable questions and I will answer them.

If you’ve been here a while, you may already know who Sandra is and you may already be a little bit excited. Alternatively, you may also have absolutely no idea what the fuck I’m talking about because, and I say this lovingly, I am a woman on the internet and not actually a central figure in your daily life and you cannot be expected to retain every character I have ever invented.

Either way, here’s what you need to know.

Sandra was born out of a very serious concern raised by the internet - that I was one joke away from ruining my child’s entire life. You see, I wrote a piece about motherhood where I dared to suggest something truly earth shattering - that sometimes, occasionally, once in a while, parents might miss things about their old life.

Things like sitting down.

A lot of people read it and laughed because they understood the concept of a joke. Others did not.

Others saw a mother talking about the relentless parts of parenting and reached a devastating verdict - this woman hates motherhood. Naturally, I responded in the only logical way there is and did what any sensible person would do.

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I invented a fictional future version of myself called Sandra, moved her to Spain, opened a failing beach bar called Sandra’s Sips, and gave her a tragic backstory involving her estranged son and a man called Miguel who pays exclusively in coins he finds on the beach.

People really loved Sandra.

Anyway, I thought her story was over - that she had served her purpose. But then a man with a profile picture suggesting he is currently travelling across a post apocalyptic wasteland on horseback in a gas mask read my piece about how to tell men to eff off without injecting your face with botox, to inform me that my son would reach 18 and promptly never call me again.

And so…

Sitting on my sofa, I summoned her like some spirit from the underwold… Sandra I said, it's time.

The year is 2078.

I’m 76.

My son is 46.

We still don’t speak. I was warned, of course. A man who appeared to be surviving the end of days on horseback told me in 2026 that my son would leave at 18 and never call. I was too busy writing about botox to listen.

After years of reflecting on the devastating impact I had on his childhood, I decided that sitting alone in my flat in Spain feeling guilty was not enough.

Sandra's Sips had been good to me, in the way only a failing beach bar in Spain can be good to a person. It had given me purpose. Structure. A reason to get up in the morning and discover the ice machine was still broken. It was something to do with all that sitting down I'd always wanted. But guilt, I realised, is not a gift you can keep to yourself forever.

I needed to do more - give back so to speak.

So Sandra’s Sips became something else. It is still technically a beach bar. The sign is still there, but underneath it, in much smaller writing, is the new addition - Sandra’s SIPport Group - A safe space for sons of difficult mothers.

Every Tuesday evening the chairs go in a circle. The men arrive, they sit, and one by one they stand up, say their name and what she did.

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The first man to speak was called Ryan.

Ryan’s mother, he explained, had spent the better part of his childhood wandering around their semi-detached house looking like something Time Team had recently unearthed. She would do this deliberately, he said. She would spend three consecutive days looking, frankly, quite alarming - grey faced, unbrushed hair, wearing what Ryan could only describe as “the big cardigan” - and then without warning she would reappear fully assembled - hair done, makeup on, clothes that suggested she had, at some point in the past, been quite fit actually.

He said the whiplash had never fully left him.

I was not thinking that Ryan’s mother sounded like an absolute genius. I was not thinking that at all.

The second man was called Jordan.

Jordan’s mother had, upon hearing him describe female orgasms as low ROI, sat him down in front of the television and made him watch The Inbetweeners in its entirety. She had paused it at specific moments. She had used the character of Jay Cartwright to illustrate that even a teenage boy whose entire understanding of sex had been assembled from Zoo magazine and a Lynx Africa advert understood that female pleasure was, at minimum, theoretically the point. She had also, he said, paused it on the scene where Simon Cooper, in a moment of romantic ambition that outstripped his vocabulary, told a girl he was going to fuck her fucking fanny off before calling her a twat. She explained that while the phrasing left something to be desired, the intention was at least correct.

He said he still has nightmares 20 years on.

I was not thinking that Jordan’s mother sounded like she had done an extremely thorough and responsible job. I was not thinking that at all.

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The third man was called Callum.

Callum’s mother had slipped a letter under his bedroom door. He was 16. The letter was about bird baths. He had not, at the time, known what a bird bath was in this context. He did now. The letter was, in Callum's words, very clear on the subject of not washing your penis in the downstairs sink between women like a coffee mug in an office kitchenette. He said she had ruined coffee for him forever and that she had signed it love always, Mum which he felt was, under the circumstances, a bit weird.

I was not thinking that Callum’s mother had done exactly the right thing. I was not thinking that at all.

The fourth man was called Dean.

Dean’s mother had taken him to Tesco at 3pm on a Sunday. He was 10. She had not explained why. She had simply gestured like a tour guide at a historical site at the women around them. Women with their hair tied up. Women in clothes that suggested they hadn’t been expecting to run into anyone. Women who looked, Dean’s mother had said, exactly like people.

I was not thinking that this was one of the more stunningly brilliant pieces of parenting I had ever heard described in this room. I was not thinking that at all.

The fifth man was called Marcus.

Marcus’s mother had a chin hair. This was not, he clarified quickly, a problem in itself - the problem was what she had done with it. She had not dealt with it privately but had instead referenced it casually over breakfast. She had turned her face in the light so it caught. She had stroked it, he said, in a way he could only describe as thoughtful and she’d maintained eye contact throughout. Marcus said he had been unable to eat toast without thinking about it for approximately four years.

I was not thinking that Marcus’s mother was one of the great unsung heroes of modern parenting. I was not thinking that at all.

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The sixth man was called Pete.

Pete’s mother had, without fail, referred to any group of people containing at least one woman as “ladies and sons of ladies.” In shops. At parents evening. Once, Pete said, at a funeral. She had also, on more than one occasion, leaned out of a car window as they drove past a man parallel parking and said “not bad for a man” before winding the window back up and continuing the journey in complete silence. He said she had never once acknowledged it afterwards. Not then. Not ever.

I was not thinking that Pete’s mother sounded like someone I would get on with enormously. I was not thinking that at all.

The seventh man was called Steve.

Steve’s mother had, on a Tuesday afternoon when he was 14, announced calmly from across the living room that she had just shit herself. She had not appeared distressed. She had not lowered her voice. She had simply stated it in the tone of someone reading out the weather forecast and continued watching television. He said it was part of a long campaign to teach him that women were, at their core, just people with pores and digestive systems, and that this had been the final, most traumatic instalment. He said he had never fully recovered.

I was not thinking that Steve’s mother was a goddess of the highest order. I was not thinking that at all.

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The eighth man was called Gary.

Gary’s mother had created a flowchart about men on the internet. It had categories. “Has the man described himself as a high value male - tell him to fuck off”, she said. “Does the man have a profile picture of a leased BMW or a fish - tell him to fuck off”, she said. “Has the man said female orgasms represent poor ROI - tell your friends, tell his friends, then tell him to fuck off”, she said. Gary said his mother had published it publicly on the internet where anyone could read it and had then gone straight back to wandering around looking like something recently excavated, apparently satisfied that she had done her bit.

I was not thinking that Gary’s mother sounded like she had, in fact, done her bit. I was not thinking that at all.

And I was definitely not thinking that I had somehow managed to fill an entire room with men whose mothers had read my old Substack.

I closed the session. The men filed out. Miguel collected the glasses.

When they had gone I sat down at the bar and opened my laptop. I pulled up the archives.

There it was.

The inconsistent appearances - put together and then haggard. The Tesco trip. The chin hair.

I scrolled down.

The bird bath. The Inbetweeners. The ruined coffee. The love always, Mum.

I scrolled down.

Ladies and sons of ladies. Not bad for a man. The flowchart.

I scrolled down to the comments and there, still sitting exactly where he had left it all those years ago, was a message from a man whose profile picture suggested he was navigating a post apocalyptic wasteland on horseback in a gas mask. His words “I simply feel bad for your son. I can tell he’s never going to call you once he leaves at immediately after turning 18.”

I sat back. I looked at the screen for a long time. And then I laughed.

Not the hollow bitter laugh that had become something of a signature move out here. Not the laugh of a woman staring into the deafening silence of a life she’d apparently always wanted. A different laugh entirely. The kind that startles Miguel so badly he drops his beach coins into his sangria.

“Sandra” he said, fishing them out one by one. “What is it?”

I closed the laptop.

“Miguel” I said, “I think we’re going to need more chairs.”

Well. That was fun, wasn’t it.

Obviously none of that happened. Sandra’s SIPport Group does not exist. I am sorry to say that there is no support group for sons of difficult mothers, no Tuesday sessions, and no laminated sign on a door in Spain.

But the comment did happen.

A man did in fact read an article about telling men to fuck off without injecting your face with Botox to prove a point and concluded the natural consequence of this was my son reaching 18, packing a bag and never speaking to me again. Which feels, even by the standards of internet overreaction, a bit much. Although I do now feel like I should ask this man if he’s okay… maybe check if he’s in his luteal phase - because that I can understand!

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While this is quite obviously a bit of a troll (gotta love ‘em - such content creators!) I do wonder why is it that this particular prophecy seems to be reserved almost exclusively for mothers of boys. Nobody appears to be arriving in the comments to warn mothers of daughters that their girls will resent them for raising them to be kind, or for teaching them basic respect for other people or to maybe not wash her bits in the downstairs loo after a round of shagging. We don’t seem to worry that girls will resent their mothers for raising them with values outside of their ‘market’ one,

It’s only ever sons. And I think I’ve worked out why…

These men are absolutely fucking terrified we might actually pull it off. Terrified that somewhere out there a woman is raising a boy who will not grow up to do “dick-ups” with weights in a Bag For Life live on a podcast in the name of looksmaxxing (I am so sorry, yes this is a thing). A boy who won’t think a woman’s pleasure represents poor ROI and a boy who has never once googled his own market value as though he were a second hand Peugeot with one careful owner.

In this nightmare scenario, the only card left to play is the one threat guaranteed to actually hit a mother where it hurts - that he will one day hate her and never speak to her again.

So, for my own peace of mind, and perhaps yours too, here is a list of some things that may actually get you struck off the ‘call mum’ list that don’t include writing humorous pieces on the internet and teaching our sons to be decent men.

1. Grinding on him during what was supposed to be his romantic first dance with his wife in front of 500 wedding guests.

2. Calling him up onto the stage for what he believed was his planned first dance with his new wife, only for Marc Anthony to introduce “the most beautiful woman in the room” and send you up to dance with him instead.

3. Cancelling your future daughter-in-law’s wedding dress with 11 hours to go until the big day.

4. Pressuring him to sign away the rights to his own name days before his wedding as a sort of prenup for being your son.

5. Repeatedly inviting his exes round in a way that’s “clearly intended” to make things awkward for his wife.

6. Refusing to help save displaced dogs during a wildfire when your daughter-in-law specifically asks.

7. Telling him you’d only contact him through lawyers from now on, then posting “happy birthday I love you so much” on Instagram 3 weeks later as though nothing happened.

Sorry, that got oddly specific towards the end there didn’t it? Purely hypothetical examples, of course. Any resemblance to an extremely famous, extremely well documented family is, obviously, entirely coincidental.

Anyway, I must dash. I have a son to emotionally damage by loving him so much that I’ve already started looking on Rightmove for the house he will need when he inevitably turns 18 and leaves me immediately. Sadly, the only thing currently available within budget is a bin shed, and even that has a bidding war, so my parents should probably clear out the wardrobe.

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For there is no modern day act of motherhood quite as capable of making people lose their absolute shit as a child who can ask for a boob by name still being allowed to have one. And there is no modern day small talk quite as loaded as “oh… you’re still… feeding?”

Because just in case you’re new here, we are in fact living in the hellscape of everyone having an opinion on what you do with your own tits – and by extension – what kind of mother that makes you.

Welcome, friends. I’ve been here a while - pull up a chair, kettle’s on.

It may come as absolutely no surprise that I – a woman whose first article on this platform was essentially a love letter to extended breastfeeding and a gentle FU to Karen Millen after she went on national television and called it selfish, weird and abnormal – have now clocked over 3 years of providing on tap milk to a boy who I’m told “speaks very well actually”.

At the time, Karen’s comments sounded rather like she was saying breastfeeding beyond 6 months was selfish, weird and had no benefit - probably because she said:

“There's no benefit, is there, for a child to be breastfed beyond 6 months really. I think it's quite a selfish thing on the mother's part. It's just not normal is it? I find it very weird”

which, looking back, was perhaps an unfair assumption on my part.

Just because somebody says breastfeeding beyond 6 months is selfish, weird and has no benefit doesn’t necessarily mean they’re saying breastfeeding beyond 6 months is selfish, weird and has no benefit.

It might mean something else entirely, like

“As a woman to women, I respect your choices and I want to support you”

(unless of course you are specifically breastfeeding a 3 year old, in which case you are in fact selfish, not normal, and I find you very weird. Which is a completely different thing - like a bag that’s £49.99 instead of £50).

Anyway.

In honour of 1 year of writing here - and of becoming, right on schedule, the exact mother my muse was talking about all along - I have compiled a very serious and in no way defensive guide to breastfeeding a 3 year old.

3 things I’ve learnt, 3 things I love and 3 things I hate - plus a highly scientific rating of the comments I now hear on repeat.

Buckle up. It’s about to get edu-lactational.

3 things I’ve learnt

1. Other people's children always look bigger than your own

I’m going to tell you something I’m not entirely proud of.

A few months ago I was scrolling - as one does, at an hour one shouldn’t - and came across a video of a woman breastfeeding her child. My first thought, before I could stop it, was that the child looked quite... old.

So I stalked her, obviously. To find out how old the child actually was. (This is probably why we shouldn’t share our children’s birthdays online. There are weirdos like me.) Anyway, it turned out her child was about 4 months older than mine. 4 months. Which means that at the point I was raising a silent eyebrow at her from my sofa, my own child was upstairs being practically the same age.

I’ve thought about this a lot since. How different a child looks when they aren’t yours. How size and age and what’s ‘normal’ all shift depending on whose baby you’re looking at. Your own child always looks like your baby. Someone else’s looks like they should be paying council tax and writing some lie dressed up as a business epiphany on LinkedIn.

We make a lot of confident parenting judgements from that position - from the outside, before you clock your own hypocrisy and you realise the child you just raised an eyebrow at is 4 months older than yours and you are, in fact, Janet from Doncaster in a dressing gown.

2. You will become the exact thing you once judged

I was breastfed until I was 3.5. I know this because my mother has told me, with some pride, on multiple occasions. I have responded to this information over the years in the way any loving, open minded daughter would - by doing an impression of Bitty from Little Britain at her every time it came up.

For those unfamiliar, Bitty is a Little Britain sketch in which a fully grown man still breastfeeds from his mother. It is played entirely for horror. It was, I felt, a very apt reference. I was very funny about it. And now here I am - with a nearly 3.5 year old who breastfeeds.

You see, the thing about parenting is that it will find every single thing you said before you had children and it will make you eat it. Every judgment, every raised eyebrow, and every impression you did of your own mother at the dinner table. It will serve it back to you slowly, over several years, with a side of humility and absolutely fuck all mercy. You don’t get to have opinions about other people’s parenting until you’ve done it - and if you do, you’ll be humbled my friend.

3. Everything is a rod for your back

Everyone who has ever said extended breastfeeding will create a rod for your back has been technically,correct. My son does ask for milk when he's tired. He asks for it when he's sad, when he's poorly, when he's bored, and when he's spotted me sitting down by myself and decided that’s not on. Stopping, when it happens, will require patience and consistency and at least one genuinely grim fortnight that I am in absolutely no hurry to begin.

But the thing about the rod warning is that it assumes rods are avoidable - they are not.

Children arrive and immediately begin creating them. The dummy is a rod, the bottle is a rod, the bedtime routine involving 17 books, 2 songs and a discussion about something absolutely batshit is a rod. The Spider Man cup is a rod and the blue bowl is a rod. The fact you’ve accidentally referred to a brioche as a “cake bun” once and now have to call it that until the end of time is a rod.

Parenting is essentially just acquiring rods and then slowly getting rid of them one at a time and the fact that something might be difficult to stop one day isn't usually a very good reason not to do it today. In fact, if we applied that logic consistently, we’d probably never have children in the first place because children themselves are, when you think about it, quite a significant rod for your back.

