Get in the bin.
Mother’s Day …..here we go….another day under pressure to perform perfection.
The perfect Mother’s Day. Along with all the other days that can get in the bin because it’s more about curating the moments rather than just living them.
So much of our culture today is entrenched in performative hell.
Scroll the platforms today and it looks like every mother in Britain has spent the day dreaming of floating around in a silk dressing gown while someone else gently presents her with brunch and unlimited peace, whilst also being presented with the perfect representation of Mother’s Day.
Meanwhile in the real world there are women cracking on, still shouting at their poppets of joy, still loading the dishwasher, answering work messages, locating lost football boots and wondering why they are the only one who knows where the spare batteries live.
Life has become something we perform. It’s utterly bonkers loo la.
We perform success.
We perform motherhood.
We perform leadership.
We even perform blinking rest and recovery.
Even relaxation has become a moment to document.
Performing life and living it are two completely different things. One is theatre. The other is presence.
And the same distinction exists in work as well.
There is high performance. And there is performing leadership.
High performance is intentional. It is the individual who knows what matters and directs their energy there, who notices, observes, shares, understands, flexes. Not claims.
Performing leadership is often loud. It is busyness, over proving, carrying everything and calling it strength.
One builds momentum. The other builds exhaustion.
The pressure to perform everything is everywhere now. Cracking on, on purpose, is something different entirely.
It is choosing what actually matters to you.
It is making decisions from clarity rather than comparison.
It is living a life that feels good, not one that photographs well. It’s spending today shouting at your 23yo to fold the washing and then shampooing the carpet because when the 20yo brought me a brew in bed, he dripped it all the way up the stairs and throughout the bedroom carpet with more droplets of coffee than Hansel and Gretel had bread crumbs. It’s sitting there in all the glorious chaos and knowing it’s still me that has to walk the daft dog.
Sometimes (I imagine) that looks like a beautifully calm Mother’s Day brunch.
And sometimes it looks like your kidults taking you out for tea knowing I will also be paying for said tea when the kidults look at their bank account balances of doom. It’s about embracing the reality in all its duality.
Both count.
Because the goal was never the performance. The goal was the life.
Let’s crack on, on purpose