Beware of the Mummy Mafia.

(From Irish Independent)

Slummy Mummy Sarah Webb

The Mummy Mafia. The very words send shivers down my spine. You know the type - the perfectly turned out mothers in their jewel-coloured Juicy Couture tracksuits or yoga outfits who put everyone else to shame. Not because they are immaculately dressed, although this also irks me, especially when I turn up in my paint-splattered tracksuit bottoms and woolly jumper which has seen better days. No, it's because they make me feel so damned inadequate. And horribly guilty.

I know they are there judging me when I send Sam to school with no socks on, or in a short-sleeved shirt and no jumper on a frosty day, or when I arrive frazzled and late to collect him from a 'play date' (I hate that expression), after a meeting has run over and the Dublin traffic is its usual brutal self.

There are two kinds of Mummy Mafia females - the head girl at school, captain of the hockey team, captain of industry morphed into full-time mum type. And then there are the even more scary ones - the women who felt socially inept at school or at college but who are now getting their own back.

They are the plain women with no dress sense who love their 'mummy' status and milk it for all it's worth. They're on the Parents' Association, they run the charity coffee mornings in the local parish hall, they run mini-marathons in aid of the latest school fund. Anything for greater glory as a professional parent.

Recently my friend Rita was chastised by a Mummy Mafiosa. Rita - a sensitive woman who does her best to juggle her demanding full-time job with her three young children - was upset. She'd collected her ...