Slumming it
Filed Under Stuff | September 17, 2007
Frankly the whole Yummy Mummy thing stresses us out. Being yummy on top of keeping everyone clean, properly fed, and appropriately stimulated (and all the minutiae that entails) seems like a tall order. Not that we don’t have our moments, of course, but since every time we show cleavage some little person possessively jams their sticky fingers down it, those moments are generally confined to date night.
Which is why we found Fiona Neill’s The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy so refreshing. The book’s heroine, stay at home mum Lucy Sweeney, battles domesticity daily. She’s unable whittle down the mountain of dirty laundry, keep the car gassed up, find her credit cards, or remember when she last had sex. Lucy’s overwhelmed by life at home with three boys and Husband on a Short Fuse, and dealing with Yummy Mummy No. 1 and Alpha Mum at school. As an escape, she starts a harmless flirtation with Sexy Domesticated Dad, but it takes on a life of its own, forcing her to decide what she really wants.
Relaxing in the evening by reading about parenting (even fictional parenting) after a day spent doing it can be an oxymoron. But Slummy Mummy, which is funny, endearing and scattered with trenchant observations about motherhood, made us feel better about our own domestic shortcomings and frustrations. And we figure that’s much better than feeling guilty for not achieving the perfection that yumminess implies.
Of her day-to-day life Lucy says, “I don’t mention the things that I do routinely, the endless cycle of cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing, partly because it has become second sense but mostly because I can’t quite believe that the contours of my existence have become defined by this domestic treadmill.”
In a nod to the yummy among us, Slummy Mummy did get Vogue’s seal of approval. Anna Wintour, the magazine’s famously glacial editor, described it as, “Hilarious . . . a literary phenomenon to rival Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It . . . [Neill] plays with the chaos and comedy of 30-something metropolitan maternity and brings it to an unexpectedly moving conclusion.”
And while the sum of our parts goes far beyond either label – Yummy or Slummy – we’re glad to see the spectrum expanding.
The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill
$25.85, Random House
One Response to “Slumming it”
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Let us know what you think or share your great finds with us so we can share them with other Vancouver mothers!
I’d like to think I can be yummy while being slummy :) Let’s redefine ‘yummy mummy’ as ANY mom, since we all do our best and that in itself is yummy indeed.