Beautiful Illustration - The Blog

Fendi or Fake?

November 9th, 2006

I saw a girl on the tube the other day with a fendi bag on her lap and I wondered if it was real or fake. 

Then her fake bag, set me thinking, and I realised that at times I feel like a complete fake myself.  A fake mother, fake artist, fake web designer, fake wife.

I sometimes wonder if people look at me walking down the street pushing the pram and think to themselves she’s a fake, she’s not a real mother.  She doesn’t know what she’s doing with that child, look at him sucking a dummy with his blankie, look at her with her fashion hat on and her lip liner - she is not a real mother.  Sometimes I look at all the other mothers and they look like they have been mothers forever, like they know instantly what to do in a crisis, like they have the three steps to potty training tattooed on the backs of their heads, and me well I’m just getting by, the best way I know how, my way. 

The same goes for my work, when I first became a legal secretary I felt like a fake, like any time now they would call me into the office and say ‘you are not a real legal secretary, you can’t type as fast, you are not as efficient and you are not permitted to disgrace us with your prescence any longer’.  Of course that never happened.  Because I was a good legal secretary and there is no such thing as a fake, you are either learning, or experienced and just because you are learning doesn’t mean you are fake.  Now the same goes for my web design.  I keep thinking that somehow I will be ‘caught out’.  Someone will ring up one day and say ‘you are telling everyone that you are a web designer, when I know that you are not, you cannot possibly think you are good enough to actually charge clients for web sites, you cannot call yourself a web designer when you are a big fat fake.  Oh, and I want my money back!’.

Of course noone has every called me up calling me a fake or demanding their money back, infact its quite the opposite, I seem to be doing so well as a web designer that I have surprised myself. 

So the point is that I never feel quite good enough, I never seem to be happy with my level of experience and knowledge, in anything that I do.  This is very annoying and makes me quite restless. 

For example, yesterday I was at home with Daniel and he was quite happily watching a dvd of noddy whilst I finished the washing up, but throughout the whole process I had pangs of guilt and feelings that I should be doing more with him.  I shouldn’t be letting him watch tv, I should be doing giant floor puzzles or paintings with him.  I should be out at the park letting him run about - that’s what a real mother would do.  But the thing is that just that morning we were out at a music group and then we went to town, and then we played with the blocks and then he had lunch and a nap and then he watched noddy. So he had a busy day and I think in my own professional opinion as a mother that after a busy morning a child should be allowed a period of time doing ‘nothing’.  Shoot me.  There I have said it.  I am a mother who believes that her child should be allowed to sit and do nothing if he so chooses. 

I don’t know how to deal with a fourteen year old child who has started smoking, but I do know how to deal with a two year old who can’t sleep because they have a temperature, therefore even though I have still a lot to learn about being a mother, I am in fact a mother, a real one.   

And that goes for everything else too.   

Entry Filed under: Personal