3 things I love

1. It’s the parenting equivalent of Ctrl+Alt+Delete

When your computer completely loses the plot, you don’t try to reason with it. You press 3 buttons and it resets. Normal service is resumed and everyone moves on.

Breastfeeding a toddler is exactly this. Whatever has broken - and something is often broken - the boob fixes it. It actually doesn’t matter what it is. I have never found a faster solution and for that I am indebted!

2. It makes sitting down in front of the TV feel legit

There’s mum guilt and then there’s mum guilt that descends the moment you put a screen on and sit down - a vague sense that you should be doing something more enriching. That somewhere a better mother is out there doing a craft activity or explaining photosynthesis.

I don’t actually know any of these parents in real life which I guess tells you everything you need to know about how much of parenting discourse exists entirely on the internet, populated entirely by people you will never meet, making you feel bad about things that nobody around you actually cares about. But still, there is guilt about what the screen is doing to his developing brain. The blue light. The passive consumption. THE ROT!

Breastfeeding while watching Bluey is my loophole. I am not letting him rot in front of a screen - I am providing him good shit while coincidentally also finding out whether Jack’s dad ever found his way through the Bush to pick him up. The milk cancels out the rot - it's science. I’m sorry, I don't make the rules.

3. I feel less stressed when he’s sick

I am an anxious mother. I know exactly how many wet nappies a toddler should have in a day, I know what the early signs of dehydration look like, I have Googled a lot of things and have arrived at conclusions that no person should ever arrive at about a child who was simply a bit warm.

I remember my friend messaging once in a panic because her child was poorly and refusing everything - the yoghurt, the fruit pouch, the ice cream, every suggestion a WhatsApp group of mothers could collectively produce to get the fluids in.

When my son is sick he will always have boob. Maybe it’s helping him. Maybe it’s helping me. Either way, when your child hasn’t eaten properly for 2 days and has decided water is beneath him, having one thing you know he’ll take feels a bit like carrying a spare parachute.

3 things I hate

1. The twiddling

There is an entire canon of breastfeeding literature and not one person thought to mention that at some point your child’s hand will locate your other nipple and just stay there… forever. Fiddling absentmindedly - completely at peace while I am sat there with both tits fully out because he has one in his mouth and the other in his hand and if you’d told me before I had children that I would sit like this, regularly, in front of both of my parents, I would have told you to fuck right off.

Most of the time I can zone out. But there are times when the overstimulation is overwhelming and I want to rip my tits off and put them in the bin.

2. I JUST WANT A CUDDLE

I grew this child. I have loved him since before he had a face. Sometimes I want nothing more than to sit on the sofa and just cuddle. Instead he spots me sitting down and says “MUMMY MILKKKKKKK”.

I know he loves me. He speaks, as we established earlier, very well actually and he tells me so. But mostly he tells me he would like mummy milk.

3. The opinions

There is a certain type of person who upon learning you are still breastfeeding a 3 year old will make a series of rapid assumptions about you. That you are, in some way, a bit much. A bit intense. The kind of woman who has strong feelings about sourdough and owns too many linen items and as Katie Hopkins once said - makes her own yoghurt and knits her own Birkenstocks.

These people are exhausting. They are also completely irrelevant. Because once you’re 3 years in to breastfeeding a child you have long since run out of energy to care what anyone thinks about it. The fucks have left the building and you are untouchable (in the most physically touched way possible!)

Which brings me to perhaps the most predictable part of extended breastfeeding.

The comments.

Not loads of them, contrary to what the internet would have you believe. In over 3 years I’ve actually had remarkably few people say anything to my face. Most people are far too British for that. But every now and then someone does get brave. And what I’ve discovered is that, much like children, these comments are not nearly as unique as their owners think they are.

For there are only about 7 of them and they get passed around from person to person like a chain email your nan would have sent in 2004.

After 3 years I no longer take offence. In fact, I’ve decided to review them. Think of me as the Michelin Guide for unsolicited breastfeeding opinions. Here we go…

“He’s going to be breastfeeding at university at this rate”

Rating: 7/10

A classic. One of the greats. A joke so old it’s probably carved in a cave somewhere. Points awarded for longevity. Points deducted for originality.

“He’s only doing it for comfort”

Rating: 10/10

Excellent observation. That is, in fact, what comfort is. A rare comment that accidentally answers itself before I’ve had chance to respond. No notes.

“Isn’t he a bit old for that?”

Rating: 5/10

The Ford Focus of breastfeeding comments. Dependable, common, seen absolutely everywhere. Gets the job done but nobody’s excited to see it. Bonus points for being delivered as though the speaker has just discovered a serious safeguarding concern rather than a child having a drink.

“When are you stopping?”

Rating: 8/10

A strong performer - consistently popular. Usually delivered with the same tone people use when asking when your kitchen extension will be finished. Points deducted because nobody ever seems to have a preferred answer. “Next week” causes alarm. “Not sure” causes alarm. “Tomorrow at 2:17pm” would probably also cause alarm.

“But he eats food now.”

Rating: 9/10

One of my favourites. You’ll never guess what I do while drinking a cup of tea.

“Surely he’s getting nothing from it now?”

Rating: 8/10

Strong energy. Often said by someone who has just watched him actively receive milk and happiness from it.

“Isn’t it weird?”

Rating: 6/10

Loses points for vagueness. What’s weird? The breastfeeding? The toddler? The milk? The concept of mammals? Needs more detail.

“You’re making a rod for your own back”

Rating: 10/10

An absolute giant of the genre. The Rod For Your Back has achieved almost mythical status in British parenting. There is no comment greater.

“When are you going to cut the cord?”

Rating: 7/10

Solid effort. Points awarded for imagery. Points deducted because if my 3 year old is still attached by his umbilical cord, breastfeeding is probably not the biggest issue on the table.

“But he can ask for it!”

Rating: 9/10

Excellent. One of the few comments that genuinely fascinates me. Yes Sharron, the talking has made the process significantly more transparent.

“Doesn’t he need to learn to self soothe?”

Rating: 10/10

A modern classic. Usually asked by adults who require a cup of tea, a duvet, a hot bath, a group chat, antidepressants, a takeaway and 3 episodes of Netflix to regulate themselves after a mildly stressful Tuesday.

No further questions.

1 year ago Karen Millen inadvertently started this Substack. I wrote my first piece not entirely sure anyone would read it. They did. Thank you Karen, and thank you, lovely reader, for being here - I hope you stick around.

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Oh sorry, what was that?

You thought altering your face in response to impossible beauty standards created and reinforced by a culture that has spent centuries rewarding women for looking young, smooth and fuckable was actually… not very “fuck the patriarchy” at all?

No no no babe you must be confused.

See, if a man tells you that you don’t need filler and Botox, the empowered boss bitch thing to do is actually to sprint directly to a woman on TikTok called something like AestheticsByMads_x who will explain, while dissolving her own nasolabial folds in real time, that getting cosmetic procedures is actually an act of radical self expression and not in any way linked to the fact that women continue to be socially rewarded for resembling a startled Bratz doll well into middle age.

Keep up. Empowerment has moved on.

There are mothers across this country diligently trying to raise sons who won’t describe women as “clapped” after marinating themselves in half a can of Sure Men while filming motivational TikToks about “high value masculinity” from the passenger seat of a financed Audi A3.

I know because I am one of them.

As many of you know, I have already spent the better part of this year wandering around my own home looking like I’ve recently escaped from a peat bog in order to ensure my son understands that women are, at their core, just people with pores and digestive systems and not in fact “warthogs” for daring to exist au naturel. Just last week I wrote a letter to give to our sons after discovering men on podcasts were now describing female orgasms as “low ROI” while giving their genitals a quick rinse in the downstairs sink between shags.

So it has come as a devastating blow to discover that elsewhere on the internet women are responding to these kinds of cultural problems not by telling men to fuck off, but by aggressively encouraging each other to freeze their foreheads, sharpen their jawlines, and inflate their lips as though this is some sort of boss bitch thing to do.

Behold, the latest reason to get botox and filler…

Because a man told you not to.

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The format is simple.

A woman appears on screen alongside some variation of “my boyfriend told me I didn’t need Botox” or “my husband said I shouldn’t get filler” or “one day a man will tell you not to get Botox and filler” before cutting to a load of after pictures saying a variation of “good thing I didn’t listen to him.”

Videos that are essentially a collection of photographs intended to demonstrate the catastrophic consequences of listening to men - namely that you will stay haggard and disgusting for the rest of your days.

Like so:

The vibe of all of these videos is pretty much the same - if your man tells you you don’t need to pump your face full of shit, you must not listen to him queen 💅.

My personal favourite detail is that several of these videos use Rihanna’s Breakin’ Dishes as the soundtrack which means that while a woman is hinting at the fact her boyfriend told her he quite likes what she looks like sans botox and filler, Rihanna is in the background threatening to smash plates and fight a man. (For those not acquainted with this banger, the song is less “my boyfriend said I don’t need Botox” and more “I’ve just discovered a second family in Milton Keynes and am 2 minutes away from being escorted away in a police van while screaming SALLY THE SLAG?! REALLY DAVE?!”)

Now, before anyone starts typing JuSt LeT wOmEn EnJoY tHiNgS! I am not writing this piece to bash you for choosing to get filler and botox. I genuinely don’t care what other people choose to do with their faces. Nor am I particularly interested in arguing about whether botox and filler “work” (whatever that means) because, in many cases, you could argue that they do. (Although I would point out that a lot of these videos are slightly loosey goosey with the truth given the before image is usually a woman who hasn’t put a tone of ‘effort’ into her appearance while the after is filler and botox AS WELL AS a full face of makeup, a new haircut in a colour that suits her considerably better, hair that’s styled, a tan, flattering lighting, clothes that fit, poses that do a lot of work and weight loss. It’s a bit like me posting a photograph of myself immediately after childbirth next to one taken at a wedding 3 years later and crediting the transformation entirely to changing shampoo but I digress).

I’m writing this piece because I can’t help but sit here thinking we’ve been played.

Like somewhere in a secret underground lair a group of terrible men are sitting around a conference table stroking white cats.

“Excellent work lads! We’ve spent years being so relentlessly irritating that women have developed a reflexive opposition to anything we say.”

“Genius.”

“And now?”

“Now we simply tell them they don’t need Botox. The rest will take care of itself!”

At which point the entire room erupts into villainous laughter.

An elaborate plan, admittedly. But no more ridiculous than some of the things I’ve seen on my For You Page recently.

Because let’s chat about how this sounds.

It sounds a bit like we’ve spent the last decade listening to women quite reasonably point out that being evaluated on our appearance all the time is exhausting and that maybe being called a warthog online for daring to look like a normal human woman is not ideal and that perhaps men could stand to stop treating women’s faces like they’re judges on Britain’s Got Talent. And then, the second a man finally pipes up with something akin to “yeah actually I think you look nice as you are” we’ve all collectively stood up, pointed at him and gone FUCK YOU KEVIN! I’M GETTING 3 SYRINGES IN MY CHIN.

The whole thing has the vibe of a toddler screaming about not wanting to eat the cauliflower on their plate being told they don’t have to eat the cauliflower on their plate and suddenly becoming desperate to consume the cauliflower on their plate. It’s deeply confusing.

Because for years the complaint has broadly been one of why are women expected to spend so much time, money and emotional energy trying to look like they have gone to sleep every night in a jar of collagen only for the response in these videos to be - oh, so NOW you like women with wrinkles? Nice try, Kevin. I’ll be at the clinic at 3.

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And it’s made me think well fuck, what a big fat indictment this is of how utterly uncool it has become to agree with a man.

Because these videos make perfect sense on a surface level. The setup is instantly recognisable and the roles are clear. A man has expressed an opinion about a woman's appearance and the woman has ignored him. CUE APPLAUSE. Nobody needs to think particularly hard about it because we all understand our positions immediately. The man represents judgement. The woman represents freedom. Bish bash bosh. Done.

Except for the slight snag that this particular act of rebellion involves making yourself look more like the version of a woman that magazines, films, adverts, influencers and approximately 95% of the internet have been telling us is the desirable version all along.

Before anyone prints off a photo of my face and pins it to their dartboard - I am not about to launch into a “STOP SILENCING MEN” diatribe. Lord knows it’s not hard to see how we arrived here. Men have spent an absolutely extraordinary amount of time making themselves difficult to agree with. At this point a man could log on and announce that drinking water is beneficial and half the female population would briefly find themselves wondering whether dehydration was actually a good thing.

And can you blame them?

This is, after all, the same demographic that gave us “women expire at 30”, “body count”, “high value males”, and whatever the fuck was going on with bird bath boy. I can bet if a woman posted a photograph of herself holding a cure for cancer, there is a very reasonable chance a chap with a broccoli haircut would reply “still clapped tho” in the comments while he himself looks like a potato that’s been stored in a warm damp shed. I get it. The trust has been eroded.

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But ladies - is this really the hill we want to die on? Of all the available hills in the entire landscape of genuinely appalling male behaviour. This is the one we're planting our flag on? A man saying you don’t need botox and filler?

Because I fear we may have reached a point where we have adopted a blanket policy of disagreeing with men and, much like all blanket policies, it is beginning to produce some less than ideal outcomes. Namely voluntarily enrolling yourself into a cycle that requires you to spend increasing amounts of money, at increasing frequency, to maintain a result that will be out of date in 4 months, sold to you by an industry that has a vested interest in making sure you never feel finished.

And so, in the spirit of my seemingly never ending community service, I have put together a short practical guide. A sense check, if you will. For the next time a man says something and you're not sure whether to tell him to go fuck himself or whether, on this particular occasion, he might have a point.

1. Has the man told you women expire at 30? - Tell him to fuck off.

2. Does the man refer to women as high body count females?- Tell him to fuck off.

3. Has the man ever said that female orgasms represent poor ROI? - Tell your friends, tell his friends and then tell him to fuck off.

4. Has the man ever described himself as a high value male? - Tell him to fuck off before he reaches the word value.

5. Does the man have a profile picture of a leased BMW or a fish and is he telling you you’re chopped? Tell him to fuck off.

6. Has the man said women shouldn’t vote? Tell him to fuck off.

7. Has the man said he would never date a single mother? Tell him to fuck off.

8. Has the man started talking about sexual market value? Large chance you need to tell him to fuck off.

9. Has the man said women should age naturally while only following 4,000 22 year old Instagram models? Tell him to fuck off.

10. Has the man said he thinks you look lovely exactly as you are? Hang on on a minute don’t do anything rash.

11. Has the man said he genuinely doesn’t think you need filler? Maybe don’t tell him to fuck off immediately.

12. Has the man said he likes the fact your face moves when you experience emotions? Potentially hear him out.

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If, however, you have reached the end of this list and you still feel a burning need to do something defiant, might I suggest some alternatives. Acts of rebellion that will cost you significantly less than a clinic appointment and will not require any needles.

You could simply… be slightly annoying back.

You know, low stakes, high enjoyment.

Things like:

• Address all groups as “ladies and sons of ladies.”

• When a man is speaking in a meeting, wait for him to finish, nod thoughtfully, and then say exactly what he just said but slightly differently and take the credit.

• Ask a man if he’s on his period when he seems upset about something.

• Tell a male colleague he’d be more approachable if he smiled more.

• When a man parallel parks, lean out of the window and say “not bad for a man.”

• Ask a man you’ve just met what he does for childcare.

• Refer to a group of men as “the boys” regardless of their ages or professional seniority.

• When a man tells you about his career achievement, say “oh that’s lovely, good for you” in the tone usually reserved for a child who has drawn a picture.

• Ask a man if he’s going to eat all of that.

• Tell him he’d look really pretty if he made a bit more effort.

• Catcall him from a moving vehicle and then drive away.

• When he parallel parks perfectly, say nothing. When he clips the kerb slightly, tell 4 people.

• Ask him his age and then do a little intake of breath.

• Tell him he’s quite funny for a man.

None of these will dismantle anything structural. But neither, unfortunately, will your filler, and these are completely free.

