Over the weekend, Meghan, wearing a lilac coat, posted a full-length mirror selfie of herself to her Instagram with her four-year-old daughter, Princess Lilibet, kneeling at her feet in a red dress – which reveals the inside of her beautifully arranged wardrobe.
The doors to the giant mahogany-looking closet at her home in Montecito, California, are flung open to display neatly ironed shirts. Hanging from an ornate bronze door handle are pressed black jackets and trousers. Some high black stilettos are carefully positioned on the floor by the wardrobe – one pair with the Christian Dior label clearly visible.
There is nothing more personal than sharing the inside of your wardrobe, and now rumours are swirling about the hidden significance of such a post. Is she starting a fashion brand? Last week, a sizing chart for T-shirts appeared on her brand’s website, although it was quickly deleted. Could this “inside her wardrobe” post really be the next clue in her ever-evolving career trajectory?
But let’s face it, the orderly selection is not what faces most women when they open their wardrobes. Where is the mismatched lineup of wooden and just-in-case wire hangers collected from the dry cleaners? What is with this colour coding? It’s more like a grab-and-go, lucky-if-it’s-clean lottery for your everyday working mum.
And just as Meghan’s walk-in screams out to other mums, “Nothing to see here. Look, everything is perfect”, so does Sienna Miller’s recent post-partum appearance, aged 44, on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, just three weeks after giving birth.
“I can’t believe you’ve just had a baby three weeks ago,” a marvelling Fallon gushed, as if it were a badge of honour to be plonked in front of 1 million viewers so soon after giving birth, to discuss her latest movie Jack Ryan: Ghost War.
“Thank you. It’s crazy to be talking words and to be wearing a dress. What has happened to pyjama-gate?” Sienna joked, looking totally unflustered. There was no drained look here that is more common among women less than a month out of a labour ward. Nope. Sienna was glowing, with bright, bouncy skin and not an eye bag in sight. Maternity leggings? She’d swapped those for a tight burnt orange-coloured dress and pristine white stilettos.
She did at least have the good grace to confess to her “absolute disaster” transatlantic flight to the US, having brought along with her both the newborn and her two-year-old daughter, whom she shares with partner Oli Green, 29. She did at least admit to the baby crying mid-flight.
“And then the looks people give you on the flight,” she continued. “The baby’s screaming, she’s screaming…” Sienna added that she eventually had a meltdown after landing in New York.
“I got to the immigration line and just broke down,” she claimed. She’d even taken to Instagram with footage of her breastfeeding her newborn baby in a makeup chair backstage at Jimmy Fallon and was clearly juggling – as we all do – but with a big difference: she looked perfect, and made new motherhood look effortless, despite “nightmare” stories to the contrary.
Of course, celebrities often have to work soon after giving birth – Anne Hathaway has openly discussed the realities of pumping milk on set, and Milla Jovovich brought her newborn daughter Dashiel directly to the movie set for Resident Evil: The Final Chapter just months after giving birth in 2016. But Sienna – officially a “geriatric” mum like me – managed to pull it off as if it’s perfectly normal to look like she’s just back from the most restful holiday in the world after giving birth.
Whitewashing the reality of motherhood in one fell swoop leaves the rest of us feeling like bedraggled losers. And just in case we didn’t get the memo, Sienna also attended the new film’s premiere in a strapless grey gown in New York the same week.
“Amandaland” is a deeply relatable portrayal of modern, middle-class parenting offering a much-needed balm from the pressures on mums to be perfect
Perfect Meghan and perfect Sienna have just shown why the messy mums of BBC’s award-winning Amandaland are so damn popular – so popular, in fact, that the BBC has commissioned a third season. Its deeply relatable portrayal of modern, middle-class parenting is a refreshing far cry from Montecito and Hollywood, offering a much-needed balm from the pressures on mums to be perfect, which are now fuelled by social media as well as A-listers.
We’ve all felt lonely – and in need of support – and apex celebrity mothering gives unrealistic expectations about what it all entails (hello Rihanna and your newborn making her debut in haute couture Dior nappies). The perfection backlash is now in full force, with the average working mum taking back control and preferring instead to laugh at the mishaps that come with the job description.
Meghan’s claim to be a working mother, juggling it all, on her podcast Confessions of a Female Founder last year, feels off when you consider she works from home and employs an “amazing nanny”. She is as excessively curated as the lifestyle brand she is flogging online. And projecting an unrealistic image of maternal and business perfection while claiming they are just like the rest of us all is just irritating.
Miller’s “making exhausting look effortless” shtick may fool some, but for every person posting a fire emoji and “#hotmama” in her Insta comments, there are more of us doing a collective eye-roll, wondering how many nannies and housekeepers she’s got to keep the Sienna show on the road. When it comes to motherhood, we don’t want to see perfect closets and pristine postpartum bodies; we want co-conspirators to laugh at all the balls we’ve dropped and the many disasters narrowly averted.
Real supermums are the ones who simply get through the day, or even to the end of term, without losing the plot, and then have to cope with the school holidays. A problem shared is a problem halved – and if we can laugh about it together, it makes motherhood feel so much more manageable. And, more importantly, fun.
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