Who puts the pressure on?

"I love it.  I feel like I've got the perfect work: life balance!", I smugly told my friends.  I further gloated with "enough family time and time to myself, I feel like I've got my life back and I'm finally able to focus on my own career".

 At the time I had one child starting school.

Fast forward to two children later and I feel like a woman struggling under the pressure of the need to be a 1950's housewife ( desperately trying to keep house) a 20th century earth mother (having a diet of organic quinoa and being a regular at baby sensory/massage) as well as being a yummy mummy (a gym bunny as appose to washed out old hare).  None of these I achieve, except the old hare part.

Most days I rock up at the school gates with a child that looks like she's been dragged through a hedge backwards and who has a bag of old crumpled paper, no drink, no snack, no coat, what she does have is a toothbrush with toothpaste embedded in (so that she doesn't notice it's there) after a failed attempt at brushing her teeth in the car.  The other two screaming children are in their pjs and hungry and I'm wearing my gym clothes - I have no intention of going to the gym but at least it looks like I'm trying.  And the truth is I'm just bloody bored and oh so lonely.  I'm bored of the school run, the tantrums, the nappies, the refusal to do anything I ask and the repetitiveness of it all.  I ended up talking to myself in car, just running things through in mind, non events really just day to day trivialities, as if I'm speaking to a friend.  On the plus side my 2 year old who is listening will have an extremely eloquent vocabulary.   I sit and watching the teenagers of society in awe of their freedom and zest for life.

Who puts these pressures on us?  I can sense the judgment from my parents, the in laws, the mums at the school gates and the grannies in the coffee shops.  How am I meant to be all these things? How is it possible to achieve it and actually enjoy being a parent? Answers on a post card.  

How naive and arrogant I was with just the one child.  I take my hats off to you who achieve it all but can I ask this, how do you do it and does it really make you happy?