Happy "Screw the Poor" Day, everyone!

Welcome to Budget Day, or as we've come to know it - the day where the government announce the new and innovative ways they've concoted to ruin lives and run this country into the ground.

In ten months of Tory government, plus five years under the Coalition, we’ve witnessed a comprehensive, ruthless, unrelenting attack on disabled people, low earners, unemployed people, families, elderly people, migrants, hospitals, schools, unions, civil rights, and the very fabric of democracy.

We were told that this was all necessary, and that our country’s fragile economy would be shored up as a result of all these cost-cutting measures. This should go down in history as one of the biggest LIES ever told by a government to its people. 

Here's a handful of truths instead:

Disability

• Over 14,000 disabled people have lost their mobility cars through switching from DLA to PIP
• 18,000 people lost vital assistance when the IndependentLiving Fund was closed last year
• The government used a loophole to reject calls from the House of Lords for an impact assessment before voting through a further £30 aweek cut to Employment Support Allowance (ESA)
• Proposed further cuts to PIP will see 200,000 disabledpeople lose £3000 a year
• The government admits that at least 2000 people have died following Work Capability Assessments, though campaigners say the true figure is much higher.
• WCAs have also been linked to 279,000 new cases of mental health problems, and 725,000 new prescriptions for anti-depressants.
• Disabled people have been hit up to 19 times harder byausterity cuts.
• While demand for mental health services has soared by 20% in the last five years, funding has been cut by 8% in real terms.

Credit: Centre for Welfare Reform

Housing and homelessness:

• The average house price is now over TEN times a person’s income, and in London NINETEEN times the average salary.
• Of the NINE MILLION private renters in the UK, one-third ofprivately rented homes fail to meet the Decent Homes Standard.
• More than 50,000 families are recorded as homeless every year, with over 103,000 children recorded as homeless for Christmas 2015.
• A third of homeless people are made so because of a privatetenancy ending, and being unable to afford to find another home – this figure has trebled under David Cameron, from 11% in 2009.
• The Tories rejected an amendment to the Housing and PlanningBill, which would see landlords required to ensure that homes are fit for habitation.
• The CAB estimates that over 700,000 families are living in privately rented homes that are unfit for habitation, with landlords taking in £5.6bn in rent for those properties.
• Over 15,000 homeless families have been put into emergency B&B accommodation in a different local authority – sometimes an hour and a half’s travelling time away from children’s schools.
• Research by letting agents Your Move and Reeds Rains showed rents in England and Wales had increased by 15% since May 2010, or 3.6% beyond inflation.

Credit: Shelter via ITV

Education and Teaching

• The government has announced that by 2020, all schools willhave converted to academy status.
• Overwhelming evidence has shown that academies are more thantwice as likely to become “inadequate” in Ofsted terms than schools under Local Authority control, and up to TWELVE times as likely to remain “inadequate” rather than improve.
• Teachers report working on average 59 hours a week, only 1/3 of which is spent on teaching. The rest is spent on planning, administration, and management.
• The number of teachers leaving the profession has risen by11% over the past 3 years, and 75% of those leave before retirement.
• Workload came top (61%) in reasons given by teachers who were thinking of leaving the profession in a recent YouGov survey for the National Union of Teachers, closely followed by seeking a better work-life balance (57%).
• 55% of 338 school leaders surveyed by the Association of School and College Leaders have reported a large rise in pupils with anxietyand stress.
• The NSPCC reported that the number of young people in Britain seeking counselling over exam stress has increased by 200% in recentyears.
• In 2013-14 ChildLine said it received more than 34,000approaches from young people over school worries such as revision, workloads, problems with teachers
• The “Prevent” agenda has been branded toxic and criticised for exacerbating Islamophobia, as families report feeling threatened with having their children removed.
• Some Further Education staff have experienced a real-termspay cut of 17% after years of below-inflation rises and pay freezes.
• Spending for adult education has been slashed by 25%, with a loss of over a million adult learners so far.
• £45million has been cut from ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classes, affecting 16,000 places.
• University maintenance grants for the UK’s poorest studentswere scrapped without a Commons vote, after a legislation committee with just 17 MPs present took the decision.
• The poorest students will now graduate with an average £53,000 debt.
• Around 45% of student loans will never be paid off, creating a financial time bomb for future years.

