Time was when being a mother was a fairly straightforward business: your own mum was round the corner, the extended family was close enough to call on and you all muddled through as best you could.
No longer. With many families relocating for work, the support of the extended family has eroded. The result is that being a mum today can be a lonely experience.
In the wake of the technological boom, many parenting websites set up as a kind of 21st-century equivalent of the extended family — with advice and support for those no longer able to glean that help from those around them. Isolated mums, some finding themselves back at home after busy careers, logged on with relief, gleefully joining virtual communities to replace the real ones no longer there.
The demand is huge. So much so that today one of the most popular sites — Mumsnet — has 17,000 members, all swapping stories and experiences, asking for help and getting an almost instant response.
Log on to the talk section of Mumsnet and you will be there for hours: in turn shrieking with laughter and crying at people’s day-to-day problems. You’ll find answers to serious questions on illness, divorce and alcoholism, alongside lighter ones: how do you hold a cordless phone in place while you talk and get on with jobs around the house? Should your bra always match your knickers? How often do you change your sheets? Above all, you will marvel at the sense of involvement in one another’s life that exists between its members — with confidences encouraged by the site’s policy of using only nicknames. You may get advice from Tigermoth, Soupdragon or wickedwaterwitch, which seems strange at first but that anonymity means no subject is out of bounds.
As Mumsnet member Soupdragon puts it: “What I love about it is that you can go online and find really serious conversations — or threads as they’re called — entitled ‘Well it’s finally happened, he’s left and I feel like shit’ or ‘Mum is dying and I feel so helpless’. These are next to ‘Has anyone got an epilator and is it any good?’ or ‘Chlamydia is the new Kylie’ — a current thread is about what people have called their children.”
In fact the sense of kinship is so strong that the wheel has now come full circle and what started out as a virtual community is slowly being transformed into a real one. Across the country meetings are taking place where member mums cast off their faceless nicknames and find new friends.
Justine Roberts, 36, who co-founded the website, has been along to a couple of meetings. “After the initial awkwardness of introductions with the nicknames, everyone talks away like they have known one another for years. I think you always have something in common with another mother, that’s the point,” explains Roberts.
Of course initial trepidation is natural. “When I went to my first Mumsnet meet-up my husband called me about 10 minutes after I’d got there to ask whether I had in fact discovered a bunch of lorry drivers with a fetish for mothers . . . Luckily I had just found seven like-minded mums, we had a great time . . . and I found two new friends within half a mile of my new house,” explains Mumsnet member Countessdracula.
It all started in 2000, when Roberts spent a miserable holiday in Florida where the childcare on offer was appalling. “It was such a waste of precious time and money,” she says. “I thought it would be wonderful if there was a forum where mothers could share their experiences of holidays. Then I thought: if it worked for holidays it would work for other products.”
Roberts set up Mumsnet with fellow antenatal class members, television producer Carrie Longton, 38, and radio producer Rachel Foster, 37. “We quickly realised that the chat element was the key focus,” says Roberts. “What people wanted was advice from other mothers, people who had gone through the same thing.”
The chat element has all but taken over and now accounts for 80% of the site’s traffic. On a Friday or Saturday night a conversation will often appear entitled “The bar is now open”, which conjures up a lovely image of women all over the country, kids finally put to bed, on a virtual night out.
“I have posted on everything from ‘Shall I go to see Mum’s body at the chapel of rest’ to ‘Am I dirty?’, a conversation about laundry habits that provoked much comparing and confessing,” says one member, MO2. “I’ve made some real friends here and being anonymous helps enormously — no one judges you by your dress sense, weight, or the size of your house. Above all it makes me laugh because more than half the women on here are hysterical.”
There has even been a virtual birth as one mother went into labour online and the midwife was two hours’ away. After lots of advice the thread went quiet and then her husband came on saying he’d delivered a baby daughter.
Recently the Mumsnet community rallied round a member whose thread read that her estranged husband failed to show up for his daughter’s birthday, leaving her distraught. For the rest of the week the girl was opening presents from the birthday fairies.
The sense of community and caring the site engenders is a recurring theme. On one recent thread a woman posted that her marriage had become routine, the sex was boring, she’d met someone she fancied and she was thinking of having an affair. Everyone gave her advice, largely along the lines of “think twice, you may regret it”. A couple of days later she posted a message saying: “Oh God, my husband’s read it, what will I do?” Two hours later she came back on and posted that they had just had the best sex they’d had in years. Virtual cheers all round.
Meanwhile the move from virtual to real friendships continues apace. The reasons for attending the Mumsnet meetings are as varied as the mums who go. One mum even admitted that she’d gone along to the arranged venue but hadn’t joined the Mumsnetters, instead watching from afar, revealing that she’s much shyer in real life than she is on Mumsnet; that her Mumsnet postings are the person she’d like to be.
Another mum explains: “I was curious to meet people I knew so much about. But going around this pub, realising that I didn’t know where the Mumsnetters were and saying hopefully to random groups of strange women, ‘Hi, I’m squirmyworm’ has to rate among life’s more ludicrous experiences.”
That and walking about the house wearing your baby’s tights on your head, which, incidentally, is how you keep a cordless phone strapped to your head.
www.mumsnet.com
