No one wastes their time reading tabloids anymore… except perhaps me. I love a good juicy tabloid article. It’s my dirty secret. I rely on proper sources for news, but every now and then I like a good laugh (by every now and then I mean every morning while I drink my coffee). This week one particular heading has made all the tabloids and caught my eye. A man named Jonathan, ignited the fury of all SAHMs (stay at home mums), by stating on a popular mum facebook page that we’re a bunch of lazy gold diggers. It made me wonder, am I lazy gold digger?
The short answer is an emphatic no. This is mostly because as the name suggests there must be actual gold, for you to be considered a “gold digger” and in my seven years of marriage to Hasani we have always been in a “liquidity crunch”, as he calls it. However, most of my friends who are mums went back to office jobs after having their babies, and although I’m constantly on the hustle pitching articles and doing translations hither dither and yonder, I still consider myself a SAHM since most of my days, and nights, are spent taking care of Alba. Does this mean I’m unambitious, lazy, and “use my husband like an ATM machine?”
I don’t know about other women, but I much rather spend my own money. Prior to Hasani and I deciding that it would be better for our family for Alba to spend another year at home with me, I had a good system going. Each month I would transfer a fixed amount to our joint account for household costs and savings, buy weekly groceries, and then the rest was mine, off the books, there to spend on whatever I pleased.
I much rather this system of personal creative accounting, than getting a whatsapp message at 6am while I’m in the middle of my tabloid scrolling session asking, “What was the £56 spent on Amazon on June 21st for?” Don’t get me wrong, Hasani isn’t a miser, he just works in finance and budgeting is a monthly intricate event where every expense is itemised, and I still can’t convince him that we need a line on that excel sheet for “possibilities”. It’s apparently too vague. But let’s say you’re out, and you happen to pop into a shop, just to pass time, and you spot a good bargain…isn’t that an unforeseeable possibility? In Hasani’s world it’s considered a want, not a need, and definitely not a possibility.
Then there is the social part of working. I know most people hate their co-workers, but in my last job my co-workers were the best part of it. I loved my team…well most of them. I miss the sneaky coffee, the cheeky pint, the juicy gossip, the camaraderie of knowing that we’re all overworked, underpaid, and unfulfilled. Yearning for some office gossip, I always ask Hasani for the low-down on his colleagues now. But banks aren’t like advertising agencies and the last gossip he gave me was that someone dropped the “f-bomb” on a call. I had to smile politely at this story, because in my last job the f-bomb was more of an adjective than a curse word, so I didn’t really consider it juicy.
As for the social aspect of being a mum, I’m still floundering. My weekly baby club sessions are a whole different world. There are the Bugaboo mums (Bugaboo is a very expensive pram brand) – this is a clique that comes to baby club early, takes up the entire shady spot, and chatters throughout the class. I’ve already been excommunicated from this group because before I realised the politics at play, I came early and plonked down in the middle of the shade, and well…I don’t own a Bugaboo. Sitting in their spot is like taking a front-line spin bike in the popular spin class and having one of the “it spinners” relegated to the second row. The travesty and all the snarky glares!
Then there’re the grandmothers, they’re nice and friendly and always have baked goodies which they’re willing to share with the stay-at-home dad, whose toddlers prefer their cookies to the bag of rice cakes he packs. They’re also the organic fruit and veg mums who lay out the picnic blanket and take out at least 5 small containers of chopped up fruit and veg for their children and watch your perfectly good home baked muffins out of the corner of their eyes. I’m still looking for the average mums.
Of course none of this takes into account all the hours spent running after Alba, reading the rabbit book 10 times a day and feigning excitement every time, mooing like a cow, quacking like a duck, and crowing like a rooster in public, crawling on all fours like a dog in the neighbourhood park, and smiling tightly when other mums tell you they just had to go back out to work because they were losing brain cells at home with their babies. There’s day-to-day tedium of chores - the making groceries, the cooking, the laundry, the hanging out and folding clothes while a little person follows you pulling them off the hanger and unfolding them, the going to sleep and still hearing baby Jake from BBC singing “yuki yuki yuki, ding dong dee…” in your head before being woken up by cries. Yep, we’re all just a bunch of lazy gold diggers aren’t we?
