I was going to write a different post for the week before Christmas. About how Dan and I are trying to wring every last drop of joy from the festive season this year, my first not working – not on Christmas Day, not on Boxing Day, not on any of those surreal, time-passing-slow-as-treacle days in […]
I recently finished Michelle Obama’s autobiography. I bought it in its first week – along with literally a million other people. It is an incredibly warm, wise book – a book that says so much about womanhood, race, love, grief, marriage, privilege and, yes, politics. It’s full of lines that have you nodding along, thinking […]
Everything’s been a little bit quiet around here. Quiet on the reproductive front, as we’re not currently trying to conceive, not pregnant, and I have managed to go several months now without having a miscarriage (that’ll do uterus, that’ll do). Instead, I’ve been throwing myself into a lot of freelance writing and trying to figure […]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about things that help. Not just in those initial raw, grief-soaked days and weeks after a loss, but in the longer term. I took part in Bide & Bloom’s #thebigselfcareshare the other week, and it’s been on my mind a lot since then. One thing I didn’t mention in […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about what I thought I would write for this week – it’s Baby Loss Awareness Week in the UK right now – and honestly? I’ve struggled. I feel like it deserves my best ‘content’, my best efforts. Me at my most opinionated, campaigning, vociferous self. But my heart is just […]
Dearest, Don’t worry. I know how you are really feeling about this birthday. And it’s neither of the answers you tend to give people when they ask – and they will ask – how you feel about turning 30. It’s not the faux, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life angst that everyone half expects, and which makes for easy self-deprecating […]
I think I’ve cried at every single episode of This Is Us. But the latest was something else altogether. Because, this was us. If you’ve not watched it (you really should) it’s about an American family, the Pearsons, spanning about 40 years of their lives, zooming in and out of their stories, hopping and skipping through […]
I’m often late. Not by a lot, just by five or ten minutes, usually. Enough to make me sweat and feel like everything is a disaster. It’s something I really dislike about myself and I’m never quite sure why it happens, because I’m a pretty organised person at heart. Perhaps it’s eternal optimism. Trying to […]
Not long after my first miscarriage I interviewed a brilliant psychologist, who specializes in pregnancy loss and infertility, for an article I was writing. I think I will always remember that conversation – how she managed to send some splinters of light through what was otherwise a blinds-drawn, shutters-down kind of time in my life. […]