TUC "Britain Needs A Payrise" demonstration, October 2014. Credit: www.civilserviceworld.com

So I originally started writing this as a shouty Facebook post to summarise a few key terrible things the Tories have subjected us to since getting their claws back into government in 2010, and what horrors may unfold as the 2016/17 Budget is announced today. I've had to stop, partially because the list is now SO long - and I've barely scratched the surface, and certainly haven't analysed the impact on people's lives - but mostly because it's thoroughly demoralising to actually try and pull together a comprehensive overview of just how bad this government is. 

I haven't even touched on what they've done to the NHS, the conditions endured by migrants and refugees, our failure to address our role in climate change, human rights, civil rights, and so many other areas that the Tories are continually wrecking. 

We were sold the austerity package as the only hope of stabilishing our economy in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008/9. We were told there was no alternative, that we were all in this together. 

Well as the richest 1000 families saw their personal wealth double since the recession, while the net wealth of the poorest 20% has decreased by 57%, I don't feel very TOGETHER. 

With more and more devastating cuts wreaked on the most vulnerable sectors of our society, written into legislation by millionaire MPs who have personal stakes in private companies now holding contracts for the NHS, have massive property portfolios for private rental, and make a fortune from lobbying groups - I don't feel very TOGETHER. 

Countries such as Iceland, who were also hit by the recession, have gotten their economy back on track by letting the banks go bust instead of bailing them out, investing in public services and jailing the bankers who caused the economic crisis. Meanwhile, our deficit hasn't even been halved, when Osborne claimed he would have eradicated it by 2015, and we have created more new debt since 2010 than every Labour government in UK history combined. 

There was always an alternative. Austerity is a lie, and we continue to be conned by it. Eleven-million voters were conned by their promises in 2015, and now the remaining fifty-five million people in the UK are paying the price. 

Every single petition that calls on the government to reverse or halt another devastating decision under the banner of austerity, every last demonstration and protest, every piece of alternative media that exposes their lies - every small and seemingly inconsequential thing we do chips away at their facade. By getting organised, mobilising into a united front, and keeping up the pressure on them, we stand a small chance of making a difference. And if not, I'm sure as hell not going to let them get away quietly.

This seems like a logical place to plug the next People's Assembly demonstration. 

April 16th, central London - March for Health, Homes, Jobs, and Education.

Meet Ted: the Duracell Bunny Baby

The concept of a Duracell Bunny Baby is something I first came across on the Analytical Armadillo blog; it is a neat term for babies who have boundless energy and Do Not Sleep. Naps, night-time - sleep does not come easily to these little fireballs. 

Fifteen month-old Theodore is one such baby. 

Do not be fooled by the cuteness. This was taken at 11pm. He is laughing at my attempts to make him SLEEP.

A year ago I wrote a post about bedsharing and how the first three months of sleeping with Ted in our bed had gone. At that point, I was still confident that within a few months, he would make the gentle transition to his cot as my three previous children have done. The theory is simple: at a certain age, my babies have each started sleeping from late evening through to the small hours of the morning. This is when they are put into the cot; when they wake, I put them in my bed until morning. That's not an ideological thing. I'm just too lazy and fond of sleep to spend hours pacing the bedroom rocking them back to sleep. Eventually, the time between putting them down and them waking again stretches out until they sleep through in their own room of their own accord.

Beautiful, yes?

The other Smalls enjoying their time snuggled in my bed.

Please explain this to Ted! At fifteen months, he still does not nap for more than half an hour at a time and even that is dependent upon being held by someone. Occasionally - rarely - we are able to put him down on the sofa. We've successfully managed an hour or two stint in the cot on fewer than half a dozen occasions but the general rule of thumb is that children one, two and three go off to bed at 7pm and are asleep by 8pm. Ted gets into his pyjamas at the same time and the attempts to make him Go To Sleep begin. It might be me feeding him, Andy walking round the room rocking him, putting him down somewhere and singing/patting/ssshing him. Ninety-per-cent of the time NOTHING WORKS and at 10pm, the little bugger is still literally bouncing round the lounge and giggling at us. 

Last night, it was midnight before he finally gave in and nodded off. 

I don't do controlled crying at all, and even if I was prepared to consider it, it would be a very bad idea for Ted as he's prone to breath holding attacks and goes blue if he cries. There are also three other children in this house who have to get up early for school, so having a crying baby around just wouldn't be fair on them. I've beaten myself up, analysed all my decisions about bedsharing and breastfeeding and blamed myself over and over again for creating the Incredible Non-Sleeping Baby, but then I remembered reading about Duracell Bunny Babies. 

