Chapter 14: The Art of the Half-Arsed Effort & chapter 15: The End

 Chapter 14: The Art of the Half-Arsed Effort

Some things require maximum effort – keeping your kids alive, making sure they don’t stick a fork in a plug socket, occasionally feeding them something that isn’t beige. Everything else? Half-arsing it is an essential survival skill.

Take housework, for example. We all want a clean, tidy house, but who has the time? The solution? The half-arsed clean. This involves:

-          Throwing everything into baskets and shoving them in a cupboard before guests arrive.

-          Spraying Febreeze and calling it ‘airing out the house’.

-          Making the bed by simply pulling the duvet up to cover the chaos beneath.

Or what about parenting? The trick to half-arsed effort is strategic efficiency. A calming bath time with essential oils and classical music? A strip wash in the kitchen sink still gets the job done. Craft activities? Stickers and crayons count. Homemade costumes for a school dress-up day? NO. Let them wear last year’s Halloween outfit and call it a day.

The world will not collapse if we do the bare minimum sometimes. And frankly, half-arsing it is an essential skill that more people should celebrate.

Challenge:

Pick one thing this week to do with the absolute minimum effort. Watch how nothing bad happens.

The Fuck It Flowchart – A Handy Decision-Making Guide

Chapter 15: The End

Dear fellow survivor of the domestic shitstorm, the social circus, relationship dilemmas and the motherhood identity crisis – if you’ve made it this far, congratulations. You are officially a card-carrying member of the Good Enough Mum Club.

There is no initiation process beyond simply existing, occasionally hiding from your family and wondering how the hell you ended up here.

By now, you’ve hopefully realised something: nobody actually knows what they’re doing. Some mums look like they do, but trust me, they don’t (even the ones with the colour-coded family calendars). We’re all just winging it. And the ones who look the most together? They’re probably the closest to a breakdown.

So let’s make a pact, right here, right now: we stop pretending.

We stop apologising for the fact parenting is hard. We stop feeling guilty for doing whatever it takes to get through the day. We stop thinking that one more tweak to our routine, one more attempt at a perfect balance, or one more parenting book or podcast will magically make this whole thing effortless.

Because it won’t.

Here’s the truth: you will never be perfect, and that’s a good thing. Your kids don’t need perfect. They need you with your sanity intact. The always-tired, often-sarcastic, forever-loving human disaster of a mother who keeps showing up, even when things get really, really hard. Some days, you will be a ‘good’ mum and other days you will be a train wreck. That’s life.  

But guess what? Your kids will be fine.

They won’t remember the bad days—when Cocomelon babysat them for hours while you clung to sanity and ended the day curled in the foetal position. However, they will remember the way you made them laugh, the cuddles after bad dreams, and the fact that you were always there. To them, you’re the safest place in the world—just by showing up.

So stop doubting yourself. Stop scrolling through Instagram, comparing your chaos to someone’s curated perfection. Stop thinking there’s a secret handbook to parenting that everyone else got but you. This is the handbook. And the final chapter is just me, yelling at you (with love), to stop over thinking it.

Now, do yourself a favour: close this book and go and do something for yourself. Eat something with both hands. Read a book that has nothing to do with parenting. Text a mum friend and tell her she’s doing a great job (because she is. And so are you).

You are enough. You were enough.

Now go forth and be the gloriously half-arsed, good-enough mum you were always meant to be. You’ve got this. And we’ve got each other.