In Which My Knickers are Twisted

Did you guys know there is a Canada’s Yummiest Mummy contest? It’s audience-participation, mostly, but the entries are also judged by the Mummy Mafia.

Holy shit.

I know – it’s all about the advertising. Lots of people like free stuff. I like free stuff. If I get free stuff for being me, well, that’s a good day. But “yummy mummy?” Didn’t that term die a horrible, fiery death 2 years ago? WHY NOT?

The only thing yummy about a mummy is her milkful breasts. After that, she is whoever she is and that person is probably not edible. Right? Are you mothers out there edible? Are you YUMMY? I just don’t get how it’s supposed to be a compliment to be referred to as something that sounds like a rhyming snack food.

Erica Ehm, creator of the yummy mummy club which, sadly, I already knew about because Saint Aardvark snuck a free magazine with her on the cover into my bag one day, tried to explain it to me at that website. She said that a yummy mummy is defined as someone who is more than ‘just’ a mother. Someone who has not forgotten her ‘old’ life and who makes time for her friends and self. Laudable goals. Some women do consider themselves ‘just’ mothers (against their wishes to be considered more) and many women do lose their identities temporarily when entering or enduring motherhood. I agree that it is worthwhile starting (reviving?) a counter-movement to the old idea of putting your partner and children first always forever.

Seems to me, though that while with one hand you are issuing a batttle cry to women to be whole, complex and unique, you are using the other to slap them back into the compartment next to the dill pickle dip and dark chocolate (two things that I, personally, would call yummy.) You are equating a woman who is a mother to a consumable item. Because heaven forfend a woman should not be available for desiring, owning or consuming.

Sure, the word “yummy” can be used to describe anything attractive, not just food. Shoes are yummy. That’s a yummy purse. Yummy husband you have there. But in every context, yummy means “I like it and I want it.” Do you describe something as yummy that you don’t want to own, have, keep? It’s a quality that indicates publicly the worth of the object in question.

So like milf, may it rot in hell for all eternity, yummy mummy to me means “just because I have used my reproductive organs for their intended purpose does not mean that I am any less possessable.” It’s a statement meant to reassure a worried world that growing a human inside your body and then raising it does not make you any stronger or more resiliant or more sure of yourself. Underneath it all, despite the life-changing (life-creating) you’ve done, you are still the same.

And I say bollocks to that. I am the official Unsavoury Mummy. Back off.