Reading down the list of bullet points on the Analytical Armadillo post about DBBs, it describes Ted to a tee. I'm so relieved to be able to tell myself this is not my fault. This is not a "something wrong" or a way I've broken the baby. It does, however, mean I don't know how to put it right and get this boy sleeping in some kind of vaguely sensible pattern.

Thankfully, once Ted has given in and dozed off he stays mostly asleep as long as I lie right next to him. If I move away, all hell breaks loose but there is honestly nowhere I'd rather be at 2am than lying in my bed, so that's not an issue. It would be MARVELLOUS if he spent some time asleep in his own bed though. I was mentally prepared for six months to a year of bedsharing and breastfeeding, but Ted seems intent on continuing both. He does seem a lot younger - if that doesn't sound daft - than my other children did at this age, so maybe this is just him taking in life at his own pace. 

I must keep reminding myself to just relax and embrace all the little bits of babyhood while I still can. He will grow up soon and eventually forge his independence and then I know I'll miss his evening antics and afternoons spent with him snoozing lightly in my arms while I will the rest of the world to shut the hell up lest they wake him.

This too shall pass.... this too shall pass.... Where's the gin?

The question parents dread to hear...

It used to be that the most awkward question your child could ask was "where do babies come from?". A pivotal moment in your child growing up; making the leap from innocent belief in fairies and storks, to the bare and frankly slightly gross reality of S-E-X. 

We crossed that bridge with my eldest boys a while ago. Their school started sex education classes from Year 1, beginning with simple things like the correct anatomical names for genitals and discussing family relationships. I have a fond and honestly not at all cringe-worthy moment of Lucas bounding out of school one afternoon, very excited to know the proper name for his private parts and loudly declaring that he also knew the name for what women have - "it's FLANGINA, isn't it Mum!". Don't worry, he knows the proper name now and the novelty of singing songs about private parts has almost worn off. 

So far it's been a pretty painless experience, although we're yet to get to the mechanics of what goes where. I'm resolved to stick with honest, age-appropriate answers to their questions as and when they ask me. For now, the boys have decided that sex sounds gross and they'd rather hear about the details when they're older. I'm cool with that but remain slightly concerned that they'll pick up some weird interpretation of it from playground gossip. 

That's something you just can't account for when you have children. You can plan out what you'll teach them and when, but there's just nothing you can do about the stuff they hear at school from other kids. It's actually more alarming than I'd ever realised. Lucas has often come home from school puzzled or upset by something he's overheard, and it's lead to many discussions about racism, sexism, violence, bullying and so on. I feel he's more world-aware than I was at his age and all of it prompted by things he's picked up outside of my control. 

So, back to the question he asked this week which filled me with dread. 

"Mum, when can I have a Facebook account of my own?"

Oh, good lord. Never. Never ever ever. I've seen the Facebook pages of some teens and pre-teens (forgetting for a moment the T&Cs about a minimum age of 13). Some of them are HORRIBLE; admittedly no more horrible than those of some adults but it shocked me to see kids behaving like this. Thinking back to my school days, I'm pretty sure kids are no more or less horrible than they used to be, but social networking is a whole new platform for them to explore that whole mess of hormones, relationships, friendships, conflict and general awfulness that comes with adolescence. Not only that, but once something is out there on the internet, it's there forever. Even deleting stuff doesn't make it go away. 

In the same week as news broke of the terribly tragic death of Hannah Smith, people are again talking about cyber-bullying and how to tackle it. I've only come vaguely close to the receiving end of this, following a fall out on Twitter with a certain celebrity "doctor" who proceeded to invite his followers to send me unpleasant messages. For the rest of that evening I was inundated with insults, threats and assorted nastiness. It was upsetting but thankfully over after a few hours. I cannot begin to imagine what that must feel like over a prolonged period of time. The internet breeds anonymity and with that a sort of perverse courage to type things you would never say to a person's face. 

How do I introduce my children to the universe of social networking and adequately protect them from this aspect of it? I'll be buggered if I know! This stuff didn't exist when I was a young'un. Mobile phones were barely in circulation and certainly couldn't take photos or upload things instantaneously to the internet. 

My eldest son is only 8 so I have a few more years where I can get away with telling him he's too young for the likes of Facebook, but given that he's already remarkably tech-savvy I think I have some research to do about protecting children online. 