And on that note I'm going to go back to wandering around my semi-detatched house looking like something Time Team unearthed safe in the knowledge that I am doing my small, unglamorous, largely thankless part to ensure that one day my son grows up to be the man your daughter’s TikTok tells her to ignore.

The devil works hard, injectors work harder, but luckily - I work hardest.

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How do I know this? Well, an alpha male told me. On a podcast. Obviously.

You may remember that last month I published a 6 step programme for ‘becoming ugly on purpose’ in order to raise a son who doesn’t describe women as warthogs on the internet. (If you missed it, the gist is that I have committed, for philanthropic reasons, to wandering around my own home looking like I've recently been found in a forest so my son doesn’t become a weasel - thank me later).

Consider this somewhat of a part 2. Same son, new problem! We are, I'm afraid, going deeper.

There I was, once again, doing the thing I do where I open Instagram at a time of day when nothing good has ever come from opening Instagram and there, waiting for me like a figure at the end of a dark hallway, was a clip from a podcast.

“How important is it to you to also make the girl have an orgasm?

“Not important. The amount of extra effort that’s required to do that is just not going to have much ROI. Like, in that 15 minutes, I could set up for my Kick stream. I could take an important phone call. I can literally think of one million better things that's going to make a girl want to be with me long term rather than just a simple fleeting orgasm.”

What followed was less a conversation about sex and more a man accidentally admitting he doesn’t know how to do it while also, somehow, airing the fact that his arse probably smells a bit off. Because the discussion quickly moved from female orgasms being “low ROI” (return on investment for those not familiar with the erotic language of finance) to something they referred to as a “bird bath” - which is apparently where you wash your penis in the sink between women instead of bothering to have an actual shower. A sort of Formula One pit stop if you will - only it’s for men who describe themselves as high value.

I have to say, it’s difficult to maintain the image of yourself as an elite hyper masculine alpha male once you’ve publicly described giving your genitals the same rinse cycle as a coffee mug in an office kitchenette but whatever.

While watching the performance (because that’s always what it is) I couldn’t help but be moved by the whole charade. Watching a man try to reposition “can’t be arsed/don’t know how to make women cum” as a form of masculine excellence rather than what it has historically been understood to mean - which is that a woman somewhere is immediately texting her friends “well that was fucking shit.”

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It wasn’t always like this.

I want to take you back to 2010. I was 17, in a relationship, and had not yet mentioned to my boyfriend that I was a virgin. At the time this felt like important information to withhold because there was a sort of general assumption at that age that everyone else had already done it (they had) and what are you fridged or something?

Anyway, what I remember most clearly about the whole thing is not the event itself but the fact that he tried twice. Not out of enthusiasm, I should clarify, but out of what I later realised was concern. He could tell, with some accuracy, that I was not having a good time and was absolutely determined to fix it. Unfortunately for him I was having a terrible time for reasons entirely unrelated to his technique. I was having a terrible time because I was a virgin and had neglected to mention this. My bad.

When we’d been together a while longer and I eventually got round to telling him that I had in fact been a virgin on that fateful day, he was horrified. Not because of the virginity itself, but because he had spent the entire encounter mentally constructing a scenario in which I must have been extremely sexually experienced and silently benchmarking him against a long list of men with Olympic level sexual performance. He also felt terrible and told me the experience would have been wholly different had he known - again, my bad!

Anyway, why am I telling you this? Well, because I think it’s an example of the prevailing attitude at the time. Men were tormented by the possibility that a woman might not enjoy sex with them. Not because they respected women necessarily - let’s not get carried away! But because being thought of as “shit in bed” was one of the worst things that could happen to a heterosexual man socially.

This was, I want to stress, not an unusually enlightened boyfriend. This was just an 18 year old boy who understood the very basic assignment. Even those who were actually shit in bed did at least understand that they were supposed to try, and if they didn’t think they were supposed to try they still made sure to tell everyone that she loved it.

I offer you, as evidence, my favourite documentary: The Inbetweeners.

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For the uninitiated, The Inbetweeners follows 4 British (I think this is relevant?) teenage boys navigating school, girls, and their own overwhelming sexual incompetence with a level of dignity that can only be described as absolutely none whatsoever. It is, in my opinion, one of the most accurate portrayals of adolescent heterosexuality ever committed to television. I fucking love it.

Take Will McKenzie. Against all conceivable odds, Will manages to sleep with Charlotte Hinchcliffe - the most desired girl in school - and is so comprehensively terrible at the experience that she later publicly bins him off in favour of finding someone who, and I quote, “knows what he’s doing.” This is public because, crucially, humiliation is the point.

Nobody watching is supposed to think “well actually Charlotte should appreciate that Will has a busy schedule and several important calls to make”. The joke only works because everybody instinctively understands that being bad at sex is, for a teenage boy, socially fatal. The entire culture at the time understood this. Heterosexual boys lived under the constant threat that a girl might one day leave their bedroom, immediately log onto MSN Messenger, and annihilate their motion in the ocean to three of her closest friends.

Then there’s Simon Cooper who finally finds himself on the verge of having sex with Carly - an event he has spent approximately 3 academic years emotionally preparing for - only for his parents to barge in beforehand and insist that the bedroom door remain open. We’ve all been there mate.

Anyway, Carly initiates dirty talk and Simon, clearly feeling that he should contribute something sexually commanding in return, panics and blurts out “I’m going to fuck your fucking fanny off you twat!”

Does this sentence make any sense whatsoever? No. Does it sound less like dirty talk and more like a threat shouted across a car park in Croydon? Arguably yes.

But note the ambition! Simon is not saying female pleasure represents poor ROI. He is not explaining that he has a stream to set up. He is, in the only language available to his terrified adolescent nervous system, attempting to communicate that he intends for Carly to have an absolutely earth shattering experience. He is ultimately, however incoherently, promising to absolutely put a shift in.

Again, this isn’t some sexually enlightened feminist, but it is at least an acknowledgement that everyone involved is theoretically supposed to enjoy themselves!

And then, perhaps most importantly of all, there’s Jay Cartwright.

Jay spends three entire series constructing an elaborate fictional sexual history involving Dutch girls, caravans, older women, nightclubs and what feels at times like a concerning volume of activity for a boy whose closest known sexual experience may in fact have involved a vacuum cleaner “sucking him off”. None of it is true, obviously (except for maybe the vacuum cleaner). But what matters is that every single lie goes in exactly the same direction.

Jay never boasts about women leaving disappointed but deeply respectful of his entrepreneurial mindset. He never claims they failed to orgasm but understood he had emails to answer. Quite the opposite. In Jay’s fantasy world women are obsessed with him. They simply cannot get enough. They keep coming back for more. They are gagging for him. His entire invented persona is built around the idea that he is sexually enthralling to encounter.

Even in the overheated imagination of a teenage boy whose understanding of sex has clearly been assembled from Zoo magazine, Lynx Africa and his parents hoover, female pleasure was still understood to be part of the point. That was the flex. Which is why this new genre of masculinity feels so genuinely bizarre to me.

How have we gone from “a woman not enjoying sex with you is humiliating” to “actually, caring whether she enjoys it is beta behaviour!”

The last time I can pinpoint where we were all still on the same page was 2018. DJ Khaled went on The Breakfast Club and announced that he does not perform oral sex on his wife. His reasoning was that he is, wait for it… the king. Kings, he explained, do not do that. His way of showing appreciation is asking how dinner was. He expected it back, naturally. Because, urm… king, remember?

He became the top trending topic in the United States. The entire internet spent about 48 straight hours essentially responding “sorry, you won’t eat pussy but you will shout your own name constantly in songs like you’re terrified of forgetting it?”

Dictionary.com tweeted the definition of “double standard” and tagged him in it. Imagine being so publicly bad at heterosexuality that the dictionary itself clocks in for a shift.

Anyway, the point is he was thoroughly mocked. The entire internet understood instinctively that what he was describing was not a philosophical position but was in fact a man announcing, on a major platform, that he couldn't be bothered and everyone recognised it immediately for what it was.

That was 8 years ago. And now we have a certain genre of man who has stopped thinking that a woman who didn’t enjoy sex with him is the worst possible outcome and has instead started thinking the truly embarrassing thing would be being perceived as trying too hard to make sure that she did.

As both a woman and the mother of a little boy, I find myself increasingly aware that modern parenting now involves an alarming amount of preventative work. It is no longer enough to simply raise a son who says please and thank you and doesn’t call women “mid” while live streaming from a gaming chair that smells a bit like the Curry flavoured Pot Noodle. Apparently we must now also intervene before they grow into men who think female pleasure is a poor use of company resources?

Mothers are already stretched thin.

As we established earlier, I’m already mid way through one long term educational initiative designed to ensure my son understands that women are human beings rather than decorative creatures who wake up looking like they’ve been run through FaceTune. Surely I cannot also be expected to tackle whatever ideological movement has convinced men that rinsing their dick in a downstairs sink before opening a Kick stream is aspirational masculinity? There are only so many fronts on which one woman can fight.

Still, in the spirit of community service, I have decided to help. And so, for the benefit of mothers everywhere, I have prepared a template letter to be slipped under your son’s bedroom door at the first sign of podcast related deterioration. I beg you, use it wisely.

Anyway. That’s my contribution to modern parenting discourse.

Not to sound dramatic, but I do think if you’d explained any of this to the suffragettes after they’d chained themselves to railings and thrown themselves under horses they’d have been absolutely raging. “We fought for THIS?” etc.

Still. We persist.

Because despite what certain corners of the internet would have young men believe, there is actually nothing weak or humiliating about caring about whether another human being had a nice time - during sex or otherwise. In fact, as far as the concept of life goes - this is more or less the entire point.

I can tell you the exact moment I knew. Or at least the moment my mother said she knew I’d be able to. It was during a charity walk around London when my aforementioned mother, suddenly and without warning, shit herself behind a tree in Queen’s Park.

I should probably explain.

This week marks 13 years since one of the more traumatic nights of my life. It was a 26.2 mile charity walk around London. So, not war, but close.

It was called the Moonwalk - an overnight marathon walk through the city in decorated bras, raising money for breast cancer charities. The sort of event that sounds slightly whimsical when described in daylight and deeply unhinged once you’re actually standing in Battersea Power Station at 10pm in the rain wondering why you didn’t just donate online like a normal person.

I made the diabolical decision to partake in this torture with my mother and my sister - a trio of women who could generously be described as intrepid explorers, and perhaps less generously, 3 people out of their minds. My mother had done this multiple times before. She’d also previously run the actual London Marathon twice and would, in her day, casually take herself out for a nice 13 mile run (what the fuck?)

I on the other hand was a recreational runner at best. I could just about manage a 10k. I therefore concluded, with absolute confidence, that walking 26.2 miles would be fine. It is, after all, just walking.

This was my first mistake.

The second was underestimating quite how psychologically damaging Battersea Power Station is as a place to begin anything endurance related. Previous Moonwalks had started on Clapham Common. Grass, trees, wide open space - you know - something that could reasonably give you the illusion that you were about to embark on something wholesome and life affirming.

Not for us! Oh no. Ours began in what felt like the concrete foyer to hell. There is something quite strange about standing outside Battersea Power Station at 10 o’clock at night in the pissing rain, dressed as a sort of fluorescent bra based woodland creature, trying to convince yourself you are “excited” to voluntarily walk a marathon with your tits out. Nothing about the surroundings suggested optimism, or movement, or even joy. It looked less like the beginning of a charity event and more like we were being processed in District 12.

Still, morale was high! Thousands of women milled around in elaborately decorated bras and tutus. I can describe the atmosphere as a bit like your nan’s hen do in Blackpool - just with fewer willy shaped paraphernalia.

While we waited for our numbers to be called to the start line we trotted around with the buoyant confidence of people who had not yet suffered.

We would lose that quickly…

At first, it genuinely did feel fun. Despite being damp and starving, there was something deeply unifying about it all. Everyone in the same boat, women of all ages marching through central London in the middle of the night dressed like a very sparkly militia.

For the first few miles, we were flying. And by “flying” I mean walking at a pace that suggested we still absolutely misunderstood the scale of what we were doing. Walking, blissfully unaware that we were currently in what I now recognise as the “latent phase” of the evening. At that stage the night still felt manageable. Difficult, obviously, but manageable. Like early labour, really - the point where people are still texting updates and bouncing on yoga balls and having little snacks and they think ahhh this is alright actually I am bossing this!

A dangerous level of confidence because eventually - in both labour and endurance events - shit very often hits the fan.

I’d say things started to unravel around Mile 10.

That was when my mother shit herself in Queen’s Park.

If you’ve ever been around someone moments before a genuine gastrointestinal emergency, you’ll know about the change in energy. One minute we were chatting away normally, the next my mother had gone very quiet and was wearing the exact expression Lillian has in Bridesmaids right before she shits herself in the middle of the road in a wedding dress.

“You alright?” we asked cautiously.

“No” she replied instantly. “I need the toilet”.

No biggie, we’ll just go to the next set of loos. We’d passed some not that long ago. “Shall we turn back?” we asked - the signs of two fabulous daughters offering to add yet MORE milage onto an already torturous amount of mileage. “There’s no time” my mother said, in the sort of voice you hear on horror films when the zombies are about to break through the barrier.

And then - without warning - she broke away from the route and started speed walking towards Queen’s Park.

“There’s no toilets that way!” we shouted after her as she ducked under the railings into the park.

“It’s too late!” she said. Suddenly me and my sister had the exact same realisation as Annie in Bridesmaids watching Lillian squat in the middle of the street.

Oh my God. She’s really doing it. She’s shitting in the street Queen’s Park.

My mother turned back briefly and looked at us with panicked eyes - “It’s happening” she said.

And then she disappeared behind a tree that had stood proudly in Queen’s Park for hundreds of years without ever having been forced to witness a middle aged woman explosively shitting herself beneath it at midnight during a sponsored walk.

There are some moments in life where your relationship with another person changes forever. One is giving birth to your child and the other is wrapping a foil space blanket around your mother’s arse in Queen’s Park at midnight during a charity walk.

And then, because we are not quitters, we continued.

You would think that after one public shitting incident the night might settle down a bit.

It did not.

By Mile 11 I had developed what I later discovered was a trapped nerve. Suddenly I couldn’t walk properly without severe shooting pain going down my leg. The only way I could move at all was with my right foot turned almost completely sideways like I was attempting to moonwalk the Moonwalk.

Meanwhile, my mother continued to intermittently shit herself around London. Not continuously - not enough to stop. Just enough to ensure none of us could ever properly relax.

At one point we finally found toilets and stood in the queue trying to act normal while people around us started commenting that it “smelled a bit like shit”. One woman quite literally said “has someone trodden in dog poo?”

Me and my sister stood there refusing to make eye contact with each other while my mother clutched her foil blanket around herself like a woman trying to smuggle a terrible secret through customs.

Later, while we were walking along the Thames, two women passed us and loudly commented on the smell of the river. “The Thames absolutely stinks round here”. Me and my sister immediately hissed at my mother to pull the blanket tighter because she was, for want of a better word, wafting.

And somehow, despite all this, we carried on walking.

By this point, the three of us had stopped speaking in full sentences. Conversation had reduced itself almost entirely to updates on pain, distance and bowel activity.

And now we had a bigger problem. You see, the issue with walking through London overnight is that eventually the rest of society starts waking up around you. Dog walkers appeared. Cyclists. Early risers clutching coffees. Meanwhile the three of us were shambling through the city looking like we’d survived some sort of low budget disaster film.

And then came the underpass.

By now my mother had developed an almost animal instinct for locating places to urgently disappear. Without much warning she suddenly veered off again and vanished down into an underpass while me and my sister remained at the top waiting for her like two deeply exhausted nightclub bouncers.

Some time passed… And then we saw them.

An elderly couple emerging from the same underpass our mother had a short time earlier disappeared into. Not just any elderly couple either. The sort of old rich London couple who look like they might be related to the royal family. Who wear long coats and sensible shoes and probably say things like “Gerald dear, shall we walk by the river before breakfast?” Me and my sister looked at each other in absolute horror. Because we knew.

We knew these poor people had just innocently wandered into an underpass at 7am and been confronted by our mother somewhere in the darkness catastrophically shitting herself against a wall. I don’t know who was more traumatised honestly.

