Dear hipster girl

I just want to say that you’re full of it, and not for one second do I fall for the portrait of style and perfection you try to pass off as your life. No, sirree bob, I don’t. While I’m prepared to concede that you might be one of those genetically blessed human beings who can produce a hoard of children and still have a washboard stomach, I do not believe the lie that your days on this earth comprise of nothing but baking pies with your children, picking home-grown vegetables and strolling through fields of lillies in funky, designer gumboots.

Those adorable little hand-made smocks and miniature moccasins your three-year-old wears on trips to the market to buy organic apricots? Pants on fire, friend – I had a three-year-old not long ago, and I can say with certainty that little girls of that age won’t be seen dead in anything that’s not plastic, pink and heavily adorned in fake diamonds. So, the fact that you can get your young child to look so thoroughly, extraordinarily stylish and amazing tells me that there’s some serious bribery and threatening going on behind the scenes and away from the lens of the professional photographer who obviously follows you around all day, because no amount of freaking instagram filters can make pictures look as good as yours.

You home school all of your children, yet nobody has been murdered and buried in the garden at night? Not only that, but you still find the time to make relish and lounge about of an afternoon on a crocheted, vintage rug? Nobody in your house appears to work, but you keep flitting off on lovely holidays where you’re photographed drinking mint julips out of hand-made frosted glasses while your children amuse themselves with the wooden toys your cool, tattooed child-husband constructed from ice lolly sticks on the way there?

I’d like to point out that one of your children is a teenager. Don’t tell me for one freaking second that she doesn’t sleep in a Justin Bieber t-shirt and thinks the lot of you suck. As for your friends who all look like they stepped off a Fleetwood Mac album and live in airy loft apartments decorated with daisy chains? I go to friends for Sunday lunch, too. We don’t drink granadilla margaritas through fancy, multi-coloured straws (product placement, anyone?), we drink cheap sauvignon blanc, sometimes right out of the bottle before we’ve even gotten out of the car because hair of the dog works and frankly, it’s been a long weekend.

Our children are either naked, in their pjs, or wearing yesterday’s clothes which still bear the relics of a foodstuff one threw at the other, and it’s with great joy and encouragement that we usher them into the TV room with ipads and games so that we can get down to the business of microwaving our lunch and talking about how frazzled we feel. And, of course, drink more wine. My Monday mornings are not spent conducting miniature tea parties and baking sage and butternut tartlets because I have a job which means I work. And my children go to school so that for a few hours of my life I’m not wiping poo off somebody’s bum or explaining why they can’t have sherbet for breakfast.

So, girl in the leather sandals and flowing maxi skirt, I’m not even going to feel bad about this stuff. I know that your children don’t really make you eggs benedict for breakfast and that you’re actually part of some clever marketing campaign designed to make the rest of us want to be like you and buy stuff we don’t need. It’s niche-market consumerism, and I see right through you and your muumuu. You’re a stepford wife in shuttershades, and I have your number.

Your sincerely,
Susan