The long road to diagnosis

When I came back to my blog a couple of months ago, I briefly mentioned that my middle son had recently begun the assessment process for Autism Spectrum Disorder and dyspraxia. The last few months have been quite the emotional rollercoaster while the family adjusts to this, and the most intense hard work hasn't even started yet.

I wanted to start documenting our journey with this because it's something that you just can't imagine unless you have a child with some degree of special needs. Over the years of meeting parents in real life or getting to know them through online forums, I've encountered quite a range of special needs among children but nothing - nothing - prepares you for someone pointing to your child and saying you're going to be joining that club too.

In a way I feel awkward and embarrassed to talk about 'coming to terms' with a diagnosis for Autism. I know people whose children have serious physical and mental disabilities, people who've lost their children and others who have struggled to have children at all. To speak about 'coming to terms' with a comparatively tame issue like this seems almost disrespectful to the other parents going through heart wrenching turmoil. But then again it isn't a competition, and there isn't really any way of comparing one family's experience to another. Everything is relative, and for us this journey is really bloody tough.

Ethan has just turned 7, and since he was a baby we've known he was a bit different. He never did 'terrible 2s', didn't really have a proper tantrum until he was gone 4 years old. He's always been a bit fluffy and dippy, smiley and just away with the fairies. We said that was just his way and when his nursery teachers suggested to me in 2009 that he may be Autistic, I laughed them off and said they were getting carried away with themselves. It didn't matter that he barely spoke until he was 3, and then had a series of non-words that he repeated over and over and over. I brushed off his refusal to engage with other children and aversion to group activities, saying he was just comfortable with his own company and preferred to play alone. That it took until way past his 4th birthday to get him completely out of nappies didn't even occur to me as an issue! I'm not lazy about it, far from it  - come on, who realistically would prefer to keep buying and changing nappies over teaching a kid to take charge of their own toiletting?!

My experience of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) up to that point was of a close family member who has Asperger's Syndrome (often known as high functioning autism). Somewhere in my mind I had kept an eye out for behavioural traits that mirrored what I had seen in this relative as a youngster, but seeing nothing of him reflected in Ethan, it seemed absurd for his teachers to suggest there was anything neurologically atypical about him.

The word spectrum is the key, however. Autism isn't just one set of traits; there's a vast range of behaviours that fit the bill, and people with Autism present with a complex cocktail of them. Two different people each with a diagnosis of Autism may actually have no overlap whatsoever in their traits, the spectrum is THAT diverse.

Ethan's behaviour fits in with the less well known aspects of ASD. He has no issues with making eye contact and isn't withdrawn at all (these are the stereotypical traits most people associate with Autism). He's actually completely opposite to that. If he wants to have a conversation with you, he will. If he wants to climb all over you, lift up your jumper and blow raspberries on your stomach, he will. He cannot judge people's moods by looking at their facial expressions or the tone of a voice. He flaps, squeaks, spins round in circles, and takes everything absolutely literally. I have an arsenal of stories about things he's done that seem superficially very funny, but having taken a step back to look at the bigger picture, I see now that it's all part of the suspected Autistic behaviour.

There's so much to learn as a parent with an autistic child. For one, I don't actually know if it's ok to say "autistic child" or if I should stick with "child with Autism". I don't want to define my son by his needs or difficulties. He is first and foremost a wonderful little person. The extra stuff is just one bit of him. I didn't know that it takes SO long to get a diagnosis! We started gathering evidence and speaking to professionals last December, and it looks like it will take until December this year before we have a firm diagnosis in hand. A whole entire year! Did you know it takes that long? We've seen the Special Educational Needs Coordinator at school, the school nurse, the GP, a Developmental Paediatrician and next we're on to Speech and Language Therapy, Occupational Therapy and the Child Psychologist. All these people have or will spend time with Ethan, take his history from me, watch him "perform" as it were and decide what diagnosis fits him best.

As we carry on down this path, I would like to continue sharing our experience in the hope that other parents starting out will find something useful or comforting here. It's SO huge, SO complicated and frightening - and that's just for me. I couldn't begin to tell you what Ethan makes of it all. If I ask him, he usually beams at me and asks if I'd like to play Skylanders with him. I think that means he's ok.

To boob, or not to boob.

It makes sense to ease myself back into regular blogging with a familiar topic, but this time I'm writing from a new perspective. Something I've never encountered before. I'm apprehensive about saying the words out loud or writing them down here, so this post feels a bit brave for me.

