Bugaboo, Bugaboo, Bugaboo, what are we going to do with you!?

A photograph from a Vogue Netherlands shoot was posted to the Facebook page of the baby buggy brand, showing a woman running in her knickers.  Pushing her toddler in said buggy.  Through the park.  Like you do. The woman is in incredible shape.

But what’s not incredible, is the enormous pressure these images of celebrities and models put on mums to not just keep this new bundle of poo and tears (I mean joy) alive, but to be worried about what they, the mums, look like while doing it.

I had an anxiety dream last night that the three plants I have on my balcony died in the storms at 3am and I know that shit’s going to fuck me up for weeks.  Can you imagine how I’d be with a child?  Ain’t nobody got time for worrying about their waistline at this critical time.  When I’m normal human tired, I reach for the snacks to keep my eyes open. When you’re superhuman, new mum tired, I imagine you use your spare hand to continuously shovel elephant sized burgers in your face.

And it seems that it’s no longer enough just to look, at the very least, vaguely human during the exhausting time after the stork drops off your gurgling gift of life.  You have to have regained your pre-pregnancy weight, and maybe even surpassed it, while all the while looking cool as a cucumber, swishing your glossy mane, tossing your head back and modestly proclaiming, “the weight just fell off. Breastfeeding is the best!”  B*llocks!  Every single mum I know in the real world were absolutely knackered.  For about………. well, for forever.  But especially in the first six months.

What are you supposed to do?  Get back to the gym the next day balance out the weight of the baby dangling from your right boob, with a dumbbell of equal weight in your left hand, and start squatting?  It’s all about, pinging, springing and snapping back into shape.  Well, I say, BACK OFF – give new mums a break.

This woman is a twenty-three year old model, who loves the gym, whose job it is to love the gym, who was pissed off she had to wait six weeks to return to the gym, had her baby at twenty-one and is married to an equally sickeningly gorgeous and healthy exhibit of the human species.  Their Instagram accounts are enough to make you want to rip your disgustingly average eyeballs out of your desperately normal face.  They should put some kind of advisory notice on them.  Enter at own risk (of throwing yourself into the depths of pre-baby/no-baby body depression).  So for sure, mums beware.

I’m in averagely good shape, without incubating and then pushing something the size of a watermelon out of my vagina and this photo makes me feel bad about my body.  Don’t pile that extra pressure on real-life mums.  They’ve got enough on theirs and their babies’ plates; and probably up the walls, all over the furniture, down themselves and in their hair, to worry about core strength.

I don’t enjoy the pressure of having to make a decision about what to have for my tea.  So for sure I don’t want to feel pressured to lose the 376 kilos I gained during pregnancy, while I sleep off the effects of the epidural and gas and air to wake with abs of steel.

And that is my ‘reasons why I don’t have kids’ #42