July / Birthdays


birth, babies, bodies, breastfeeding

This month was a well of nostalgia. July always is. I am thrust back to the past, however hard I cling to the present. However hard I work I’m hurled with my broken nails into maudlin reminders. A month of anticipation and worry, niggling silliness. A week, two days, 24 hours until the anniversary of […]

25th July 2012

Half-baked


family & parenting

Depression can make you do some bloody barking things. Even afterwards, when you aren’t in the abyss. I’ve written about black dogs, and howling madness, but I find sometimes the most aggravating of all things related to mental health are the niggles, the things you can’t trust, the draw of magical thinking and other delusions, […]

20th November 2011

First Person


family & parenting

Spider-boy has just turned four. FOUR. Well done him – eating all that time, straddling two decades already, forging ahead and becoming him and him and then him again. Squeezing off see-through skins like a never ending edemame bean, perfect moulds of him shedded day by day to reveal brighter, firmer, more solid seed kernels […]

19th July 2011

Independence daze – Part II


family & parenting

The daze of title, is of course mine. It has been a week for striking out. And now I have to tell you something bad. Something very, very scampy indeed. Did you read the brilliant My Naughty Little Sister books when you were little, secretly worshipping the nameless anti-heroine and her accomplice Bad Harry? Here’s […]

14th June 2011

Strawberry Sunday: Bite me!


family & parenting

Newborn goes gaga for his first taste of fruit as we celebrate Mr Thatwoman’s 34th birthday with friends, Eton Mess and 34 (count ’em) kisses a piece from Spider-boy. Birthdays bring out the best in Spider-boy. He spends the day asking what it was like when Mr Thatwoman was ‘only 33’ and getting frustrated that […]

8th May 2011