Now that the schools have gone back, the café feels like neutral territory again. She reclaims her usual spot in the corner, takes out her book, waits for her coffee. In the holidays, it gets too loud for her here; the presence of everyone else’s children oppresses, the noise and sudden movements of so many […]
A guest post by @Project_Babyu ‘Is it good news?’ My mother-in-law’s friend is smiling at me – and at my still swollen stomach. This is a common question in my community. From the moment a girl gets married, the next thing people will ask is whether a baby is on the way. Straightaway: ‘Any news?’ […]
A guest post by Kathryn Mann (@kathrynmannartist) My first miscarriage happened in a festival Portaloo. There’s no perfect place to lose your hopes, dreams and a significant amount of blood, but this was perhaps the least appropriately stocked, and most inconveniently located. Thankfully I had a couple of hankie packs in my pocket, so I […]
Last week, I launched a new guest blog series (you can catch up here, if you missed it) sharing different perspectives on miscarriage and pregnancy loss. All kinds of loss and all kinds of voices. Here, Hayley, who writes the blog Life. Love. Loss, shares her story…. I can remember reading, in some pregnancy booklet […]
It’s back to school season, and that means running the daily social media assault course of first-day-of-school pictures (I can’t be alone in thinking of it in these combative terms, can I?). A week-long parade of other people’s babies – and they do often look like mere babies, play-acting in their Big School uniforms – […]
There is a pregnancy of mine I haven’t written about before, for the simple reason that I don’t know for certain that it was actually a pregnancy. It happened (or didn’t happen, as the case may be) after we’d been trying to conceive for about six months, well before our first miscarriage. I was about […]
As some of you may have seen from my social media posts, last week I was made this year’s winner of the Tommy’s Mum’s Voice Award. (If you don’t already know about the work that Tommy’s does as a charity, you can read more about it here ). It is a huge honour. Though it […]
I wrote this for a newspaper a week or so ago, but thought I’d share it here, too, in case any of you missed it. I tried to unravel the many complex reasons women often feel they can’t take even a single day out after – or even during – a miscarriage. Please do share your […]
I’ve got a piece in this month’s Red magazine about socialising – specifically, how to be sociable when you don’t feel like it. I’d pitched it after seeing one too many ‘I’m sorry I’m late, I didn’t want to come’ memes, thinking that it would be interesting to delve into why we’re all apparently so […]
