It’s a strange new world when you produce a child, but my world is stranger than most as I am an Old Mum.

Oh those perfect filling-free pristine white teeth…

My child has silken skin and white teeth. New heart and lungs all clean and pink and working to perfection. I have to find something to hold on to when rising from my seat….he hurls himself backwards off treehouses.

I am out of sync when chatting over the park swings. No one knows who New Order were/are. (They may all be dead by now, in fairness).
They are baffled when I talk about Green Shield stamps. (So are you, aren’t you.)

They know they are supposed to hate Mrs Thatcher but they are not quite sure why. And actually, they won’t welcome discussions on the Poll Tax riots anyway, for Old Mum, I have discovered, can be rather more earnest and deep thinking than Young Mum. She finds herself saying things like: “Yes, that links back to the primeval clutch instinct, possibly soon after the orbital thumb developed wouldn’t you say?” when Young Mum tells a funny story about baby pulling her hair.

She’s not as interested as she once was, in hair mousse and high heels and has backpacked round many of the countries her peers cannot locate on a map.

If Old Mum is not careful she can be left with no Young Mum friends at all (There is no Junior Mum category for the purposes of this blog. You are either Young or Old Mum.) And you cannot survive new motherhood without mum friends. You must have people who will discuss the consistency of your baby’s pooh with enthusiasm.

People to ask if it’s normal for babies to chew leather bags. People who understand when you break off in mid sentence to gaze adoringly at your divine child doing something incredible. You can’t do this with a bank assistant I have discovered. Especially not in the middle of the queue.

So Old Mum must try to fit in. Her greater experience of life must be modified so Young Mum does not feel she is being lectured to  (But such is Old Mum’s longing to dispense advice she has set up this blog!)

Above all, Old Mum must not Mother the Young Mums. She must only mother her Young Son. And that, luckily, is the common thread that ensures Old Mum does have some really rather lovely Young Mum friends – because she is just as clueless on child rearing as they.

This blog started out as being solely about my struggles with a new baby but as Old Mum aged and got a bit poorer through lots of alterations to the kind of income she was used to (which really was of no interest to Young Mums who did not want someone chuntering on about finding a glorious old climbing frame in a skip while they were planning a day in the scented air of the brand new John Lewis baby department), then extreme money saving became something of a passion and then…menopause things happened and she got a dog…and it was all such a struggle at times that I thought I might as well just write about it all and save you a load of worrying if it’s all happening to you too.