Eastern Suburbs Yummy Mummies Suffering from Elf Burnout

By Pearl Bullivant on November 24, 2021 in Satire

Middle class problems. Photo: Elle von Shelf

COVID has truly been an inconvenience for the yummy mummies of the East. While the people of the Western Suburbs have happily endured isolation doing what comes naturally – watching TV, existing on VB and McDonalds and amusing themselves with home tattoo kits and SportsBet – our yummy mummies have been denied the self-care and self-love essential to being an Eastern Suburbs mum.
It’s been a difficult five months of restrictions, and we have the new premier to congratulate for opening up NSW and understanding how difficult it is for women with large (quantitatively speaking), beautiful, affluent families to survive in a state of isolation. Life in the east has always been fraught with challenges and competition, even before COVID – choosing party themes for birthdays (unicorn bubbles or luxury glamping sleepover?), selecting the right ‘magnet school’ for one’s profoundly gifted child, deliberating between cosmetic injectables and yoga styles and ensuring one’s life appears more ‘Byron Bay’ than overcrowded ‘Bondi’.
Thankfully, one has the Hamptons-style beach cabana (inducing ‘cabana envy’ amongst one’s peers) to stake a claim on Clovelly Beach now that the beaches are once again open to the great unwashed. God only knows how one survived without the convenience of the beach cart – the new essential for lazy yummy mummies when dragging their able-bodied kiddies from the luxury of an illegally parked Range Rover to the local café for an acai bowl.
With Christmas upon us, the yummy mummies of the east have yet another challenge – the dilemma caused by the Elf on the Shelf tradition (i.e. one invented by a bored American mother). For those readers ignorant of the latest middle-class FOMO trend, Elf on the Shelf is a hideous looking creature sent by Santa to monitor and critique the behaviour of one’s children. You would think the parental dilemma would be one of psychological damage, particularly amongst the pseudo hippies, but instead it is actually a time issue – since the elf needs to be moved around to create proof-of-life, time strapped parents have been suffering from ‘elf burnout’, trying to find creative and fun ways to animate an inanimate object (not to forget the competitive spirit of posting it on Facebook).
As one who amuses her cat, Pushkin, by hiding her dry food in different places, Pearl understands how harrowing the elf dilemma is for parents. But, like all middle-class problems, it has been solved in the form of a $110 ‘survival box’ created in response to parents for whom the elf has become yet another thing to worry about during the Yuletide season. Pearl had assumed that all issues in the life of a mum of the east could be solved by a margarita or champagne (the essential bevvies to survive Halloween trick or treating, going by what I saw on our local streets last month), but obviously I was wrong, just as I was wrong when I assumed that coronavirus would replace the virus of affluenza in the east and provide us with the reset that is so desperately needed.