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Milf Teeth

The Yummy Mummy Internet Is Getting Me Down

It's making me want to get offline forever.

A screengrab from the weird as shit Romy and the Bunnies website

Dear Internet. I'm writing to tell you that I am thinking of breaking up with you. I know this will come as a shock as we've been together a long time, you're my best friend, and you're really good in bed. So good in bed, in fact, that it can be hard to sleep when I lie next to you, which is every night. Sometimes I wake up again in the early hours and there you are, just waiting for me still. Your commitment is unswerving and I would be a fool not to appreciate that. Not that this dedication is a one-way street as I too am committed to reading you in your entirety up to 38 times a day, and more when I have an important deadline elsewhere.

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It’s not the listicles that have broken me. Sure, it's bad enough when your whole internet is just people posting "The 29 Most Middle Class Things That Have Ever Happened To Piss" and "I GOT PISS! Which Non-Solid Item That Got Flushed Down 1990s Britpop Toilets Are YOU?" It’s bad but it’s not The Glow, a website glorifying super high-end yummy mummies from New York that I found five days ago and haven't been able to stop clicking through since. The Romy and the Bunnies website was bad enough, with its fashion shoots of the two-year-old granddaughter of a Parisian dynasty. ("You too can dress your child like the baby of Carine Roitfeld's heir's heir! But you must start by getting your arms back in shape! Pregnancy does terrible things to your arms!") Then there's Jools Oliver on Instagram whom I am forced to follow for legal reasons, and whose children's playrooms are so much lovelier than my entire house. I will tell you in confidence, Internet, that sometimes she makes me want Jamie Oliver to stick his kebab-wand inside me so that I too can be pregnant with four more fat-tongued… no no, what the hell is wrong with me? This isn't right.

But The Glow, The Glow is the nadir, Internet. The endless fashionable mums with the morning light drifting through their hair. They dress like Victorian ghosts on a Californian beach holiday. Their children's bedrooms eschew wardrobes – instead, they hang their children's designer clothes along pieces of driftwood, dangling from the ceiling on lengths of softly distressed string that glint in the sunlight like spun gold. Apparently parenting is all about driftwood and spun gold now.

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The Glow describes itself as "a glimpse into the world of inspiring and fashionable moms. Here you'll find their styling ideas, go-to gear, multitasking secrets and enviable decor". Internet, I have been reading this site for three days now and somebody needs to switch you off before I fall any deeper into the lives of people who say, about their baby, "I like to mist Sunny's face every morning with Heritage Rose Petals Rosewater Spray – it makes her laugh – and I give her a massage every night with Desert Essence Jojoba Oil." These people who say that motherhood has been such a learning curve that they now believe they are superheroes, "a multi-tasking problem-solving goddess! I know that when I see other parents, they know that I'm a super hero too. If you're lucky, you'll get to wear a cloak and a mask (I do sometimes), otherwise you just achieve it daily in disguise."

Internet, there was a man the other day in New Zealand who was on the beach, went in the water, and found himself attacked by a shark. He was standing in about six feet of water when he felt a tug on his leg, and thought one of his friends had grabbed him. "I looked behind to see who it was and got a bit of a shock," he told Radio New Zealand. He says he felt no fear, though, he just thought, 'Bugger, now I have to get this thing off my leg.' Somehow this man had a knife in his hand, and so he stabbed the shark for long enough that he could get it off his leg. "I put a few nicks in it," he explained.

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Anyway, he escaped, he got himself sorted out and went to his car, where he kept a first-aid kit for going on pig hunts. Being a doctor, he managed to stitch himself up OK, and then he headed for the pub. Eventually the landlord gave him a bandage because he was dripping blood onto the floor, but he stayed in the pub and went to work at the hospital on Monday, where they sorted his stitches out a bit.

Internet, I would like to see a lifestyle feature on this guy instead. A Tumblr dedicated to arty shots of the enviable decor of his limbs, perhaps featuring interviews with other people who got attacked by killer sea beasts and still made it for a pint afterwards. Some details of the products they used to make sure they could still walk in the aftermath of the attack. Lots of pictures of wounds and blood. I think we could all take a lot of inspiration from it. Because becoming a mother – a single mother – felt, basically, a bit like that. Or at least more like that than a light mist of rosewater oil applied lightly to my child's darling face.

A shark attacks you, you stab it with a knife, stitch yourself back together and you go to the pub. Somebody gives you a bandage, the blood gets mopped up and you head to work on Monday. And then it is all reasonably fine, very often lovely, and not really super-hero like at all because it is what humans and animals have all been doing since the dawn of time and if you have a washing machine and your kids are healthy then there's nothing much to say about how hard it is because you could be down a coal mine waiting for a canary to huff on some carbon monoxide and die.

Follow Sophie on Twitter: @heawood

Previously – Why Alain de Botton Loves the Daily Mail Just as Much as the Rest of Us