When my mother eventually reappeared she could barely make eye contact. And then she casually informed us that a volunteer had also come down there to “check she was alright”.

“What did you SAY?” we asked horrified.

“I told him ‘you don’t need to see this’” she replied.

Which, considering she was at that point apparently having to practically scoot herself along the floor like a dog with worms, feels fair enough really.

Unfortunately for all involved, this would not be the last time we saw him.

By this point my trapped nerve had become genuinely unbearable. At some point after sunrise we stopped on one of the bridges because I was having what can only really be described as a full blown panic attack. I was crying, exhausted, in agony and absolutely convinced I could not physically continue. My mother, despite having spent the last several hours intermittently shitting herself around London, was still doing what mothers do best - comforting me.

“We can stop if you need to - it doesn’t matter if we don’t finish”.

And then, out of nowhere, a man approached to ask if we were alright. I saw my mother’s face immediately change - a sheepish recognition. She later informed us that it was him… The underpass volunteer.

The poor man looked at my mother. My mother looked at him.

It was one of the most painfully British interactions I’ve ever witnessed. Nobody mentioned the underpass. Nobody mentioned the scooting. Nobody mentioned the hideous bowel transgression that had brought them together in the first place. They both just sort of looked at each other like ah, you again and then carried on pretending this was all perfectly normal.

Anyway. We did eventually finish after what felt like roughly 19 years. I remember the sheer devastation of reaching Mile 26 only to realise there was still another .2 left to go. Whoever added that .2 to marathons - well, you are satanic.

My dad had been waiting for us for hours by the end because we were so catastrophically behind schedule. As we climbed into the car we immediately announced “Mum’s shit herself” which I suppose is better than one of us having died on route.

He didn’t believe us.

Not until we had to drive all the way home with the windows down.

So that’s the story of one of the more traumatic nights of my life. And I suppose the question is why I’ve just told you all of this. Why I’ve publicly aired my mother’s dirty laundry (literally).

The answer is that I've been having one of those patches lately where there’s nothing left in the tank and you’re convinced you're doing everything wrong, and you’re spinning all the plates, and my god is it supposed to feel this hard?

And then this week was the anniversary of that fateful night. And while my mum, my sister and I were reminiscing in the group chat it dawned on me that it is the most accidentally accurate metaphor for motherhood that has ever existed.

You sign up with complete confidence because how hard can it be, it’s just walking, other people do this, you’ll be fine. And for a while you are - more than fine actually, you’re flying! You’re having little snacks and you’re bouncing along thinking I am absolutely bossing this. And then somewhere around mile 10 it all feels really hard in ways you didn’t see coming and wouldn’t have believed if someone had warned you. You lose the ability to form full sentences. Everything reduces to updates on pain and distance and MY GOD how long until bedtime? At some point you are standing on a bridge at sunrise crying, absolutely certain you have nothing left, that you cannot take another step, that the version of you who thought this was a good idea was a different, more optimistic, very stupid person.

And then you take another step. And then another. And then another. You keep taking steps one after another because there are people around you who need you to keep walking and so you do, and somewhere in the doing of it you discover that you can.

And I think the reason this story has stayed with me for 13 years isn’t actually because my mother shit herself around central London dressed as a sparkly leopard (though of course that’s definitely part of it!) It’s because even while she herself was having an objectively catastrophic time, she was still doing what mothers do best - comforting everybody else. And years later, when I became a mother myself, I finally understood what she meant when she told me “If you can do this, you’ll be fine in childbirth”.

Although actually, now I think about it, childbirth was the easy bit!

Motherhood is the real endurance event.

And if you're currently somewhere around mile ten, crying on a bridge absolutely convinced you cannot take another step - you can. I have it on very good authority. She was covered in shit at the time, but she was right.

Sending love <3

P.s. This story was shared with my mother’s full blessing. We have laughed about this many a time around many a dinner table. Consider yourself part of the fold! Also, to the best of my knowledge, she has not shit herself in public since. Hurrah!

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The first one is ugly but hilarious. The second one is beautiful but boring. The third one is both beautiful and funny.

This is not supposed to happen.

There are rules and she is breaking them.

You get the face or you get the personality. You get the cheekbones or you get the punchline. You do not get both!

The universe, in all of its infinite wisdom, does not simply hand the two out to the same person - that would be chaos! It would be unfair! It would make the whole system completely impossible to navigate and some men would have absolutely nothing to say at parties!

Every so often, someone says out loud a version of this theory that has been floating around for years - that women are either funny because they are ugly, or beautiful and lobotomised.

This time it was David Haye.

For those not in the know… Allow me…

David Haye is a former heavyweight boxing champion who recently appeared on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here South Africa - a show in which a group of celebrities are deposited into the wilderness and invited to eat things like donkey dick in exchange for public sympathy and a brief career renaissance. David spent several weeks being largely unpleasant to an Emmerdale actor and, in his quieter moments, developing theories about women.

It was during one of these quieter moments that the campmates got to chatting about their loved ones back home. Sinitta (Simon Cowell’s ex? and So Macho extraordinare) noted that David’s girlfriend sounded, in her words, “drop dead gorgeous.” David agreed enthusiastically. She’s lovely! he said. Cooks for 60 people. Garden parties in Costa Rica. The full package.

He could have left it there (thankfully he didn’t because now I can write an article about it!) but instead continued by paying his girlfriend what he clearly believed to be the highest possible compliment by saying that she has, and I quote:

“The personality of a proper ugly bird”.

The camp, to their credit, did not receive this well. But David, undeterred, pressed on.

His theory is one I’m sure you’ve heard before and it goes like this:

Pretty girls don’t need personality because the world hands them everything. They grow up being told they’re amazing, every door opens for them, and they never have to try. Ugly girls, on the other hand, have to work for it. They have to banter. They have to tell jokes. They have to ask if they can get you a drink. They have to make themselves useful in ways that have nothing to do with their face, because their face is, quite frankly, grim?

Women (like his girlfriend) who get both the looks and the personality are few and far between, but David, ever the philosopher, has a name for it - the ugly duckling syndrome. AKA girls who start out plain, grow into their looks, but retain the personality they developed during their less aesthetically blessed years.

For those who enjoy a front row seat to a man digging his own grave in real time you can watch here:

His girlfriend, by this logic, is the jackpot. She is the anomaly - a double win if you will. A happy accident!

The idea that less conventionally attractive women sometimes develop humour as a response to how the world receives them is not exactly a new observation. There is a whole film genre built around it and there is even a Maddie Zahm song called Fat Funny Friend which means it must be true?

But the obvious problem with this theory, aside from the fact it sounds like something developed over four pints by a man named Gaz who refers to women as “birds”, is that it assumes the only audience women are ever performing for is men.

The ugly girl becomes funny to attract men. The beautiful girl stays boring because men already reward her for existing. Men are positioned as the judges in both directions.

But most women I know are not actually structuring their personalities around whether random men fancy them. That doesn’t mean they’re not trying to be liked - they are. But, in my experience, they’re not trying that hard to be liked by men - they’re trying to be liked by other women.

It goes without saying that I don’t agree that women who are both attractive and good to be around are rare. Just like I don’t agree that being fugly automatically means you’re going to be the life and soul of the party.

People are, generally speaking, not sorted into personality categories by their bone structure. There are boring ugly people and hilarious ugly people. There are stunning people who are vacuous and dull and stunning people who are the funniest person in any room they walk into. Personality is, it turns out, quite complicated.

But the way people respond to your appearance does shape the social behaviours you develop in response. Because being considered attractive does not exempt you from social consequences. If anything, sometimes it just gives you different ones.

Which begs the question: what if the women who get both the face and the banter are not anomalies who have developed this because they used to be ugly? What if they also developed humour, self awareness or social softness because they learned very early that attractiveness is not a neutral state to move through the world in. It is not simply a thing you have that makes life easier (though of course there are many instances in which it does).

But being attractive is also something people have strong feelings about, and girls learn very early which kinds of women are easy to like, which ones feel threatening, and how quickly the mood can turn on anyone perceived to be a bit too aware of their own appeal.

Let’s go back to David’s analysis of the girl who is pretty from day one, shall we? “Everyone goes ‘you’re so beautiful, so amazing’” he says. “She grows up thinking I’m amazing, everyone loves me, I can open any door I want.”

This theory imagines a pretty girl floating through life on a cloud of compliments, every door swinging open, and nobody asking anything of her in return. And of course there are girls like this. We have all met them and, if we’re honest, we’re all fucking terrified of them. They’re often the queen bee. The one who clocked her own power early and decided to use it to maintain her spot at the top of the social hierarchy rather than do anything even remotely good with it like, you know, being nice?

But what this theory seems to miss is that social hierarchies among girls are rarely organised around simply “pretty” and “ugly”. They are more complicated than that.

The girl most likely to attract scrutiny is not usually the one everyone has already dismissed. It is the girl perceived to be socially threatening in some way - prettier, more confident, more attention grabbing, more liked, or simply a bit too comfortable occupying space.

Let’s use my favourite documentary - Mean Girls - as an example.

The Plastics did not police ugliness. They policed attractiveness. Who had it, how much, and whether you were allowed to know it. You could be pretty - but only on their terms. You could be liked - but only up to a point. And the fastest way to become a target was to accept a compliment without immediately undermining it.

And if you need a more recent example of exactly this dynamic playing out in real time, allow me to present a TikTok I saw recently.

A woman made a video talking about how being pretty in public can feel intimidating. How there’s a low level awareness of being looked at and of being noticed. Of being visible in a way that feels uncomfortable. A fairly mild observation, you might think.

The comments were exactly as I imagined:

You are allowed to be attractive. You are not, under any circumstances, allowed to know it. And if you do know it, and worse, if you have the audacity to say it out loud without a self deprecating disclaimer attached, you will be reprimanded.

So what does a girl learn from this? She learns that being attractive is something you are allowed to be, but under certain conditions. Only if you take the edge off. Only if you make yourself easy enough to be around that nobody feels the need to bring you down a peg.

And one of the most effective ways of doing that, it turns out, is being funny.

I have, as it happens, written about this in some detail before - a whole piece about my deep and longstanding terror of groups of women that I will link here for anyone who wants the full and frankly quite bleak picture.

I should probably clarify at this point that I am not about to launch into some tragic monologue about the burden of being devastatingly attractive. I spent most of my teenage years with three layers of Dream Matte Mousse on my face and my hair straightened to within an inch of its life so that I resembled a low budget remake of the girl from The Ring.

But I also know I was visible enough, appearance wise, for people to make assumptions about me before they knew literally anything else about me.

At school, older girls on the bus would ask, with suspicious casualness, whether I was wearing hairspray. Unfortunately, this was less of a beauty enquiry and more of a flammability assessment before they instructed the boys to flick lit matches at my head. Quite the party trick!

I was called a slut in corridors with alarming regularity despite having kissed, at that point, precisely one boy. I was called stuck up, which I can only assume is what happens when you stop making eye contact in corridors after your 11837th time of being called a slut. I was once nearly beaten up at a village fair by a group of girls from my year, from which I escaped by discovering I could run quite fast.

At university, friends who later became some of my closest told me they had assumed I’d be a bitch before they met me.

And I once sat in a sushi restaurant and overheard a conversation between a man and a woman about how I, quote, “looked good”, which ended with the woman’s verdict which was - yeah, but too much makeup.

None of these people knew me. They were responding to whatever assumptions they had already attached to what I looked like.

And so I became funny. Or at least I think so. Not because I was compensating for anything in particular, but because I could feel from quite a young age that being perceived a certain way made people treat you in ways you didn’t always like. And funny, it turned out, was one of the quickest ways to soften whatever assumptions people had already made about me before I’d even opened my mouth.

I am, to this day, extremely silly around people I don’t know well. I make myself the punchline before anyone else can. I laugh first and loudest at myself. I have spent a lot of my adult life pre-empting whatever impression I might otherwise be making.

And this, I think, is what David Haye and theories like this miss entirely.

Humour is not always compensation for failing to attract men. Sometimes it is social camouflage. A way of making yourself easier to approach, easier to like, less threatening, and less easily dismissed as arrogant or cold or “too much”.

We talk endlessly about the male gaze - about women shrinking and softening and reshaping themselves to be palatable for male consumption. As though everything a woman does is either for male approval or in response to male rejection.

But so much of what actually shapes how women move through the world - how funny they are, how self deprecating, how careful not to take up too much space, whether they are allowed to be pretty and smart and funny and successful all at once without being burned for it - doesn’t actually come from men - it comes from other women.

It's easy to look at David Haye and men like him - men who have, by the look of things, spent a lot of time at the gym and considerably less time thinking - and write this off as just another outdated sexist trope that we roll our eyes at and move on from.

But pretending that how you look has no bearing on how you move through the world is its own kind of fiction. And pretending that only the women who didn’t “win” whatever imaginary scale he’s working from spend their lives managing how they are received is, frankly, one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves.

Because the “ugly bird” who learned to be funny so people would overlook her face and the “beautiful woman” who learned to be funny so people wouldn’t be threatened by it end up in a similar place doing a similar thing.

They learn to adjust.

They become funny, or self aware, or easy to be around. They learn how to take the edge off whatever quality the world has decided they have too much of.

And that adjustment is not reserved for “ugly birds” while beautiful women drift through life untouched. Most women, regardless of where they land, learn sooner or later that being visibly anything comes with consequences.

Too pretty and you risk being dismissed as vain. Too smart and you risk being unlikeable. Too confident and somebody eventually decides you need taking down a peg. So you soften it. You make yourself funny. You become self aware enough for everyone else to relax.

Which tells you that this was never really about compensation for ugliness. It’s just what it takes to move through the world as a woman.

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Edit: I want to make clear that my sister is completely and utterly supportive of my decision not to go and has never once made me feel guilty about it. Any comments that attempt to paint her negatively will be deleted.

I’m not going on my sister’s hen do.

Even writing that feels like I’ve just admitted to kicking puppies or leaving an empty chocolate wrapper in the fridge so someone gets excited about there being a delicious late night treat before realising there isn’t any. It feels like I should follow it up with but I love her I really do just so you know I’m not a monster. Because only a monster would miss out on something as once in a lifetime as a sister’s hen do.

I imagine myself writing in those ‘Am I The Asshole?’ forums.

“I (33F) am not going on my sister’s (29F) hen do. The hen do is abroad. A few days. Flights, hotels, dinners, drinks, dancing, the whole thing. It’s going to be a lot of fun and I know she’d love for me to be there. But I have a 3 year old son and I don’t want to leave him. I could list the practicalities to make myself sound more reasonable - the logistics, the cost, the sleep situation (did I mention we sleep together?), the fact he still reaches for me in the night. I could dress it all up in sensible language, but if I’m honest, the core of it is much simpler and much less defensible. I just don’t want to be away from him for that long and I don’t feel comfortable being that far away from him. So the only question left for me to ask is, AITA?”

Before getting a flurry of responses like:

(Fuck, writing that felt like I was bullying myself!)

Of course no one (except one) has ever actually said anything like this to me explicitly, but I’ve been swimming in a sea of content that tells me, in a roundabout way, that by choosing not to go on a trip like this that I am not doing life quite right. The hen do abroad and mums on tour content is a whole genre and every time it crosses my feed I feel like I'm being handed a mirror I didn't ask for and told to have a good hard look at myself.

Couple that with the sister thing - and not just the sister thing but the big sister thing - the history laden, memory soaked, she was my first baby before I had an actual baby thing - and then add in the little sister getting married thing, which comes with its own kind of emotionally charged ideals about how you’re supposed to do things - and you’ve got yourself a pretty heady concoction.

One that screams in your ears with alarming regularity that you are a shit person, a shit friend, and an even shitter sister.

It would be easier, cleaner, more straightforward to say that there is no part of me that wants to go. That I am simply above the whole thing. But that’s not true. Tell any mother she can have four days completely responsibility free, with ice cold drinks with little umbrellas that make her head feel like it's emptied its contents all over the floor and she'll probably say well shiver me timbers, slap my arse and call me sally - where the fuck do I sign up?

