I Want to be a Mum with Dad Lore

Ever think back to your dad’s dinner-table stories and realise ‘dad lore’ is mostly insanely dangerous shenanigans he rebranded as character building? As a girl, I heard those stories like fiction — but I bet most boys saw them as a blueprint. Unlike boys, who are brought up to believe that their bodies are made of rubber, girls are often encouraged to stay safe, to preserve their bodies and minds as if they were delicate heirlooms. While boys are often excused for erratic and reckless behaviour, girls simply don’t get away with being silly or impulsive. And I’m not just talking about expectations — that girls should be smarter, more composed, more mature — but also physical risk. We will be discouraged from having riskier pastimes: like, don’t learn how to skateboard, or ride a bike too fast, because ‘you could hurt yourself’, and scars are certainly not pretty on a girl. Girls are taught to play it safe — but it’s time we make our own mum lore and start living for ourselves.

Even if it’s not our own parents discouraging us, someone or something else will. I know this from personal experience. My mother was my number one fan when I learned to skateboard at age thirteen. Even with her support, though, I found myself leaving my board behind when I moved to university, because it simply didn’t fit with the heels I now felt so confident wearing. I certainly had grown more confident but annoyingly cautious compared to my younger self. I see this as a common feminine experience: we start choosing safety over freedom. We choose what we know over what we don’t.

Being a girl is a constant identity crisis, torn between an emotionally-impulsive heart and a mature, cautious mind. More often than not, the mind wins — especially when it comes to making decisions about ourselves. Ironically, the only time we let our wild hearts take the lead is in decisions involving boys. Maybe, if we just decided to flip the script, leaving the cautious mind to take the lead in our love lives and letting our crazy hearts choose how we live and who we become, life would be much easier… and more fun.

Men seem to do this better than we do. My dad always told me, “I’m in love with my life” — by which he meant every beautiful, chaotic, spontaneous, inadvisable part of it. That lack of regret came from dreaming recklessly and living freely, on his own terms, never waiting for anyone’s approval. Here’s the difference: men grow up as the main characters of their own stories — their choices are rarely questioned, and their detours are seen as adventures. They don’t hesitate to centre their lives around themselves at all times, even if it sometimes comes off as selfish. 

Women, on the other hand, are conditioned from a young age to think of everyone else first. What would our parents want? How will our siblings see us? Will our friends still like us? And so we hesitate. We second-guess our decisions, our life choices, our crazy plans. Maybe it’s time we learned from that unapologetic male confidence — not to be careless, but to be free. Like Gillian Anderson said: “Follow your dreams, not your boyfriends.” We deserve to fall in love with our own life before we fall in love with anyone else.

The life we will look back on — hopefully with laughter and pride — won’t be the life we carefully curated, but the one we simply lived. We should plan that solo trip we always wanted to plan, try that sport that seems too difficult at first, or express that opinion that we were once told was not ‘ladylike’. Who cares, really? 

Our future ‘mum lore’ will be made up of all the stories we live before we meet the dad of our future kids (if we choose to have some). It’s the life we build before we find someone worth settling down with. So until we do, why should we give anyone the power to tell us how to live the right way? University is the best opportunity for us to build our mum lore, developing our intelligence and critical spirit, but also uniquely unhinged personalities, and live stories worth telling our future kids. 

One night, my girl best-friend and I decided that a construction road sign would make a fantastic decoration for my new living room. Why? Well, the right question is, why not? Not everything has to make sense, and not everything has to be a thought-through, mature decision — something we often forget as we grow older. Sometimes, the only logic that matters is choosing to have fun with our fellow women and enjoy the time with the people who are closest to us. Living by the rules is safe, but we all know that rules were only created because it’s more fun to live without them.

As women, we already know that the future awaiting us — for those who choose to be mothers one day — will be a life full of love but also full of responsibilities and duties. Hence, we have an overwhelming responsibility to ourselves first: to get rid of that imaginary boundary that blocks us from living how we want to. Remember the only person you could ever truly disappoint is your future self.

Illustration by Isabelle Holloway