Even on the very worst days, there’s usually a light to be found. Flecked throughout or dappled like sunlight we can usually find at least one Good Thing. But on our very hardest days, the days when we feel like we sighed more than we spoke, on days where we collate our unkind words into a rap sheet, we forget the good.
Parenting is wild. In every single…
Read MoreYou are not a permissive parent.
You are not.
It’s tiring. It’s tiring to turn against things so ingrained in us, since childhood, since…
Read MoreThere’s the gentleness in her hands as I brush her teeth and she turns around to stroke my face. The soft kisses she lays on her baby’s face, the softer words still as she tucks her most loved and ratty bunny into bed and wishes it a “goodnight…
Read MoreI think that we are often sold a trope, a stereotype of what kindness in motherhood should look like. I ask you to imagine it, to close your eyes and think of the words “self-kindness”.
Is it bubble baths and facials, a spa day, shopping without children, getting your haircut, a massage? Or is it something more deeply nourishing than that?…
Read MoreThe night and days before you become another year older I find myself playing a game. It’s always “this time last year”, “this time two years ago”.
On the seventeenth, it’s this was so very nearly your birthday.
On the twenty-ninth…
Read MoreEvery 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 MoreThis post is the first of a series on shopping second-hand, beginning with clothing.
I have always been a magpie. It began with stacks of Vogue in my teenage bedroom, weekends spent in city centres and Topshop bags toted like an identifier. Then graduated to much smaller things- like newborn size smaller - of high street baby clothes…
Read MoreI remember crying, big wracking sobs, because all I wanted was a bath. Eilish was seven weeks old, I was seven weeks postpartum unsure as to whether or not she would wake up. A ten minute soak in some warm water was all I wanted. Just five minutes, even, would do. It was a small lifeline to before, the smallest indulgence that had become an impossible task. I didn’t have one…
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