I am, despite what you may think, not a masochist. I do like a good time. I love a drink or two or three or ten and I love being amongst good company. Especially outside and in the sun. There is absolutely nothing like a British beer garden in summer and I will not be persuaded otherwise. The problem is, my sister is not having her hen do in a British beer garden in the summer. She is having her hen do in a place that requires flights. I’m not sure why she couldn’t have just opted for a light, culturally rich itinerary of day time pub crawls in Blackpool over four days in Ibiza but apparently she’s not a cock straw kind of person. Her loss?

Anyway, given that I have a child, the flying to another country is out of the question for me. And while for many this is not a deal breaker, for me, right now, it is.

Part of me would love to be the mum who hops on a flight without a second thought. But I would not be this person. And I know you think I’m going to say that I’d be inconsolable and crying with worry the entire time, but that’s not what I’m going to say.

I would be inconsolable and crying with worry for the first hour, that much is true. I would check my phone every four minutes until somewhere around drink three when I would overcorrect so dramatically in the other direction that I would forget I had a child at all and end up doing karate in a hotel corridor at 2am.

I am, to expose myself, extremely Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids. There is no other way to describe it. I am her, in all aspects. Which means my sister's hen do would essentially become a situation where she spends half of it talking me down after I’d drunk 17 gallons of Bloody Mary and the other half talking me up after the booze had worn off and I remembered I had a child at home who I missed - which, if we’re being really honest with ourselves, doesn’t sound fun for anyone - least of all my sister.

But that's not why I'm not going. I'm not staying home because I don't trust myself with a free bar (though, now you mention it). I'm staying at home because, as I said in the imaginary AITA forum, I don't want to leave my son. Which I know, is an extremely untrendy thing to say. But it is, I am unashamed to say, the truth.

I have always followed my son's lead. Breastfeeding and cosleeping are the big two - hence us being three years in with no signs of stopping on either front. I remember his nursery settle sessions, reeling off what felt like a list of admissions. “We cosleep”. “He's fed to sleep”. “He's exclusively breastfed and won't take milk from a bottle”. While other children arrived having been sleep trained and bottle fed, I was sending a child who only took the breast and slept cocooned in his mother's arms.

I remember berating myself in the months leading up to him starting. I felt like a shit mother for not having prepared him properly for the world outside of me. You stupid cow, look what you’ve done I’d think. As if I should have been cutting him off preemptively. Putting barriers in place that neither of us wanted just because I was going back to work.

I can't say with certainty that these things won’t eventually be halted by me rather than by him. But I can tell you with glaring certainty that they won't be halted by a holiday. Even one for my sister, no matter how terrible that makes me sound.

Because to go would mean putting in place boundaries I don't currently have and drawing lines I don't currently draw. It would mean, in the weeks before I left, deliberately unwinding some of the things we have built together over the last three milk soaked, cuddle bug years. Stopping feeds, getting him used to falling asleep without me, not being there to settle him at night - none of which I have ever asked of him. Things that are, essentially, practising my absence.

And people do this. Of course they do. All the time. The trouble with writing about this is that it's almost impossible to do it without it sounding like a comment on the mothers who are completely fine with going. Who feel the fear and do it anyway, as people love to say, as though staying is just a failure of nerve rather than a choice. My staying and my writing about this now is not meant as a judgement on those who choose differently but as an acknowledgement that, at this exact point in time, it doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

Going would feel like I was trying on someone else’s coat and insisting it fits because technically, it does, but it doesn’t feel like mine when I move in it and it chafes and makes me uncomfy.

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I know there are people reading this thinking that’s just called parenting, that children are adaptable, that he would adjust. Others who are thinking see, this is exactly why you should sleep train, this is why you should have introduced a bottle from early on, you’ve made a rod for your own back and now you can’t even get drunk on a boat!

To that I say, even if he slept in his own bed and took a bottle and had never once fed to sleep and was, essentially, a very small and extremely independent flatmate who simply happened to share my surname - I still wouldn’t want to leave him. Because he is still, regardless of what some may think about a three year old being practically mortgage ready, so small.

And there would be a moment at some point over those four days where he hurt himself or got scared or just wanted me the way that three year olds want their mothers, suddenly and completely and without warning. And I wouldn’t be there. And I can’t help that when I’m at work and he’s at nursery. But I can help it now. And so I am.

That is my choice. But making a choice doesn’t always mean it is easy - even when you know it is the right one for you.

If you’d told me growing up that my sister would one day get engaged, plan a hen do, and that I wouldn’t be there, I would have looked at you like you’d just suggested something truly unhinged. The hen do, the wedding, all of it - these things exist in your imagination from the moment you have a little sister. They are there in the distance like fixed points. Of course I’d be there. Obviously I’d be there. Where else would I be?

I was the archetypal big sister. I’d lock her in wardrobes to prevent her from annoying me and my friends, force her to sit through endless games of me playing teacher on school inset days (lol, poor sod), forbid her from wearing my clothes, and spend many an evening bursting into her room to perform what, in hindsight, looked like a ketamine fuelled Marina and the Diamonds–Panic! at the Disco hybrid. Hating her one minute, adoring her the next, and instantly declaring fuck that bitch to anyone who dared upset her. You know, normal sister stuff.

And yet here we are.

But no part of me feels like I am making the wrong choice. And part of knowing that is knowing that there are ways I can celebrate her that don't require me to be somewhere that feels fundamentally at odds with how I choose to parent right now.

Just last weekend, I organised a surprise afternoon tea for her with her friends, our mum and her soon to be mother in law - all people she loves, and a variety of whom will not be on her hen do. I thought about what she would love, and more importantly, who she loves. I thought about what would make her feel seen and loved and celebrated and I made it happen. And the two of us, with our mum and my son, are doing our own version of a hen do - a little UK staycation, just us, later in the summer. I may even source some cock straws! My son’s first girls trip!

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I don’t know much, but I do know this.

We are told in ways both loud and quiet, big and small, that the way you prove yourself to the people you love is by showing up to the big things. The milestone events. The ones that cost a lot and happen once and get photographed extensively. The ones where you are on a boat in the Mediterranean and the light is golden and everyone is laughing and it looks, from the outside, like the truest expression of love and friendship there is.

But those are the easy bits.

Being a sister doesn’t look like that most of the time.

For me, it looked like hovering at the top of the stairs while my grandparents bathed her when she was just days old because she had started to cry, having declared just moments before that I was going downstairs to look after my dolly. (I know this happened because I’ve seen it on old VCR footage.) It looked like a 4 year old girl not wanting to move another inch because she could hear her baby sister upset and felt an instinctual pull to protect her.

It looked like opening her Christmas and birthday presents before she could get to them herself because I was so desperate to see her face when she did that I couldn't wait for her to actually get there. Tearing through the wrapping on her behalf and then getting told off for it because hello? they’re not yours, Jennie?

It looked like hating every girl who was ever cruel to her at school with a ferocity that was probably disproportionate but absolutely non negotiable in my mind.

It looked like getting a train home from university when she had her first heartbreak, and having her come and stay with me in halls when she needed to be somewhere else for a while so I could ply her with Pimms on Brighton seafront.

It has looked like biting my tongue on certain things and not biting it on others, and knowing, most of the time, which is which.

It will look like walking her down the aisle on her actual wedding day because she has asked me to.

And after that I imagine it looking like being there when she’s pregnant and frightened and googling things at 3am that she shouldn’t be googling. I imagine watching her become a mother and recognising her in it and telling her she’s doing brilliantly even on the days she doesn’t believe it. I imagine our children growing up knowing each other, being annoying to each other, loving each other in the way that only cousins who have been around each other their whole lives can.

I imagine watching our parents get older together. Being the only two people in the world watching the same thing, who have the same history, who will catch each other’s eye across a room and not need to say anything at all.

I imagine all the ordinary stuff that never gets a sash or a grazing board but is, in the end, the whole point.

Because life is not the sum total of the events you showed up to. It is not a highlight reel of the hen dos and the weddings and the milestone birthdays and the trips that got photographed from a boat.

Long before I was a mother I missed things. Everyone does. A birthday you couldn't make. A night out you said no to because you were tired or you hadn’t been paid or you were just not feeling it. And nobody sat you down and told you that your relationships were over. Life continued. The people who mattered stayed because the people who matter know that showing up is not one single act performed on one single occasion. It is everything else and all the times in between.

Life has seasons. It has chapters where things that were once easy or automatic close for a while, and other things open up in their place. Learning to tell the difference between a door that is closed forever and one that is just closed for now is one of the greatest lessons of motherhood.

So. To answer my own question.

No. You are not the asshole. You are a mother in a season of her life where your child needs you more than your sister does. You are someone being pulled by a thread so strong that fighting it would cost more than it's worth. You are not boring. You are not weak. You are not someone who has lost herself. You are just someone who knows, right now, where she belongs.

And one day - when the babies are bigger and the nights are yours again and the thread has loosened just enough - you will take the trip. And the drinks will be cold and the air will be warm and the sun will sit on your shoulders like it's been waiting for you. You will laugh laughter that rises from somewhere deep and surprising and you will stay up too late and sleep in too long and not feel guilty about either. You will sit without bracing, move without anticipating, and stay without calculating when you need to leave.

And across the table your sister will catch your eye, and it will feel, as it always does, like no time has passed at all.

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They didn’t mean to do this of course. They just meant to sell vitamins. But between the treadmill footage and the bit about discipline, they made a catastrophic error, which was to ask out loud how a man does it all with three kids and, worse still, to serve that question to… a woman.

Me.

I have to assume I was not the target demographic for the ad that landed in my feed that morning. The target demographic, I suspect, does not already know the answer to the question “how the hell has Spencer done this with three kids?!” The target demographic has perhaps never had to know the answer to anything much at all aside from “what’s for dinner, love?”

I am a woman and a mother, which means I knew the answer to the question before it had even finished being asked… And the answer, as any mother who has ever tried to leave the house alone for longer than forty minutes will tell you, is not a vitamin.

It’s a wife. (And in this specific case, also being a multimillionaire).

Behold, the ad in question:

I have watched this many times now. It does not get less funny.

The man asking “how the hell has Spencer Matthews done this with three kids” in the way that someone who has genuinely never considered the question before is, I think, my favourite part. He sounds like he’s cracked the Enigma code. He is genuinely astonished. He has looked at Spencer Matthews and experienced what can only be described as awe. He needs answers. He has questions. He went looking for them on the internet and he found a vitamin.

Then there’s Spencer himself. “Hi, I’m Spencer Matthews, I’m a founder and a father…” In that order. I’m not saying this is a confession, I’m just saying it’s a very specific order in which to introduce yourself and that his daily schedule probably reflects it.

“I have the energy of a 20 year old.” Spencer Matthews is 37. It is, I will grant you, impressive to have retained this. It is less impressive once you know how.

And boy do I know how.

It’s Vogue. And it’s being a multimillionaire. But mostly it’s Vogue.

Vogue Williams, AKA his wife.

While Spencer - who is, for those not in the know, a Matthews in the “we own Eden Rock” sense, whose brother James is married to Pippa Middleton, which makes him connected to the Crown by a surprisingly short series of steps, and whose family does not, as a rule, have to think very hard about the cost of much at all - that Spencer Matthews - well, while he was was completing 30 marathons in 30 days across the Jordanian desert, Vogue was at home with their three children under six, being, we have to assume, the main reason he could actually leave home for a month and run said 30 marathons in 30 days across the Jordanian desert.

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While watching this very well thought out and not at all easy pickings ad I waited with bated breath for the part where they answered “how the hell has Spencer Matthews done this with three kids?!” with the only honest answer there is - “HIS WIFE”.

Instead, I was left feeling like I had accidentally been included in a conversation that wasn’t meant for me… Because there I was being asked to consider how a man has managed to run multiple ultra-marathons, build businesses, and maintain a physique that suggests he’s been through the Walkers crisp packet in the oven phase of early 2000s childhood (shredded!), while also having three children.

Like there is not a very obvious answer…

I, of course, don't know the Matthews-Williams household. I am not in those circles. In my circles, the big physical challenge is trying to find a window to take the dog out in amongst the working day, the washing, and getting dinner on the table, and the paid help is nursery, because I was not, as it turns out, made in Chelsea. (For our American readers for whom Made in Chelsea is apparently blocked? Made in Chelsea is a reality TV show in which Spencer Matthews starred - essentially Southern Charm but British and with worse weather. Spencer was the sort of the lovable villain. He was also, it turns out, actually rich - not reality TV rich, but "the family owns a resort in St Barths that costs $100,000 a week to rent" rich).

But while I don’t know the couple personally, what I can tell you with probable certainty is that Vogue Williams is likely a big part of the reason the whole operation is kept running while Spencer is running ultra marathons in deserts for months on end. Someone was keeping the children alive while Spencer was in Jordan. I’m not saying for certain that it was Vogue - I’m just saying it wasn’t Spencer.

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This is not a Spencer Matthews problem. Spencer Matthews is just the face of an ad. The ad is the problem. Or rather, the ad is a very shiny symptom of something much older and significantly more annoying, which is the habit of marvelling at men who do impressive things without ever asking who is holding everything else together while they do them.

Which, once you start noticing it, is everywhere. Including in comments left by women called Becky:

In fact, if you leave the advert and go directly to the Heights website - which I did, because I like to fully immerse myself in a problem - you’ll find a section called “what our customers say”. And by “customers” I mean Spencer Matthews and, crucially, Vogue Williams.

Spencer’s reads as follows:

“I feel like I’ve found a very simple solution that keeps me energised and balanced, and ready to tackle whatever the day brings. I know I’m giving my body everything it needs so I can perform at my best, day-in-day-out.”

He is, as luck would have it, shirtless, and in, you guessed it, the desert!

Spencer’s words are, you’ll notice, a statement about output. Energy, performance, and the ability to meet the day head on, presumably while the day is already largely under control.

Vogue’s, on the other hand, reads:

“As a busy mum, I’m always keeping my eyes peeled for good-value ways to look after myself and my family… it’s so easy, and helps me be my best self.”

Which is, again you’ll notice, a statement about maintenance. Looking after, keeping things going.

Same product, same website, same household, completely different job descriptions. His is about maximising what he can do. Hers is about making sure everything - including him, one assumes - continues to function. He is performing at his best. She is keeping her eyes peeled for ways to look after her family. He has no qualifier before his name. She is introduced, first and foremost, as a busy mum. He doesn’t mention the children at all. She leads with them.

Heights did not mean to write the whole argument for me but they’re doing a pretty good job of it!

Of course, none of this is new. “Women do quite a lot” is not exactly a fresh hot take is it? I appreciate I’m essentially standing up to announce that the sky is blue. And this isn’t even shade at Vogue being introduced as a “mum” first and foremost. I would also, if asked, introduce myself as a “mum” before anything else, despite having a job, a personality, and at least one opinion. I also am not blind to the fact that women introducing themselves as “mums” so they can sell products to other “mums” is simply the easiest means of doing business.

That’s not the point. The point is how easily the work of women and mothers that is the foundation of everything else disappears the moment we start telling a story about a man doing something impressive.

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And this is not, despite appearances, a celebrity only phenomenon.

This is just the high gloss version of something much more ordinary and significantly less well lit. It’s the man who gets really into running when the baby is four months old. The man who has a standing golf commitment on a Sunday that lasts six hours and requires specific trousers. The man whose colleagues ask, with genuine admiration, how he finds the time. Not realising that time is not found, it is made. Usually by someone else. Someone who, interestingly, has not been offered a supplement deal about it.

Which brings me to what I can only assume is an oversight.

Because I have to believe that at no point during the making of this advert did a single woman say, “I’m so sorry, but this is not how this works.” And if they did, I have to assume she was ignored. Which is a shame, because with a few minor adjustments, this could have been a much more accurate piece of marketing.

So, Heights, in the spirit of helpfulness, I have taken the liberty of fixing it for you.

Imagine, if you will, the following being voiced by Spencer Matthews, in the tone of one of those Old Spice ads (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about - here… ENJOY!)

So, Heights, if you fancy a second attempt at this - you know where to find me. I'll be in the kitchen. Keeping my eyes peeled. For good value ways to look after myself and my family.

And finally, a word for the women.

