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Part of motherhood is the inescapable feeling and conditioning that you’re probably doing something wrong. You should just be a natural at juggling parental responsibilities, looking after your home, and keeping up with your career, and be able to do it all with a serene smile on your face. It’s all bullshit, of course, but when you’re bombarded with perfect homes and wives on TV and Insta you can’t help but compare yourself.
I thought I was safe within games because while Daddies are very much in vogue, being a mother is not. So when I was browsing the eShop on Nintendo Switch this week and I spotted Virtual Mom – Job Simulator Manager which promises to “step into the everyday life of a modern mom and experience the thrilling moments she faces,” I felt like a challenge had been thrown down.
Julie (virtual mommy’s real name) looks about 24, is perfectly made up all of the time, and can apparently show you what a real mother accomplishes in a day. Basically she’s perfect and I can’t let that stand – a mum simulator can’t really be a better mum than me… can it?
Julie starts her day awake before everyone else and already dressed in a smart-casual red blazer – her first job of the day is to wake up the kids and get them dressed which they neatly do without any prompting. Meanwhile I have to repeatedly ask my daughter to put her socks on and then console her because the new toothpaste is a slightly different kind of mint, all while I’m still dressed in an old, fraying promo shirt as pyjamas. This round definitely goes to Julie.
Next, it’s time for a match-3 minigame because parenthood involves a lot of Candy Crush-like games apparently. This is how Virtual Mom plays out; you walk around a lavishly large house completing tasks by walking up to a designated spot, and then pause for some unexplained puzzles.
Perhaps it’s a philosophical reflection on how motherhood often throws up unexpected challenges that see you shifting little pieces of your life around on a daily basis to line up with others, or perhaps it’s just bad game design to help pad things out. Who knows. Either way, Julie takes it all in her stride, making a lovely breakfast of grey rectangle to share, and then getting the kids ready for school.
The bus parks up on her patio but Julie doesn’t seem to mind. she’s a working mother who takes everything in stride, after all. She gets changed into an identical (but different coloured) blazer and then heads off to work to manage a hotel. At this point in my own routine I’m still in my pyjamas and slowed down by making a second cuppa while wiping down the surfaces because, unlike Julie, my kitchen can’t magically clean itself.
While she’s already meeting clients and sorting out rooms, I just about make it upstairs to sit at my computer and scroll on social media for 20 minutes before writing hard-hitting journalism pieces like this one. Another point to Julie then.
At lunchtime things start to turn. Done with work for now, she returns home to wake her husband who looks like he passed out still in his full suit after drinking too much the night before, followed by a round of match-3 that’s set up in such a way that you can only complete it if you get lucky with how the coloured sweets have landed. The kids have also returned, and now she has to make lunch for them all (more grey placeholder rectangle, yum!). Her husband also demands to be brought tea on a fancy serving tray while lounging on the balcony before she heads back to work.
She may be smiling through it all, but I start to feel sorry for Julie – the ideal mum’s life doesn’t seem like it’s much fun. All that work looking after the kids and bringing in money for the household only to get zero help from your partner must be soul crushing. Perhaps all of those random puzzles are her way of distracting herself so she doesn’t have a breakdown. Later on you join your family to relax with some TV, but while they all sit on the sofa Juile has to stand.
Then the game ends. That’s it. Day in, day out, those are the ‘thrilling moments’ Julie gets to face in her ideal version of motherhood: constant work, an unsupportive husband, and not even enough gratitude to be allowed a spot on the sofa. She definitely has things under control far better than I do (I felt accomplished when I remembered to brush my hair before school pick up time yesterday), but if that’s what people think a simulation of mum-life is like then I’m happy to fall short.
I’ll take having to instruct my kid not to lick doorknobs and wondering why my elbow is suddenly damp over having to smile through one day of Julie’s depressingly soulless life. Virtual motherhood looks terrible! That’s what you get for 0.89p on the eShop, I suppose.