Right.
Let’s take a moment — just a moment — to salute a species more resilient than a Nokia 3310, more enduring than a royal family scandal, and more overlooked than the ‘Terms and Conditions’ checkbox.
Yes. I’m talking about the working mum.
She doesn’t “balance” work and home. Oh no. That word implies some sort of gentle yoga pose. She juggles it — with flaming swords, blindfolded, on a trampoline, while someone tugs at her trouser leg asking where their dinosaur pants are.
Let’s start with the toddler years.
These are the chaos years. We’re talking 5 a.m. wake-ups because someone wet the bed. Again. A breakfast consisting of three cold coffee attempts and a half-chewed crust from a toddler’s abandoned toast.
The working mum tries to leave the house looking mildly like someone who has a job. Instead, she arrives at the office with mashed banana in her hair and a Peppa Pig sticker stuck to her backside.
Then the guilt begins.
She missed the class photo because someone scheduled it at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. What kind of monster does that? Her child’s tooth fell out and she heard about it via WhatsApp — complete with a blurry photo captioned “he was SO brave!” And she sits there, in a finance meeting, nodding at pie charts while trying not to cry into her tablet.
But wait. Fast forward. Toddler becomes pre-teen.
Now we enter the Sass Era. You are no longer “Mummy.” You are simply a walking embarrassment who buys the wrong cereal and doesn’t “get TikTok.” Your lovingly prepared after-work spaghetti bolognese is met with a disgusted, “Did you use actual tomatoes? That’s gross.”
The working mum? She comes home from a ten-hour day and walks straight into a wall of door-slamming, eye-rolling, and homework-related meltdowns. She helps with a maths worksheet that appears to have been written in Klingon.
She stays up till midnight sewing a costume for “Dress Like a Historical Figure” day, only for her child to say, the next morning, “Actually we didn’t have to dress up. Oops.”
But still, she keeps showing up.
Now we hit the Teenage Apocalypse.
Suddenly, you live with a six-foot-tall hormone in track pants who treats you like customer service at a budget airline. You ask how their day was and you get “fine.” You ask what they want for dinner and you get “I dunno.” You offer life advice and you get “You don’t understand anything.”
No hugs. No drawings. Just Wi-Fi demands and arguments about whether it’s okay to wear shorts in the middle of winter.
And yet, when that same teenager gets dumped, or fails a test, or has a panic attack at 11 p.m., guess who they call for?
Mum.
The one who’s been working all day, then cooking, then folding, then checking emails while waiting in the car during netball practice. The one who missed school concerts and class cupcakes, yes — but never stopped fighting for a better future.
She missed moments. She carries guilt like a handbag she can’t put down. But she also taught them what it means to be strong, to persevere, to love loudly even when you’re exhausted.
So if you see a woman in the supermarket, in a blazer with yoghurt on the sleeve and a face like she’s aged ten years in two, do not underestimate her.
That’s a gladiator. That’s a CEO of Chaos. That’s a working mum.
And she’s not just surviving — she’s bloody magnificent.
Now, if you’ll excuse her, she’s going to sit in the car alone for ten minutes pretending she’s on a tropical island.
Cheers, Mum. You’ve earned it.