If you’ve ever watched one of these adverts and felt, even briefly, a slight pang of “I’m not doing enough”… I promise you, you are not the problem. You are just missing a wife, a fortune, and a very forgiving relationship with reality.

The answer, as we know, is never the vitamin. It is always something far more powerful, more ancient and that which is unavailable on any subscription tier (unless you’re looking in weird places).

It’s a woman.

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I’d had my own niggling suspicions for a while. Nothing concrete. Just a general sense, gathered over time and lived experience, that we might not all be playing quite the same game. You know, little things…

Like the moment I was having my fanny stitched back together over small talk while my partner was having a cup of tea and a biscuit.

As I said, nothing major…

And then the Jon Hamm TikTok trend arrived, and with it, what I can only describe as some fairly compelling research - the kind that is highly scientific and peer reviewed - if your peers are other tired parents scrolling at 2am.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about - the Jon Hamm TikTok trend is one where you film yourself doing something and then cut to Jon Hamm dancing in a nightclub with his eyes closed in a state of pure bliss soundtracked by a 2010 Scandinavian club hit that absolutely nobody had thought about for 15 years until a load of sleep deprived parents decided it was the sound of having no responsibilities, at which point it went to number 1 on Spotify. Which tells you everything you need to know about the current state of parenting discourse.

Anyway, I digress. The implication of the trend is one of - this is me right now with not a care in the world. I am, totes unbothered (or as Catherine Tate would say - bovered?)

And dads are doing it a lot.

My favourite being: me when my exclusively breastfed baby wakes in the night *AKA Dad remembers he doesn’t have udders and rolls back over to sleep*. Cut to Jon Hamm.

All this to say that Dads, on the whole, are having a wonderful time.

But for all their unbothered, lights off, eyes closed bliss, it turns out there is one thing - one small corner of their existence where society has looked at them and decided that actually, no, not that bit.

You can have everything else, but fuck no, not that.

“Kisses aren’t for Daddies - only mummies” said the lady in the hardware shop to my 3 year old son who was being kissed by his father.

Firstly…

No seriously, who told you that and where do they live?

Secondly…

OF ALL THE THINGS SHE COULD HAVE SAID. Of allllll the things!

She could have said uninterrupted shitting is for mummies actually. Lie ins are for mummies actually. Breakfast in bed is for mummies actually. A head full of nothing but what flavour crisp goes best with her chilled glass of Sauvignon is for mummies actually.

Don't get me wrong, I love kisses from my son. Adore them in fact. But if we're taking things from daddies and giving them exclusively to mummies, couldn't it have been something like the ability to fall asleep within 4 seconds of getting into bed? Or the part of the brain that switches off the moment you leave the house? Maybe the divine gift of sitting down and just, well, sitting there? Not thinking about anything? Just existing in a chair? Could that not have been for mummies actually?

Because kisses seem like something that I don’t mind sharing but I’d love a brain that is silent and to sit on my arse for 3 consecutive days.

Luckily for everyone involved I wasn't there. I was at parents having a rare glass of vino with my mum sans bambino (who was being reprimanded for kisses with his father in the local hardware shop in case you forgot). My partner relayed the story later. And I did what any reasonable person does when they hear something that pisses them off - bitch about it round the dinner table and then think about it ever since in the way that only sane people do, which is to say, obsessively, at 2am, making connections that probably seemed tenuous at first but which I am now completely convinced are not tenuous at all.

Because I think what happened in that hardware shop is connected to something much bigger. Something that sent me down a rabbit hole that led, via some fairly bleak statistics, a lot of Victorian photographs, and one absolutely brilliant essay by a woman who is, like the rest of us, completely exhausted by men’s shit - to the conclusion that the manosphere is, among other things, extremely gay - and for good reason.

Whew, that sounds like a lot of completely unrelated things but bear with me.

There was a little documentary recently - a small affair, you probably missed it. A guy called Louis Theroux? Perhaps you’ve come across his work? Anyway, he made a little film. Barely anyone watched it, hardly any Instagram stories were posted and almost no think pieces were written. Very under the radar stuff.

In it, Theroux - who has made it his life’s work to sit across from people who make your skin crawl and ask them very politely why they are like that - spent some time with various manosphere figures. The kind of men who have built entire careers out of telling other men that women are the problem. Men with podcasts and Telegram groups and masterclasses and, as of this week, Substack bestseller lists.

And then, among the approximately zero think pieces that followed, came the earlier essay I mentioned by titled Sorry But the Manosphere is the Gayest Thing on the Internet which I loved so much, mainly because she was ultimately saying the same thing I’d been saying just months before when a load of trad men turned up in my comments after I wrote about hyphenated surnames. To quote myself, because if you don’t back yourself no one else will:

“I find it genuinely fascinating that men who are so very not homosexual, who will tell you at great length about how absolutely, categorically not gay they are, are so utterly obsessed with other men and their marriages. The sheer amount of energy they pour into monitoring whether other men are being “real men.” Whether they’re holding frame, whether their wives respect them enough, whether they’ve maintained proper dominance, or whether they’ve let themselves be controlled - it’s quite intimate, really, this level of concern for another man’s relationship. The energy here is less “concerned friend” and more “are you watching me watching you?”

In a similar vein, Liz said of the men in the Manosphere doc:

Many of these manfluencers are infinitely more comfortable performing for men than they are existing near women. Which raises a pretty obvious question about how heterosexual any of this actually is, when these men seem to spend considerably more time and energy telling us how much they admire other men than they ever do talking or thinking about women.

Her piece got thousands of likes. Mine got about twelve, which I can only assume is because I didn’t include photos of RFK Jr. and Kid Rock doing shirtless gym stuff together, which Liz had the good sense to illustrate in full. I just used words. Rookie error.

Anyway, she ends her piece by saying that “At the end of the film, Theroux notes that nearly every influencer in this world grew up with an absent or violent father. So they built a replacement world, one made entirely of men, run by men, monetized by men, for men who are also looking for men. Misogyny is the brand. But the product, if you look closely, is male longing.”

And I’ve come to the realisation that every conversation about the manosphere ends up in the same place - absent fathers, broken homes, boys who never had a male role model and went looking for one on the internet and found Andrew Tate instead. Which is all absolutely true and has been said approximately four thousand times by people much more qualified than me - Liz included.

And I agree with all of it. I’ve been saying for a while that these men aren’t performing for women, they’re performing for other men, and that underneath all of it is just a load of blokes who are absolutely desperate to be close to each other and have no idea how to do it without dressing it up as something else entirely.

But hearing that some lady thought it appropriate to warn my son off from kissing his father made me wonder whether the absent father narrative - true as it is - really is the whole story. Because my son has a father. A father who took him to the hardware shop on a perfectly ordinary Saturday afternoon with his Grandad, and kissed him, because he’s 3 and scrumptiously kissable and that’s what you do when you love your child - yes, even as a Daddy. And a lady (no less!) saw that and tried to put the brakes on.

Which means this isn’t only a story about absence but a story about what happens to presence. Physical presence. The kind that involves bodies. You know, kissing, holding, being close.

I say this because I don’t believe that anyone would have said a word if my partner had been talking to our son, or comforting him, or doing literally anything else. It was ultimately the kissing that warranted a comment - the physical affection between a father and his child.

Physical affection between fathers and sons is apparently something a lot of people have very strong feelings about.

In the Theroux documentary, HSTikkyTokky - a 24 year old manfluencer, says he would disown his son if he were gay. When Theroux points out that this might be considered homophobic, HSTikkyTokky says, “I believe being gay as a son is a product of parenting.”

He calls the prospect of disowning your own son “good parenting”. But underneath all the bluster what he’s actually saying is that physical affection between men is dangerous, that it leads somewhere bad and that it needs to be caught early and corrected before it goes too far.

Which is, if you squint, exactly what the woman in the hardware shop was doing. Just with a considerably warmer tone of voice and presumably without the intention of anyone ending up homeless.

One intervenes in a cooing tone usually reserved for golden retrievers and the other with a threat. Both seem to be saying that physical closeness between men, even between a father and his 3 year old son (seriously wtf?), is something that makes people uncomfortable enough to do something about.

And that’s where it starts. The closing off, not just emotionally, but physically. Which is why, by the time boys become men, the menu of acceptable physical affection available to them is, well, piss poor.

Because men are touch starved too. Not just emotionally closed off - they are often physically starved of contact. There’s actually a name for it - the intimacy gap - which describes the difference between how much physical affection men want from their male friends (specifically male friends not ‘tings’ they want to bonk) and how much they actually get. And the gap is significant. Men want more of the physical bromance stuff - they’re just not getting it.

Then there’s what the big wigs call touch isolation, which describes the reality that for a lot of men the only acceptable physical affection on offer comes from their mum, their wife, or a rugby tackle. And even those three are precarious.

Sport is fine because it has plausible deniability - it’s not affection, it’s adrenaline, it’s the game, it doesn’t count. His wife is fine because, well, that’s what wives are for, right? And his mum is fine… until she isn’t. Because at some point a boy who’s close to his mum becomes a mummy’s boy, and NOBODY WANTS A MUMMY’S BOY, DO YOU HEAR ME?! It’s literally on the ick list, right there between “wears a backpack” and “orders a Diet Coke”. So that avenue closes too.

Which leaves his wife and a rugby tackle and an awful lot of unmet need.

Compare that to women for a second. We hug each other hello and goodbye as standard. We tell each other we love each other on a Tuesday for absolutely no reason. We hold hands when someone’s crying. We sit with our legs touching on the sofa without it meaning anything. We say “you look incredible” to a complete stranger in a pub toilet and she says it back and we both mean it and we never see each other again and that’s just a thing that happens. We are, physically, allowed to just love each other, openly and without a disclaimer that says “I promise I don’t want to play scissor sisters I just like your hair!”

And even if you’re a woman who cringes over physical affection, the option is there if you wanted it to be.

Men on the other hand - well, they get a rugby tackle and a wife (if they’re lucky).

Which brings me to my earlier note around Victorian photographs… I told you to bear with me.

It’s very easy to talk about all of this like it’s ancient or hardwired or just the natural order of things, but it isn’t. If you look at photos of men from the 19th century - and I really would recommend doing this because it’s actually quite nice - they are, to put it bluntly, all over each other.

They love that shit!

Sitting on each other’s laps, arms slung round shoulders, holding hands - sometimes all of the above simultaneously! These are men that are looking, for all intents and purposes, like they’re having a lovely time together.

And it was all completely unremarkable. Male friends even wrote each other letters that would make your average rom com look vanilla as fuck.

And nobody thought anything of it. It was literally just how they were with each other. Because at that time physical affection between men wasn’t automatically read as sexual. Affection was one thing, sexuality was another, and people seemed broadly capable of telling the difference.

And now we’ve got…

No homo - nothing to see here - just two words that a man has to attach to any display of warmth toward another man just so everyone’s clear he is definitely not gay.

Which is why this stuff gets me all hot and bothered (not in the good way!) Because closing down physical affection between a father and son at age 3 gives you men then end up in the manosphere decades later seeking male intimacy through the only language available to them - that of dominance and performance.

If you learn from toddlerhood that physical affection between men is something to grow out of, you don’t stop needing it, you just lose the language for it. And then you’re a grown man who is starving for closeness with other men and the only framework you’ve ever been given for male intimacy is competition and one-upmanship and then along comes men like Andrew Tate offering exactly that - a way to be intensely, obsessively involved with other men while calling it something else entirely.

The need for physical affection doesn’t disappear. It just comes back completely warped.

So if you’ve ever wondered how we went from men sitting on each other’s laps and writing each other love letters to men needing a disclaimer to hug their mates this is it.

You can trace bits of it back if you want to. Laws, attitudes, all of that good stuff - but really there’s no big moment or single villain you can point at and say:

It’s rather an accumulation of tiny things. Tiny, sometimes well meaning, completely throwaway things said in a cooing voice… to small children… in hardware shops.

The manosphere is full of men who never had fathers, yes. But it's likely also full of men who did. Men whose fathers were there, warm, present, kissing them in hardware shops - until someone suggested they probably shouldn't be. And that’s how it starts. Not always with an absence but with a comment. And then another comment. And then a look. And then a boy who has absorbed, without anyone ever sitting him down and explaining it, that this kind of love isn’t for him.

The absent father narrative is legit, but it also lets the rest of us off the hook. It locates the problem in broken homes and bad men and other people’s families. It means those of us raising boys around present, loving, affectionate fathers think we’re fine. We’re watching for the bogeymen - we’re not watching for the hardware shop.

Which means it might not be fixed by better fathers alone. It might be fixed by all of us deciding to just. not. do. that. Not make it weird. Not put a shelf life on it. Not tell a 3 year old boy, in the warmest possible voice, that kisses aren’t for daddies.

They warn you about the playground, the school gates, the internet. Nobody warns you about the hardware shop.

The manosphere didn’t come from nowhere. It came from everywhere. From all the tiny, well meaning, completely throwaway things.

I have to hope it can be undone the same way.

So to the lady in the hardware shop. I know you’ve already forgotten what you said. I know you probably went home, had your tea, watched whatever you watch, and slept the untroubled sleep of a woman who was just being friendly in a hardware shop.

And you were ‘just being friendly’ which means that part of me feels bad for writing about you here.

But unfortunately, I am a mother to a boy in a world of Andrew Tates and red pills and sigma males and podcasts where men sit in leather chairs talking about the problem with women. Unfortunately, I am a mother to a boy in a world where men are twice as likely to die by suicide and half as likely to talk to anyone about anything and where male loneliness has become so epidemic they're calling it a public health crisis and where guy best friends don't hug each other at the end of a night and fathers and sons don't say I love you and men sit next to each other in silence and call it companionship and where a grown man can go his entire adult life without being held by another bloke unless a referee blows a whistle first and where the only time it's acceptable to kiss your mate is if you've just won something. Unfortunately, I am a mother to a boy in a world where we’ve all just accepted that this is just the natural order of things rather than something that was built, brick by brick, throwaway comment by throwaway comment, in hardware shops and changing rooms and playgrounds, by people who were just being friendly.

So I'm sorry for writing about you. But also, I'm not really. Because my son has a dad who kisses him and I would quite like it to stay that way.

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This was not always the plan. Like most women, I had hoped to age gently, moisturise sporadically and die having never been compared to a farmyard animal by a man whose profile picture is a fish.

But alas. I have, yet again, made the mistake of opening Instagram.

Let me fill you in…

There I was, once again scrolling that godforsaken app (that gives me loads of content!) one random Friday when I found a woman who looked, both before and after her hair transformation video, unmistakably like a 1997 Cameron Diaz. She began the video looking like Cameron Diaz on her way to buy oat milk and she ended it looking like Cameron Diaz on her way to a film premiere.

No seriously…

This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a beautiful woman. She is quite objectively, a very attractive person - with, and without, makeup.

But being objectively attractive does not make you immune from being called ‘chopped’ by strange men on the internet…

Read it and weep…

This is not, I am aware, a new thing. Men online have long been troubled by the idea that women might look slightly different without makeup - see also: jokes about “the morning after”, the insistence on taking her swimming for the first date, and the general sense of betrayal when confronted with a woman sans winged eyeliner.

Up until now, this has been nothing more than something to roll my eyes at. It’s just men engaging in a favourite past time - who am I to point out that their profile picture is a koi carp?

Except that a little over 3 years ago I forced an 8lb baby out of my vagina under fluorescent lights and that baby happens to be a boy. Which means I am for the first time in my life faced with a difficult but necessary decision.

I have realised that if he is to grow into a functioning member of society - one that does not use words like “chopped” to describe anything other than an onion, I must begin preparing him for the reality of women’s faces by becoming as physically unattractive as possible.

I know I know…

“But Jennie, you can not! Where will your worth come if not from your perfectly made up face?!” I hear you cry.

Please know that I do not make this decision lightly.

Like any mother, I had imagined my sacrifices would be more conventional. Things like sleep, personal space, perhaps even the last yoghurt in the fridge. I had not anticipated that I might one day be called upon to relinquish my own aesthetic dignity in order to correct a long standing societal problem: men with keyboards.

But the situation has escalated.

Because the public evaluation of women’s faces by men who themselves appear to have been assembled by a child putting together a Mr Potato Head in the pitch black has been going on for some time now.

