Anyone reading this not in the UK might not be aware of our upcoming election and what feels like a really pivotal moment in our political and community sphere. Please don’t think that I am about to bombard you with my political opinions, I’m not. But, I do have some comments on how things feel as a working mum, and mostly those comments rotate around the word, community.
Community is a word I am aware of more and more at the moment. It is in the semantics all around us: in the words of politicians, in the need to be more climate-aware, the move to shop more locally, and even how we need to be a community in social media too – we all have a duty to care and support – not troll and bully.
As a mum herding two children on the school-run, I am ever frustrated by the lack of community-spirit when it comes to picking up after one’s dog. I am a dog-person through and through, and believe you me, a dog has been on my personal life goal list for my entire adult life. But. Every walk to and from school has become fraught with me trying to keep my children out of dog poo! I can’t understand why people don’t pick up. What I do think is that lack of respect for others, and that thinking from a position of ‘self’ sums up a lot of the problems facing our society at the moment.
When you only think in terms of ‘self’ that disregard for others, which at first may seem harmless, and just a bit lazy, actually has a ripple effect. That one person who doesn’t pick up after their dog creates a series of hazards for everyone else using that path. It means that each mum has to try and develop x-ray poo vision and seriously, at the moment, I think I must sound like a crazy lady the amount of times I am yelling and grabbing my two to keep out of the poo!
That disregard also shows to others that it’s ok not to pick up after your dog, and therefore it’s ok not to care about the other people using that path. So a couple more people stop picking up. And soon, there is literally sh*t everywhere!
Apart from the dog poo, there are pockets of working-mum-hood that are pretty flippin’ fantastic. One of those, is Bizmums, which truly is the epitome of community. It began as a series of networking groups aimed at self-employed mums, the main aim being that you can network with other self-employed mums, at child-friendly venues. I have been a Bizmum for two years now, and truly I have never felt so supported. We are all women who work hard, juggle running a business around our families, and through online and face-to-face I have found a community where we all work to help each other. It is not competitive, it is nurturing and collaborative and open-minded. It shows me that the true spirit of community is a powerful and amazing thing.
Without Bizmums, I probably wouldn’t have created DesignerMum, I certainly wouldn’t have published Reynard, and I would feel a lot less secure and settled where I live.
And how does all this relate to our election? Well. When we operate from a position of ‘self’, we are choosing not to care or support those around us. For me, here we have a problem. If we all remembered that as human beings we have a duty of care to those people and the world around us, I believe our world would be a happier place. It would also be a richer place. A society which places community at its heart is surely somewhere where everyone can benefit, in all sorts of ways. I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t strive for our own goals, of course we should. But instead of only caring about ourselves, we can choose to pick up after our dogs, and make other people’s walks more fun. We can choose to get milk delivered in bottles and keep a local farmer going, whilst also reducing our plastic consumption. We can choose to support those working around us, and improve our local economy directly.
This election feels to me like a choice between self and community. From the bottom of my heart I hope that we can choose community, because I am tired of all the sh*t.
Designer Mum 