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quoted as having said that to keep a man happy you must be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. To which her razor-sharp (and presumably not short of a bob or two) daughter replied that she’d hire the other two and take care of the bedroom bit. Well said, lady.

      These days Granny Hall would have to add another few jobs to the CV to keep her man, if not happy, then certainly as he might like: maid, yes; cook, yes; whore, yes please; but also nanny, diary organiser, interior designer, decorator, money-earner, accountant, doctor, counsellor and seamstress, to name but a few. In other words, the world’s best PA.

      The number of things a lady feels she is required to do these days to qualify for a Gold Star is enough to tire us out just by thinking about it—which is probably why so many of us are exhausted half the time. But if we stop for a moment, and ask ourselves a few fundamental questions, we soon see that the situation isn’t quite so daunting or depressing after all:

      1. Do we have to be all of these things? Clearly the answer here is ‘no’. We do not have to be perfect in every aspect of our lives, and to try to be so is ridiculous and self-destructive. Something’s gotta give, baby.

      2. Who are you doing it for? If you can honestly say that you are trying to be the best wife/mother/cook/cleaner/decorator etc. because it makes you happy, then hats off to you, but maybe you need to lower your expectations a little. Even the most talented, hardworking woman in the world can’t do it all. If you are doing it to please your partner, then you have some very serious thinking and talking to do: if he doesn’t love you without all the trimmings, then he doesn’t love you at all. He loves the life you give him, not you.

      3. What does it say about us? The more we take on, the more successful and accomplished we are as women—no? Well, no, I don’t think so. It’s great to be able to do so many things, and to multi-task 24/7, but I don’t think it makes us any more complete or admirable. If anything it shows us to be more needy of praise and desperate to impress than ever, and this always smacks of insecurity.

      So what’s a modern family girl to do? Keep slogging away, cooking sumptuous meals, hosting dinner parties, performing breathtaking sexual acts every night, redesigning and decorating her stunning living room, raising her kids perfectly while wearing gorgeous clothes to complement her perfect skin, perfect figure, perfect home and perfect bloody life??! NO. She is far too intelligent to give herself away like this—to become a slave to what others might say about her. If you feel that you are wearing too many hats at once and are in danger of taking someone’s eye out with one of them, then the following should help:

      

Put the blinkers on. Who are you trying to impress? Your friends? Your husband? Your parents? Who are these people who you think will judge you according to whether your cushions match your curtains or your freshly baked scones rise as well as your salary. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks—you do as much as feels sensible and stop if it gets too much.

      

Get real. As soon as you can rid yourself of the feeling of trying to impress someone, you can get on with the more important business of spending time with your family and enjoying yourself a little. This is what life is really about, not worrying whether your DVD collection is arranged alphabetically or by genre. Nobody cares!

      

Be honest with yourself. I know that many of the jobs I do, from cook to nanny to gardener, I do because I like them. I like decorating my home, organising the kitchen, keeping on top of the school admin and making sure the children’s clothes are labelled. If I moaned about it I would be unforgivably hypocritical, because I would complain more if the jobs were done badly by someone else. Sometimes it’s much easier to do it myself, and do it well. Many of my friends also admit that while they often complain about having too much work to do, they actually quite like getting so much done themselves. That’s fine—just be honest with yourself, and know whether you are doing it for you or for everyone else.

      

Cut down. It’s amazing how much you can ease off on the Perfect Wife thing and still have a happy, clean, fed and satisfied family. Sure, some people might admire you for being good at a million jobs, but much more impressive is to be able to do them all but to only do the ones that are most important for you and your family, and stick to making those work. So take the test—see how much you can cut down on without your entire family coming apart at the seams. I think you’ll find it’s quite a lot—so put that iron down!

      

What example does it set your kids? I was brought up in a family where my dad had the ‘main’ job and did all the Man stuff, like tax returns, mending the car and reading the paper at the weekends, while my Mum had a part-time job and did everything required to keep us all alive. Without her we wouldn’t have had anything to eat, wear or wash with. Honestly. We kind of joke about it now—‘Ha, ha—Dad can’t even boil an egg! And he doesn’t know where the washing powder lives, even after thirty years! Ha ha!’—but really it’s pathetic and I grew up believing this was how marriages had to be. My husband thought I was really weird when I assumed he couldn’t cook, clean or shop and it took him years to get me out of that old-fashioned mindset. He deeply regrets this transition, of course—now I expect him to pull his weight equally around the house—sucker!

      You know you are fantastic, he knows you are fantastic and your kids will always think you are fantastic because you are their mum. Working yourself into an early grave through excess polishing, baking, tidying and weeding won’t make them love you any more.

      All of this housework has made me hungry. Let’s leave all the cleaning products behind and head towards the kitchen, stopping off along the way to check out what we’ve got to choose from…

       PART SIX The Pantry

      Oh, this is a treat—going into the pantry. My own house doesn’t have a pantry (you will have gathered by now that my own house is really rather small!) and neither do the majority of homes today: they were either never built in the first place or they have long since been knocked through into the new, open-plan kitchen-living areas or converted to utility rooms or back porches. But this house has a pantry because it means we can separate all the food buying and storage from the cooking and eating. So cunning.

      The Weekly Shop: Easing the strain

      Anyone who has ever shopped with children in tow will know what a hideous, exhausting, depressing, frustrating and miserable experience it can be. What makes it even worse is that shopping is supposed to be enjoyable—a treat, even. To have this self-indulgent, therapeutic, and leisurely pastime ruined by a toddler who refuses to sit in a buggy until you buy him a Bob the Builder magazine, asks for a chocolate bar every thirty seconds and manages to clear the bottom shelf of the family planning aisle in Boots with his left shoe, leaving you struggling to put back as many packets of condoms and jars of Vaseline as you can before the whole of your street walks past, is enough to drive the most level-headed mother slightly mad.

      

Shop while they sleep. This mainly applies to very young children who still have a nap in the day. I know there are a million and one other things you could be doing while you have this period of quiet, but when you watch babies screaming in buggies, toddlers pulling clothes off rails and mothers becoming exasperated at the checkout you realise why shopping with a sleeping beauty in the buggy is a good deal more sensible. Little kids hate shopping

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