Men have felt not only entitled but duty bound to announce whether they would find a woman attractive at 7.14am in natural light for far too long. Long enough, in fact, that it feels irresponsible not to intervene.

Entire generations have grown up believing that women wake each morning looking like a promotional still for Skims, only to experience profound shock and upset when confronted with a human epidermis. We did not, much to their horror, wake up like this.

We have tried ignoring it. We have tried writing articles about it. None of which has worked. It appears that if meaningful change is to occur, it has to begin in the way so much must - at home. For who better to take on this philanthropic task than a mother who has been in training for it her entire life?

I grew up in the golden age of forensic female scrutiny. A time when magazines regularly unveiled celebrities “without makeup” as though they had been caught committing fraud. One image would show a woman professionally lit and lacquered and the next would show her in a petrol station buying chewing gum with a headline like "Barefaced Cheek! The A-listers Brave Enough To Go Au Naturel".

It wasn’t new, of course. I had my own introduction to the genre long before the internet got involved. I was in Year 7 when a boy in my class loudly informed me that I had hairy arms. This was not, I was told, a good thing. It is worth noting that this particular critic was, at the time, approximately two feet tall and ginger - a combination which, in the early 2000s, did not place one at the top of the school’s social hierarchy. And yet the confidence with which he declared me unfit to be near him was, well, quite something.

Looking back, this feels less like an isolated incident and more like an early lesson in a subject many boys go on to specialise in - telling girls, and later women, that they are, in fact, BUTTERZ!

Then came social media, which democratised the process - much to papagrande6767’s delight! No longer did you need editorial approval to announce that a woman would look “shocking” in the morning. Any man with a data plan and an over gelled fringe could participate.

Women fought back eventually. Threads emerged. Viral posts mocking what men think women look like without makeup - spoiler: there was a lot of makeup - versus what women actually look like without makeup - which is to say, urm, human. There was even a great beard reckoning. The widespread cultural realisation that many men had, in fact, also been contouring for years. A fact I can personally attest to after working with a colleague whose mouth, upon shaving, revealed itself with the suddenness and emotional impact of a prolapsed arsehole.

Of course none of this nonsense was ever about the makeup and more about women who were choosing not to perform.

Which brings me to why I am now, deliberately and with great personal sacrifice, wandering around my own home looking like I’ve recently been found in a forest. Because while it may feel as though we are swimming against the tide, there is a way forward - a means by which we can teach our sons that a woman’s natural appearance is not cause for commentary by becoming utterly repulsive (aka human).

Step 1: Be inconsistent as fuck.

First, you must resist the urge to present a stable, coherent version of yourself. Instead, aim to bounce wildly between states. We’re talking Worzel Gummidge to Marilyn Monroe. Spend several consecutive days looking, frankly, quite alarming, or as I said earlier - like a woman who has recently been found in the woods after 25 years.

Allow this to become your child’s ‘normal’.

Then - without warning - reappear fully assembled. Hair done. Makeup applied. Clothes that suggest you used to be quite fit actually.

At first, he may be frightened. He may question whether you are the same woman. This is normal - reassure him gently. Over time, he will come to understand that these two faces belong to the same person, and that neither represents a moral high ground.

Step 2: Start getting ready, lose interest, then continue your day.

Begin the process of getting ready in full view. Lay out your products, perhaps create a sense of occasion about it all. Let him believe he is about to witness a completed look.

Then stop. Just completely stop.

One eye fully done, the other entirely untouched. Hair straightened on one side, the other looking like Hagrid’s twin sister. Jeans on, but no clear plan for the top.

Continue your day like this. Make a cup of coffee, answer a question, perhaps even leave the house briefly to put something in the wheelie bin while waving at the neighbour.

If he asks what’s happened, look at him calmly and say: “I lost interest.”

This is an important lesson. A woman’s appearance is not a group project, and it does not need to be finished to be valid.

Step 3: Do not pluck your chin hair

At some point, a single, determined hair will appear on your chin. If this hasn’t happened to you yet, well, your time will come.

When this happens, do not panic. I repeat, do. not. panic.

Do not rush to the tweezers like a woman with something to hide. Allow it to exist there - let it reach a length where it can be identified from a respectful distance. Maybe spend time turning your face slightly in the light so it catches. Reference it casually over breakfast.

“I’ve got a situation developing here,” you might say, while buttering toast.

If he reacts, hold steady. This is a perfect teaching moment. Maintain eye contact. Stroke it if necessary in a thoughtful way.

A boy who can process a chin hair without needing to lie down is a boy who will not one day describe a woman as a warthog on the internet.

Step 4: Take him to Tesco at 3pm on a Sunday

Training must start in the home but it will not end there! At some point, you must take him into the field. Choose your moments carefully - late afternoon is ideal. Supermarkets, soft play - anywhere lighting is unforgiving and spirits are low.

Take him there and allow him to observe.

Women with their hair tied up in a way that suggests both practicality and “fuck this shit”. Skin that looks grey and outfits that suggest the wearer wasn’t expecting to see their ex boyfriend and his new girl today.

Do not narrate. Simply gesture, subtly, like a tour guide at a historical site while letting him take it all in.

This is what women look like when they are not performing, my boy. This is what women look like most of the time.

Step 5: “Mummy’s just shit herself”

I need you to hear me when I say that it is not enough for your son to understand that women have faces and greasy hair. He must understand that those faces are attached to a fully operational system.

You will need to be brave here.

Bodily functions should be introduced early and without ceremony. A fart, for example, should not be treated as an embarrassing faux pas. Hell, if the moment presents itself, escalate! Follow through on one every now and then - why not? These things happen.

The important thing is tone.

“Don’t worry, darling” you might say calmly, from across the room. “Mummy’s just shit herself.”

At some point - and this will feel like a big step - you may even wish to reference the fact that all humans, including women, go to the toilet for reasons beyond a quick powder. You do not need to provide a guided tour necessarily, but nor should you behave as though this is a dark family secret.

We are not raising boys who will one day be blindsided by digestion.

Step 6: Exist in your body like you own it

This is the final step, and the most important.

You must behave as though none of this is remarkable.

Sit how you like. Move how you like. Laugh in a way that involves your whole face - specifically your double chins - not just the socially acceptable parts of it. Scratch an itch without turning around to check if anyone is looking. Remove a wedgy whenever you need to - from the front or the back!

Exist fully in your body as though it belongs to you - because, my friend, it does.

If any of these steps made you uncomfortable, I understand. "Deliberately shit yourself in front of your child" is not advice you will find in any mainstream parenting book. But as someone who spent the better part of her teens and twenties internalising narratives about how women should look and behave I am taking my role of “chopped mum” (see also: human woman) seriously.

There are still mornings where I catch my own unmade face in the bathroom mirror and hear, very briefly, someone else’s commentary running underneath it. It takes a surprisingly long time to evict a voice that moved in when you were 11.

It’s a long game, so while I play it - a word for the women in the room.

If you have ever felt personally victimised by someone whose profile picture is a fish he caught once and never forgot about - a man who has, at some point between his third Carling and whatever Jordan Peterson podcast he’s currently working through, taken time out of his busy schedule to let a complete stranger know that she would look “shocking in the morning”, that the “distance between makeup and no makeup is pretty great”, or that she resembles a warthog without her slap - just know that somewhere, in a semi-detached house, a woman is deliberately wandering around looking like Peter Pettigrew in the hope that her son does not grow up to be like him.

It's not the philanthropy I imagined, but it's the philanthropy we need.

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The can you imagine was about the cost - a sort of oh how wonderful it must be to be THAT rich!

I on the other hand had a completely different can you imagine running through my head - one that had quite literally fuck all to do with my eye-wateringly pathetic bank balance.

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I was thinking about handing my practically brand new baby to a stranger, at night, during which he would be alone in the dark with someone whose voice he didn’t know, whose smell he didn’t know, and who had no reason beyond professional obligation to care about whether he’d be okay. It felt utterly alien, and if I’m brutally honest, completely out of the fucking question.

Long standing readers will know I’ve written about being labelled an “extreme mother” for the crime of, among other things, sleeping next to my son. That label came from this same person - the one waving the my friend has a night nurse flag. So she knew where I stood on the subject of leaving my child in this way. She knew I was someone who couldn’t fathom putting distance between us and yet here she was, telling me about a night nurse in the same tone you’d use to recommend a good plumber.

I can only conclude she told me for the same reason people tell vegans about a really good steak! Some weird little compulsion they just can’t help.

The extreme thing, in her view, was me. Asleep next to my child. The normal thing was a stranger in the spare room.

Yeah, I don’t get it either.

Anyway, that was nearly 3 years ago now, and I hadn’t much thought about that conversation - mostly because I've been too busy being extremely horizontal with my son, forging rods for my own back and absolutely ruining him for life - y’know, the usual.

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In fact, the first time it actually came back to me was during a late night read of the wonderful Marina Mofford. In her article Co-sleeping in a culture that promotes sleep training she writes about her own brush with a night nurse - one she had hired after being surrounded by New Yorkers for whom a night nurse was as standard a registry item as a muslin.

It’s important to note this night nurse lasted one night, and was promptly fired after Marina caught her attempting to teach her 3 day old to self soothe while playing Candy Crush on her phone.

Her description of this experience made me burn with rage - a rage so specific and so hot it nearly took the top of my head off.

Which brings me to the next time I found myself thinking about night nurses - this time, unfortunately, not as the result of something life affirming like the words of a wonderful writer on Substack - but over a story in the national press that’s left me with that same feeling of incandescent rage.

Except this time it’s worse, because this time a baby died.

In October 2024, a 4 month old baby was found unresponsive by his father in the early hours of the morning. His name was Madison. An inquest concluded last week into the circumstances of his death. You may have seen it in the news - Madison was the son of former Leeds United striker Matt Smith and Amy Bruce, daughter of football manager Steve Bruce. It is, in part, because of who his family are that this story reached the national press. But the reason it matters has nothing to do with that.

The baby’s parents, Amy and Matt, had hired a woman through a company called Ruthie Maternity Services. Their son had been struggling to sleep in the afternoons and so they looked for support. They believed the woman they hired was skilled, trained and properly vetted and that the company was a well established, reputable service.

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Having never met the family before, the woman arrived at their home and that night took sole responsibility for Madison’s care while his parents slept.

Madison was put to sleep on his front - which is of course directly against NHS safe sleeping guidance for babies. Even for those who can roll, the guidance is always to put them to sleep on their backs. His mother had already expressed her concern about this earlier that day when the woman they had hired had placed Madison to sleep on his front. Before she went to bed, she sent a text:

I hope he is okay on his front. I worry about him being on his front.

She was assured this was fine.

News reports cite that Madison cried in the night and that he was heard stirring multiple times on the baby monitor. The woman responsible for his care did not go into his room. Police later found extensive evidence of her using TikTok and other apps on her phone throughout the night. There was also a message she’d sent to someone else earlier that day, after meeting Madison for the first time that reportedly said “This baby can cry” with a crying emoji.

Madison did not wake up in the morning.

In a statement his family have said:

“The sleep nanny and maternity practitioner industry is entirely unregulated. Anyone can call themselves a sleep nurse or a maternity nanny without any requirement for qualification, accredited training, safeguarding checks or professional oversight. There is no regulatory framework, no compulsory standard, and no mechanism to ensure competence or prevent unsafe individuals from working with newborn babies. Parents are easily misled by language that implies professionalism.”

The senior coroner agreed, saying that, in effect, any one of us could walk out of that courtroom and call ourselves a maternity nurse tomorrow. The term “registered nurse” is protected by law. The word “nurse” is not. It is a word that, as this family so cruelly found out, implies everything and guarantees nothing.

I’ve been watching the discourse around this story since the inquest concluded last week, and it has been - to put it generously - a little all over the place. On one end you’ve got people reminiscing about how in their day they put babies down on their sides with a rolled up towel propping them in place, as if the correct response to a baby dying is to crowdsource a fun fact about 1970s parenting.

On the other you’ve got the conversation that keeps circling back to the fact that this particular woman was unregulated, that this particular company was unregulated, that the coroner has called for regulation and that regulation would fix this.

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And of course regulation would help. The coroner is absolutely right to call for it and this family are absolutely right to demand it.

But it's not the only question worth asking here. Because underneath why wasn't she regulated is a question about how we’ve built a culture in which an entire industry exists - thrives, charges a fortune, and keeps growing - on the premise that a mother's instinct about her own baby is the least qualified opinion in the room.

Most people hear “night nurse” and clock out of the conversation, because it sounds like a problem for people with a second home and a cleaner called Gerald. And at £80 to £150 a night - at the lower end - it is, undeniably, not something most of us are in the market for.

But the night nurse is just the most visible tip of an industry that has its hooks into almost every new parent regardless of income. The sleep consultant on Zoom at anywhere up to £1,000 a package. The Instagram sleep coach with 200k followers selling a PDF routine for £49. The TikTok account explaining that your baby should be sleeping through by eight weeks and if they’re not, here’s all 17 million and one things you’re doing wrong. Different price points, sure, but identical ideology. The night nurse is just what it looks like when you’ve got enough money to buy the whole service rather than just the advice.

And that ideology - that a baby’s sleep is a problem to be solved, that the solution requires expertise you don’t have, and that the expertise is purchasable - didn’t come from nowhere.

We talk a lot about the village. It takes a village, and nobody has one anymore - said as a kind of collective, helpless shrug. The village used to be your mother coming round, your sister staying over, your neighbour who’d had four kids and knew things. It was people who loved your baby second only to you, who had a reason beyond professional obligation to care about whether they were okay, genuinely okay, and who could tell from across the room that something was off.

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That village has, they’re right, been dismantled. By geography, by the way we work, by the way we live, by a culture that told women that needing help was weakness and then sold them help at a premium when they inevitably needed it anyway.

And what’s moved into the space that was the village is an industry - one that is, as they say - entirely unregulated.

But it’s not just the night nurse and it’s not just Ruthie Maternity Services. The sleep consultant you find on Instagram - unregulated. The woman charging for a Zoom call about your baby’s nap schedule - unregulated. The sleep trainer who comes to your house for a night - unregulated.

As one training provider puts it with remarkable candour (truly!) on their own website - there is no formal qualification required, and anyone can call themselves a sleep practitioner or consultant.

The coroner called for regulation of maternity nurses specifically. They were right to. But the problem is not one unvetted woman on one night. The problem is an entire industry, operating across every platform and every price point, in a complete regulatory vacuum telling exhausted, isolated, unsupported mothers that expertise is available, that it will fix things, and that they should trust it.

Now, I can already hear the objection. Surely they have to have some qualifications? Surely there’s some kind of certificate, some kind of accreditation, some kind of - well, anything?

And yeah, sort of. There are certifications available if you want them.

One training provider - selling their own certification course, mind you - describes the situation on their own website like this:

“The world of pediatric sleep consulting is currently unregulated. That means anyone (and we mean anyone) can throw up a website, slap ‘Sleep Coach’ in their Instagram bio, and start charging sleep-deprived parents for advice.”

“Sounds a bit scary, right?” (Their words, not mine).

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Another, also selling their own course, helpfully clarifies that the titles of sleep coach, sleep consultant and sleep practitioner are not regulated, so there is no legal requirement for formal training before working in these roles.

The certifications that do exist are courses sold by private companies, accredited by bodies you’ve likely never heard of. You pay, you complete the course, you get a certificate. But there is no independent regulatory body setting standards. There is no register parents can check. There is no mechanism to strike anyone off. The industry, in the absence of any external oversight, has essentially decided to police itself.

Which is to say - it hasn’t.

Can you imagine this in any other context? A driving instructor has to be licensed. A childminder has to be Ofsted registered. If someone is working with gas in your home, they have to be legally certified. Doctors, nurses, teachers - all regulated, all accountable. We have regulatory frameworks for people who tattoo your skin and sell you a sandwich.

But the person you invite into your home to take sole charge of your newborn baby in the middle of the night - no mandatory qualifications, no consistent standards and no formal oversight. There is no legal requirement for a DBS check, no mandatory first aid and no safeguarding standards. Didly squat. Just a certificate they bought online (if that) and a profile on a website that carries no liability whatsoever for whether any of it is true.

