Skip the pink lab coat. I've earned the truth.
I don't know about you, but I roll my eyes at aspirational marketing.
When I had my first child — who recently got his driver's license, so I've just aged myself, albeit happily — I was convinced I would be an enviable, unblemished parent. I exclusively breastfed. I ate organic. I hand-mashed steamed produce from my farmers market, all in a strange effort to be the perfect mom.
But there is no such thing. There is only a woman standing in a kitchen at 11pm googling whether she can freeze the mash. A woman who knows she will probably throw said mash out in the midst of a rage clean to combat being overstimulated several months later.
Today I no longer look at Pinterest. (Because who has time for anything when there are fights to break up and clients to email and a Fanta spill on the new carpet in my basement?) My flirtation with that medium was brief. I now keep myself to memes about Elmo getting roasted for not overtly defending the Knicks, voyeuristic clickbait on the gorgeousness that was Dua Lipa's wedding, and the occasional article about quantum physics, or the upside of enjoying being mundane. I have a pack of three boys, all in the double digits, and I've been a single mom since I was six months pregnant with my youngest. (A story for another time, another place, and roughly 1.5 martinis — maybe a quarter cigarette over a coffee in my favorite orca mug.)
I tell you all this because somewhere along the way, women's wellness decided there were only two versions of me available in stores. There's the Madonna: serene, backlit, with rolling waves of perfectly unkempt hair, drifting through a field of linen. She has clearly never located a missing cleat at 7:52am or driven her children to school in her bathrobe.
And there's her counterpart — all filter, no stretch marks — apparently designed to make me feel some type of way about a body that produced three humans weighing over 8.5 pounds each. (Which, frankly, is a party trick I'd like a little more credit for.)
Here's the thing: I don't want to be aspired to. I want to be talked to. And I want to laugh. Skip the pink lab coat. Skip the scary statistics dressed up as a gift with purchase. Skip the euphemisms. I promise I know all the words and I've said most of them in traffic.
I'm 40-plus, which is the age where I finally know what I like, what I don't, and exactly how much your marketing is trying to get away with. Turns out that makes me a delight to sell to.
Just tell me the truth and buy me the martini and I’m yours forever. I’m low hanging fruit. And after three kids, that's not just a metaphor.
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