WingingIt…

MS - 5 Feb 16

“To be honest, I’m just winging it. Life, motherhood, my eyeliner. Everything.”

… is what the beautiful typology in the quote said when posted onto this very site’s Facebook page a few weeks ago. The quote resonated with me so much that I asked the Selfish Mother team if they would print ‘Winging It’ onto their next sweatshirt saying I would buy the first one if they did. They replied by saying if they did do it, they’d send me one for free.

And they only went and bloody well did it!

Which to me just sums up the whole ethos of this site and the huge community that has formed as a result. They see people, they hear people, they respond to people. They GET people.

And it’s this that has given me the confidence to write my first ever blog post on Selfish Mother while, hopefully, at the same time exposing some winging it truths. Well kind of. I’m not Brene Brown but this all a bit ‘Daring Greatly’ for me…

As someone who grew up thinking that ‘grown ups’ new everything and that at some point in my early adulthood I would be struck by an epiphany that would download everything I ever needed to know into my brain – the stark realisation in my twenties that that hadn’t happened, and never would, came as somewhat of a shock. Not at the fact that I might have to continue bumbling along, finding my own way and hopefully getting a few things right and paving a good and happy life for my family at the same time – but at the realisation that the aforementioned grown ups must have been totally winging it too. And in a really convincing way.

Having read a fair few column inches on the number of women that say they suffer from imposter syndrome, and having seen the response to and comments around the Winging It shirts on Selfish Mother over the past week, my shoulders seem to have breathed their own sigh of relief at the realisation that I’m probably doing okay – and even if I’m not, we’ve got each others backs. Because between us we’ve been at the coalface, in the boardroom, at the end of a changing table, sat in A & E with a poorly child, in an interview, in a coffee shop with a baby at the end of our breast, in a delivery room bringing life into the world, in bed with a laptop working until past midnight, in a room full of other mothers thinking they all knew what they were doing when we didn’t have a clue…

But for mums, winging it isn’t just about putting lipstick and a brave face on it (although I do believe that Charlotte Tilbury’s 1975 lipstick has actual magical powers). We’re not just hoping for the best, expecting something for nothing. We work hard. Really bloody hard. We put the effort in to make the best lives we can for our little folk and for ourselves. No single one of us is ever going to know everything there ever is to know. But by winging it, by going through the motions and actually thinking we can do something, chances are we can flipping well do it.

I have totally winged writing this post.

In the same way I winged going swimming with my three year old this morning with hair in places it really shouldn’t be.

In the same way I did the school pick up with no make up on today.

Wing it. We’re in it together. x

Image: Selfish Mother

MS

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