I would like to stop breastfeeding.

There we are; just six little words that have caused me a huge headache in the last month or so!

This concept is new to me because, although I've breastfed all of my other children when they were babies, they each lost interest by the time they turned a year old. I've never had to wean a baby off before, or find alternative ways to get them to sleep at night! Ted is coming up to 13 months old and still very much my little squashy baby. He likes food, but still breastfeeds half a dozen times a day at least, as well as on average twice a night. He still sleeps in my bed, although we've tried (and failed!) to move him into his cot once he's nodded off. He knows! He can be in the deepest sleep, snoring his head off and the very moment he touches the cot mattress, his eyes fling open and he cries as though he's been abandoned for tigers to eat.

I don't mind him sleeping in my bed for the foreseeable future. He's a lovely, cuddly companion and a big part of me will miss having baby snuggles once he's outgrown us. I don't actually know why I feel I would like to stop breastfeeding. I just would. I've loved every minute of it, never minded missing out on nights out, never felt it was a burden to be his sole source of nutrition for the first 6 months. It doesn't bother me now; people tell me he's only using me for comfort, but that's fine. That's what I'm there for! It's just... I don't know. I'd like my body back. I'd like to be able to buy pretty summer clothes without first evaluating them for ease of boob access and degree of discretion for feeding. It's a vanity thing, pure and simple. I don't mind admitting that. Or maybe I do... I don't want to be called selfish for feeling this way and I don't think anyone with a shred of sense about them would say anything like that, but there's a lingering voice at the back of my mind that knows Ted still needs me, in his own little world.

So! Lovely readers... I need some help. I need some tips and advice for gently easing him off breastfeeding. It doesn't matter if it takes weeks or months, so long as it works without breaking his heart! He's quite fond of his sippy cup but all my attempts to introduce formula or cows milk as a drink (I cannot for the life of me express more than a few drops!) have been met with a look of disgust.

I'm sort of trying "don't offer, don't refuse" at the moment but he's quite persistant and doesn't mind letting me know when he thinks it's time! Dummies get thrown at my head. Bottles make excellent tools for banging on the coffee table, but nothing more.

Any suggestions?

The big bad "B" word - bedsharing

I'm going to try and resist the temptation to write a load of "for" and "against" points in this post. There is a wealth of evidence that sleeping in the same bed as your baby is perfectly safe as long as you observe a handful of safety points, all of which are nicely summarised here. This post is simply my personal experience of it, particularly in the last 3 months since my youngest son was born. 

I first discovered bedsharing quite by accident. My first son was about 3 weeks old and I was beyond sleep-deprived. He was not an easy baby by any means, especially when it came to sleeping. He hated his Moses basket, screamed if put in a cot, snoozed briefly in the car seat as long as you stood up swinging it back and forth but woke the moment you put it down. After 3 weeks, I was deranged with tiredness. My friend's mum, a wonderful midwife, came to visit and asked me if I'd tried lying down on my bed to feed him. She helped me get comfortable, pointed out the safety do's and don'ts and left us to it. He went to sleep! And he stayed asleep for hours. AND I SLEPT TOO! When we woke up, I felt like a new woman and resolved to stick with this marvellous practice every night. When my second son and then my daughter came along, there was no question of where and how they would sleep, and the same applied when this baby was born. 

What differed this time was the attitude of the health care professionals I encountered. Previously I felt I had to play down the role of bedsharing in our lives, or print out studies demonstrating that it was safe as responses to the concerns of health visitors. Lying in bed on the postnatal ward after Baby T was born in May, however, my eyes were drawn to a little A4 poster on the door (which I cannot for the life of me find an online edition of!) containing a drawing of a bedsharing mother and baby, and a summary of the safety advice. It seems that finally the medical profession is recognising that most mothers will, at some stage and sometimes only for one night out of desperation, have their babies sleep in bed with them and that rather than put forth blanket advice to not do this, it is far more sensible to at least tell parents how to do it safely. I'm surprised that I actually feel SO much better for being able to come out of the closet and talk openly to my health visitor about bedsharing!