And here’s my personal favourite bit. One of these certification providers - again, selling their own course, in their own marketing material - lists among the reasons to get certified the following… That parents are, and I quote:

“The first to sue you if something goes sideways.”

I beg your finest pardon, but what the fuck?

Those pesky parents and their sue-happy personalities! It’s like they love their children or something?!

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The entire pitch is commercial self interest dressed up as professionalism. Because this is an industry that, in its own marketing material, describes caring for newborn babies in terms of return on investment. Again, these are their words, not mine:

“Our graduates report an average return on their tuition in just 5–10 clients. That’s the kind of ROI traditional degrees only dream about.”

ROI. On babies. Five to ten families. That’s five to ten sets of exhausted, desperate, trusting parents handing over their babies and their money to someone who, by their own industry’s admission, needed no qualifications whatsoever to walk through the door.

We have decided, as a society, that the person responsible for your baby in the dark hours of the night requires less formal oversight than the person who sets up a sandwich stall.

When you see it laid out like that, it's no wonder this industry has worked so hard to make mothers question themselves.

They tell you they’re selling sleep. But the product isn’t sleep. It’s your self doubt. Sleep is the promise on the tin, but what this industry actually sells is the idea that your baby’s completely normal, ancient, mammalian need to be close to you at night is a problem. A habit, a rod for your own back and something that, left unchecked, will result in a teenager who still can’t sleep without you in the room.

Their cry is not a communication - it’s not your baby telling you something -it’s a behaviour, and behaviours, unlike needs, can be trained out.

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Once you accept that framing - and this industry works very hard to get you to accept it - the logical next step is that you are not the right person to respond to it. Because you my friend, are too close, too emotional, too likely to just pick them up.

What you need is someone with a system, a routine and a professional approach. What you need, essentially, is someone who can do what you cannot bring yourself to do - hear your baby cry and not go to them.

Stripped of the wellness language and the soothing pastel Instagram grids, what is being sold is the ability to not respond to your baby in they way they want you to. That’s literally it. There’s nothing else to it.

And it works because the conditions are engineered to make it work.

You are exhausted in a way you have never been exhausted in your life. You have been told, repeatedly, by an industry with enormous reach (and enormous financial gain), that what your baby needs is a routine and what you need is sleep and that these two things are in tension with each other and only expertise can resolve the tension.

You have been told that wanting to go to your baby is anxiety, that needing them close is attachment issues and that the mother who sleeps next to her child is, perhaps, a bit extreme.

So you lie there in the dark. Listening.

The Reddit threads and Mumsnet forums about night nurses are full of women describing the same experience in different words. I went looking because night nurses aren’t exactly common in my world.

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One mother wrote that her night nurse "treats my baby like an object" and that she just wants someone who will, I quote, "give a fuck." Another wrote about watching on her baby camera as her night nurse ignored her crying newborn, while talking herself out of going in because, again, I quote, “this woman is the professional, I feel weird micromanaging.” Another lay in bed listening to her baby scream and negotiated with herself about whether she was allowed to go in.

I read all of this and wanted to scream myself.

A commenter responding to one of these posts said “I keep seeing you gaslight yourself in this post saying you should trust the professional” and that right there is the crux of it. It’s the whole thing in a nutshell.

The industry sells “expertise” by creating the conditions in which a mother overrides her own alarm and calls it deference to a professional. It creates the conditions in which lying awake listening to your baby cry becomes the correct, responsible choice, because going in would be interfering with the process.

And “this baby can cry” - 4 words sent in a message by someone being paid to care for an infant - well, if you want the philosophy of this industry with all the pastel grids and wellness language stripped away - there you have it.

The baby’s cry is not something to respond to but something to tune out.

I am sorry to say, this is not one negligent woman’s attitude - it is what so much of this industry, at its core, teaches.

Before she went to bed that night, Amy Smith sent a text to the woman she’d been told was a qualified professional, and who was responsible for her 4 month old son.

I hope he is okay on his front. I worry about him being on his front.

Amy Smith is not a mother who failed to trust her instincts. She is a mother whose instincts were right, who said them out loud, in writing, at 11pm, and who had been given every reason by every structure around her to believe that the person in the spare room knew better than the feeling in her chest.

That is not a personal failing - it is what this industry is designed to produce.

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Madison Bruce-Smith deserved better than an unregulated industry operating in a complete regulatory vacuum. His parents deserved better than a system that took their trust and had no framework whatsoever to justify it. And Amy Smith deserved to live in a world that told her in no uncertain terms that what she felt at 11pm when something didn’t seem right was the most qualified opinion in that house.

Regulate this industry. The coroner is right and Madison’s family are right. It has to happen and it has to happen now. No more one day courses for £450. No more any old Tom, Dick or Harry calling themselves a maternity nurse. No more regulatory wasteland where the most vulnerable people on earth - brand new babies and the exhausted mothers responsible for them - have no protection whatsoever. And not just the night nurse - the whole damn lot. Every person charging parents for advice about their newborn baby without a single mandatory qualification, check or standard to their name.1

But regulation won’t fix the fact that we decided that a mother’s instinct isn’t something to trust. That’s a cultural problem and it needs a cultural answer. We need to stop selling mothers the idea that expertise is something that happens to you from the outside, that your feelings at 3am are anxiety to push past, that the professional in the spare room knows your baby better than you do after 6 hours and a one day course.

This industry exists because we told women they couldn’t trust themselves. It thrives because we keep telling them that. Regulation is where we start, but it can not be where we stop.

To Madison's family - I am so sorry for your loss. Thank you for having the courage to speak publicly about what happened. It matters.

If you have been affected by the sudden or unexpected death of a baby or young child, The Lullaby Trust offer free, confidential bereavement support. You can call their helpline on 0808 802 6868 or visit lullabytrust.org.uk

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But would you live for them?

Would you join a WhatsApp group called MUMS ON TOUR? Would you buy matching satin pyjamas that say MAMA NEEDS MARGARITAS on the back? Would you vote in a poll about poolside outfits that need to be “floaty but sexy”? Would you spend 3 weeks pretending you’re fine about sharing a room with Sharon even though you’ve heard she snores? Would you post a story saying “offline for the weekend” while posting continuously? Would you cry in a restaurant toilet with a woman called Stacey about how motherhood is beautiful but relentless? Would you rehearse saying “I never do this” while doing exactly this?

Then you my friend, are “living”.

And everyone can see that you’re living. Which is, obviously, the most important part.

Being a mother today means being absolutely, relentlessly, comprehensively bombarded. Once upon a time your information came from your mum and a dog-eared weaning book from 1993 that was the length of War and Peace but less fun.

Now you get that plus approximately 9000 reels a day from people who are all somehow experts in something. 9000 opinions coming at you like a flock of seagulls on Brighton seafront ready to fight you for your chips. Opinions about sleep, about feeding, about screen time, about gentle parenting and about whether the way you’re handling household tasks is setting your child up for a lifetime of emotional unavailability.

And then, just when you think you've heard it all, that there cannot possibly be another thing you're doing wrong, along comes perhaps my new favourite genre of content. That which tells you, in a roundabout way, that the best thing you can do for your children is pack a bag, get on a plane, and go and get absolutely walloped on Cîroc in Marbella.

For the children, obviously.

Let me set the scene…

There I was, minding my own business (if by minding my own business we mean scrolling everyone else’s business) toasting a crumpet for my 3 year old when I was confronted with what feels like the 19387th video of a group of women approximately my age having a whale of a time on a boat. There is always a boat, I don’t know where they’re all coming from but there are an extraordinary number of boats available to people on Instagram.

This boat video was adorned with a caption that said:

“You’d die for your children, but would you live for them?”

Hmm, I thought.

I began patting myself down like people do in films when they wake up after an explosion and need to establish whether they are in fact dead. Arms? Check. Legs? Check. Yesterday’s leggings? Also check.

Because, I was, as we have already established, not on a boat. I was in my kitchen telling my son, again, for the 17th time in as many minutes, that if he did not stop antagonising the dog he would have to go and live somewhere else.

The dog.

I’m talking about the dog. Or am I?

The crumpet popped. My son started frantically telling me he was going to be the one to butter his crumpet (not a euphemism!), the dog loitered around hoping he’d nab some dairy in order to torment us all with the foulest smelling farts known to man, and I stood there in my kitchen on an average Saturday and I thought - is this not living?

Because it felt like living to me.

Chaotic and simultaneously mundane, but living nonetheless.

The gap between the scene on my phone and the scene in front of me felt enormous. On my phone, women were laughing on a boat in the sun - free and untethered, despite having a child across borders, and making sure everyone knew about it. In my kitchen, my son was trying to feed the dog a crumpet now slathered in butter despite being specifically told less than 30 seconds ago not to feed the dog a crumpet because the butter will give him the shits.

Oh the glamour. The freedom. The unmistakable scent of dog farts drifting through a semi-detached in a town I’d rather not be living in.

But at no point did the life in front of me feel like less.

So why did it piss me off?

Why, if I was perfectly content not being on a boat, did this wind me up? Was I jealous? Was I secretly longing for a life of matching satin pyjamas and boat based self discovery? Was I, quel désastre, the boring mum? The one who’d ruined the groove?

Or was it the phrase?

Was it because some part of me felt implicated - pointed at - by a caption on a video posted by a woman who uses phrases like "you'd die for your children but would you live for them" to incite some kind of anxiety in me in order to sell a version of motherhood that looks, well, suspiciously like a very good holiday?

By golly, I think she’s got it!

Selling to mothers has always been an easy sale.

We’re not stupid, but we are often anxious. The stakes of motherhood feel enormous and someone is always, always telling you you’re doing it wrong. That is extraordinarily fertile ground for anyone with something to sell!

And they’ve always known it - corporations, advertisers, the wellness industry, the formula companies and the sleep training programmes and the organic everything. For decades it was faceless brands finding the anxiety and parking their product next to it.

Then it stopped being just corporations - it became other mothers. Women who look like you, sound like you, and have children the same age as yours. Women who have absorbed the same ideas and the same anxieties and are now, from a boat in Marbella, passing them on.

Which is, if anything, more effective. Because you can see through an advert. You can’t always see through someone who seems to be just like you.

It doesn’t feel like a sales pitch in the traditional sense. But it is selling nonetheless. Find the thing a mother worries about most, name it, and then offer the solution.

And what do we worry about most?

At the absolute core of it, underneath all the shite about screen time and sleep schedules and whether the crumpet has too much butter on it - we worry about being enough. We worry about whether our children are getting the best version of us. Whether we are, in the most fundamental sense, what they need.

This is, as the above gif so scientifically points out, not a new thing. Allow me to demonstrate.

Enter 1970’s advertising…

Can you see where I’m going with this?

Three ads. Three different women. Three different family situations. But the same line every time - They Need Me.

The first is a single mother outside her house with her two kids. The copy talks about having to take charge of her life to take care of theirs. Notably, taking charge of her life appears to involve getting life insurance rather than getting on a boat. Whatever, it was a different era, what do they know?

The second shows a woman caught between a husband asking about the mortgage and a daughter asking for new ballet slippers - her income, it turns out, is no longer just for extras.

The third has a mother holding a baby while a small child tugs at her holding a shoe with laces asking if he’s doing it okay, while her husband - who is standing right there with two working hands, and is fully capable of answering that question himself - asks what’s for dinner.

Some things, it seems, are timeless.

All three are selling the same fear. You are the centre of this. Everything rests on you. Everyone needs you. And if something happens to you - if you’re not here, if you can’t provide, if you fall short in some way - it all falls apart.

They need me. So I need Prudential.

Granted the selling here was slightly more transparent - they need you to be alive but, urm, if you do happen to drop down dead, well at least you’ve got life insurance!

The sell now is slightly more opaque - but it’s a sell nonetheless.

They still need you. And they need you fulfilled, and they need you whole. And, as it just so happens, to be fulfilled and whole you need to still be her. The version of you that existed before this pesky thing called motherhood. The one that still goes to far away places and does big extravagant things and can’t be described, under any circumstances, as boring.

You can’t pour from an empty cup, they say. Put your oxygen mask on first, they say. A happy mother makes a happy home, they say.

All of which started as a genuinely reasonable observation about burnout and has been subtly inflated cup by cup, oxygen mask by oxygen mask, until the only thing left for it is a week in a foreign country. The oxygen mask costs £800, the empty cup can only be filled in Marbella, and the happy mother, it turns out, needs a boat.

For most of the last century, becoming a mother meant change and everyone just said so. You had the baby. You went home. Your career ended or paused indefinitely. Your social life became the school gate and the church hall and the neighbours. Your identity became mum. Society organised itself around that assumption and nobody particularly questioned it.

And then, quite rightly, women pushed back. We’d like to keep our careers and our identities and our lives outside the nursery, thank you very much.

Now the message is quite the opposite - it’s one that tells you not only that motherhood doesn’t have to erase you, but that it shouldn’t really change you at all.

Which is, of course, impossible. Because motherhood does change you - especially in the early years. The radius contracts, the spontaneity goes, the Tuesday looks like the Wednesday looks like the Thursday and on and on it goes.

But we’ve been sold the idea that a small life is a shameful life. That ordinary is failure. And phrases like this one find you exactly there. In the overlap between two anxieties. The maternal one - am I enough for them - and the deeply human one - is this enough of a life. And it offers the solution to both at once.

In the words of M&S, “this is not just a holiday”. It is proof that your life is not small, that you are not ordinary, and that motherhood has not, despite all evidence to the contrary, made you boring.

And for women who have two contradictory things being screamed at them simultaneously - be a good mother - which means being selfless and present and endlessly available - but also don't you dare lose yourself - which means being fun and frictionless and still her - well, she can’t win.

She can’t simply say I want to go because I fancy it. Because wanting things purely for yourself as a mother is still rather scandalous. But she can’t say she doesn’t want to go because that makes her boring, and as we’ve already established, there is no worse fate than that!

So she does what any reasonable person does when caught between two completely contradictory cultural expectations.

She reframes.

She doesn’t go simply because she fancies it. She goes because her daughter is watching. She goes because you’d die for your children but would you live for them?

And then, she sells it back to you.

To you. The one reading this. The one who is, in all likelihood, not on a boat. The one who is on a sofa, or in a kitchen, or in a car park with seven minutes to herself and a podcast that just got good, or laying next to her sleeping child reading this in the dark. The one whose life is, by the metrics being offered, not quite living.

And I want to say something to that person directly.

Because if you’re the mother who has seen this stuff - the captions, the boats, the oxygen masks and the empty cups - and felt a flicker of is my life enough, am I enough, am I not living? - I want you to know that you are being sold to. The anxiety you felt in that moment was not an accurate read of your life. It was a product. Manufactured, packaged, and delivered straight to your phone.

Living doesn’t have to look like Marbella. Filling your cup doesn’t have to look like an extravagant girls trip once a year involving a boat and matching swimsuits. It can look like a long bath with the door locked. An extra 7 minutes in a car park because the podcast just got good. A whole book, read cover to cover. A walk with nowhere to be. A bench beside some daffodils, clouds swirling overhead. A coffee while it’s hot. Netflix in silence with a blanket on a Wednesday. A phone call with your mum. A bookshop and no list. A bottle of wine with a friend while setting the world to rights. A natter in the pub. A whole meal without cutting anything up for anyone else. A yoga class in nice leggings. A breathwork class where you get to scream into a pillow without anyone questioning your mental health. Writing something and feeling, briefly, like yourself. A run where your head goes quiet for the first time all week. Laughing until your face hurts. Sitting in the sunshine with your eyes closed. An hour where nobody needs anything. Dancing in your kitchen to a song that’s just for you, with nobody watching, because you don’t need an audience for this one.

None of it performs well. None of it gets 47 comments saying AMEN! A woman dancing in her kitchen with nobody watching is, by definition, doing it with nobody watching. A run where your head goes quiet is, well, quiet. A bath with the door locked is behind a locked door.

But it is, every single bit of it, living.

So to answer the question…

You'd die for your children, but would you live for them?

Well I guess that depends on who's asking - and what they’re selling.

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