Every time I speak to parents about sleep, it’s the one thing that repeatedly comes up as having always have knocked them for six when it came to becoming a parent. We are told often as new parents that “just wait, one day you’ll wake up and you’ll have slept the whole night!” and that’s the end, close the book, we’ve ticked the sleep box and off we go into the sunset.
I could shout it from the rooftops; sleep is not linear. It’s not a track clacking…
Read MoreWhen I speak to parents that I’ve met, my friends in groups and those that I’ve met over in online spaces, I find that most of us are parenting in ways that differ to how they themselves were parented. And I’m almost certain that many of our own parents would say the same thing.
No parent is perfect. We make mistakes and we wish we’d done that certain thing different. We regret that word that came out sharper than intended. I think we all look introspectively and find things inside ourselves that we’d prefer not to pass onto our…
Read MoreI found going back to work hard. Grappling with the idea that things weren’t going to be quite as imagined, pregnant delusions of just being at home with my daughter, getting by and budgeting weren’t going to cut it. So, I packed up Eilish and me in the car, a box full of baby led weaning for an entire two days, and went back to work.
Read MoreI sit here, last of the festive mince pies being consumed and washed down with a cup of tea in the quiet that can only be found after 10pm at night. Candles are lit, my husband is out for the night and upstairs my daughter slumbers, balled up into the corner of her cot in such a way that is so undeniably her. And to the left of me sits a notebook, brown and unassuming, started at the beginning of December; my hundredth reattempt at journaling (it will stick this time). A few days ago, the day after Boxing Day, I began scribbling notes and memories and words and dreams and ideas. Most of them were the thoughts and feelings that follow me, at the tail end of this year, of 2018. Some of them belong to my brown notebook alone, they are a little too raw even for me, but some, some I thought I would share, simply because it feels good to.
Read MoreI don't have many regrets as a mother, barely a handful. But if I had to choose one it would absolutely be the perceptions I placed upon myself of who I would be as a mother. So much aggravation would have been saved, of that I am positive, had I just shunned the pre-judgements and preconceptions, took them off, sealed them up and shoved them under the bed like last summer's clothes. I would not have been so unbelievably tired. It is hard trying to recover from birth, sleep with healing stiches, breastfeed on demand, keep yourself fed and watered, all while holding yourself to some unattainable standard you yourself created when brewing a small human.
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