On Jamie Oliver’s Wife.

The dilemma of not particularly maternal women in their 30s who find that the whole biological clock thing is not a myth and has just caused them to throw a lifetime’s aversion to bodily fluids to the winds and get pregnant is that, frankly, they barely know which end of the baby is up, let alone how to deal with them on a hour to hour basis.

Luckily, you were not the first person you know to have a baby.

Best Friend had that privilege, and you have benefited hugely from her thorough research into the business, the fact that all the people she knows seem to have followed her lead in the last four years (Happy Birthday Best Friend’s Adorable Little Girl), as well as the huge store of baby accessories she has in her loft. Or had, you should say, as now you are borrowing most of them.

In particular she supplied you with books. Most of which have been extremely useful. You’ll get to them later.

However.

You found yourself supremely irritated with Jamie Oliver’s Wife’s account of her first year with her two eldest girls.*

To start with she is one of these women who can barely manage the mildest winge about the difficulties of baby care and instead spends most of her time warbling on about the joys of motherhood. Despite the fact that her children have less than a year’s gap between them.

This made you feel old. Under 25 year old mothers really are obnoxiously energetic.

The fact that it was appallingly badly written might have had something to do with it, too. You wish the editor had had a firmer hand with the exclamation marks in particular. And it has certainly cured you of ever again contemplating using ellipsis as a method of punctuation.

The effect of the bad writing though is mainly to make any and all incidents seem irritatingly trivial. There she is describing what you assume was actually a pretty desperate episode involving mastitis and while she was presumably actually writhing on the bathroom floor suffering untold agonies for the umptieth day, all you could think is: visit the doctor already. Or rather: Oh!! My!! God!!! Visit the doctor already!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And she has PCOS. She responded well to clomid, however, and got pregnant first cycle. Which made you feel uncharitable on behalf of other less fortunate people with infertility problems. Especially when she then promptly got pregnant again about two and a half minutes after giving birth. Without really giving any indication that she knows how lucky she is*.

The entire book is also an infuriating tribute to just how easy parenting is when you can just throw money at it. Don’t get me wrong, Jamie Oliver’s Wife is a hands on mother. But what did she do when Daughter was refusing to sleep at night? She hired a night nanny and presumably retired to the spare room for a couple of weeks**. I rest my case.

Mostly, though, you found yourself profoundly disturbed that Jamie Oliver’s Wife’s entire raison d’etre was to be a wife and mother.

Why this is, you can’t quite put your finger on.

It’s not like you have anything against stay at home mothers. You are a stay at home mother. You would quite like to continue being a stay at home mother if the truth were told.

But you’ve done other things. Being a wife and mother is a part of who you are not the entire package. To have no other ambition, to have no other experience of life after so many have struggled for so long so that she could… (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????!!!!!???????)

It just seems wrong.

On the other hand, given that what 30 year old mothers most struggle with is the way that self gets subsumed into the endless demanding drudgery that 50% of baby care seems to consist of, perhaps Jamie Oliver’s Wife might have the right idea after all.

Except that most of all she just sounds monumentally tedious. 

 

*Which, by the way, you understand Best Friend had foisted on her as a gift originally.

 **Charitably, that could be the result of the awful style.

***Of course, this might explain the tremendous amount of energy too.