So what have the last 3 months actually been like for us as a family at bedtime? Well, mostly pretty good. T is, for the most part, a great sleeper. On average he wakes 2 - 3 times a night to be fed, at which point he turns half onto his side, snoozily latches on and then falls asleep again when he's done. I am very pleased to not have to leave my bed in order to tackle the night feeds! Recently he's taken to falling asleep around 8pm at which point we put him in the carry cot downstairs and then I move him to his cot in our room when we go to bed, where he'll sleep until around 2am. I have to confess that for the first few nights he did this, I couldn't sleep. I felt very anxious even though he was only a few feet away! When he's lying next to me, I can quickly check that he's still breathing, he's not too hot or cold etc. When he's in his cot, I worry that I wouldn't immediately know if something was wrong. Plus when we fall asleep in bed together, I like to hold his little hand and I miss that when he's all the way over there in his cot! 

It's not all sunshine and daisies though. My hips and back are struggling with lying in the same position all night. Left to my own devices, I like to sleep on my front, limbs sprawled out as much as I can! Definitely can't do that with a baby in the bed. Lying on my side is my least favourite sleeping position. We've also had to contend with a bed that isn't really quite big enough... we only have a 'small double' bed, not a full double. It's a squeeze with me and my husband in (both sprawly, inconsiderate sleepers!), but adding the baby to the mix makes it a combination of uncomfortable and not really safe (baby gets too hot in between the both of us, or is too close to the edge of the bed if I lie in the middle). So in order to make it a safe sleeping environment, my husband has taken to using either the air bed in our room or the spare room, or sleeping on our (admittedly very comfortable and big) sofa. We've had to put a lot of work into replacing that lost intimacy of sleeping next to each other but we're doing alright with that. We both know it won't be forever that the baby is in our bed, plus we know that if it became a real issue for our relationship, we could simply invest in a bigger bed and then all snuggle in together safely!

As much as I'm looking forward to getting my bedspace back and being able to sprawl again, I know I'll really miss waking up next to a little baby face. My older children all abandoned my bed by their first birthday (apart from occasional nights if they were poorly or had a bad dream) and it was a sad moment for me to realise that I wouldn't curl up for a snooze with them again. My husband and I have said repeatedly that we're really throwing ourselves into embracing all the hard work of a baby's first months this time because we know Baby T is our last and if we wish this time away, we will regret it.  So yes, bedsharing has its bad points as much as its good points, but I wouldn't give it up for the world. 

Month one of breastfeeding...

As part of my mini-series of blogs giving a warts 'n' all account of my first few weeks or months (whenever I get bored of writing about it or you get bored of reading it!) of life with a new baby, it seemed appropriate to include something about breastfeeding, particularly with National Breastfeeding Week coming up at the end of this month. One of my pet peeves (I have a few) about how we treat breastfeeding is the lack of transparency and realism used in promoting it to expectant parents. Most of the literature pregnant women receive about breastfeeding contains beautifully shot photographs depicting calm, romanticised scenes of a laid back mother and a content, snuggly baby. Very lovely to look at, very lovely to imagine yourself doing. Not entirely representative of the early days establishing breastfeeding, and thus not actually terribly helpful.

When my first son was tiny and I was trying to get to grips with feeding him, I struggled. He didn't latch well, I felt awkward holding him, my arms ached from lifting him and holding him in position to feed, my nipples were sore, I developed mastitis, I felt self-conscious about exposing bits of wobbly postnatal belly when lifting my jumper, I leaked milk everywhere between feeds and from whichever side I wasn't feeding from at the time - never mind the fact that he CRIED. A lot. I was certain that there was something wrong with what he was being fed, either the quantity or the quality. Why else would he cry?? I remember loudly lamenting to my midwife that boobs really should be see-through and have little marks down the side to help keep track of how much milk babies had taken! Looking back now, I see that comment as sadly indicative of how far we've marginalised breastfeeding and normalised bottle feeding in its place.

 It wasn't a snuggly and calm experience, and I thought I must be doing it wrong because it didn't feel like the pictures suggested it should. The remedy to this was chatting with a bunch of other breastfeeding mums I knew from baby groups and realising that we had all experienced varying degrees of discomfort and awkwardness, worry and frustration. I wasn't weird and certainly wasn't doing it wrong! That's just what it's like trying to learn a new skill when you're already tired and uncomfortable from having given birth days or hours before. Imagine trying to learn to drive when you haven't slept properly in days, then giving yourself a hard time for struggling to coordinate your hands and feet to control the vehicle!

So. This time would be fine for me, right? I've breastfed three other children for around a year each. I'm a trained peer supporter and have read an almost absurd amount of stuff about how breastfeeding works. So I wasn't going to have any problems getting to grips with feeding this baby... HAHA. How wrong was I.

The very first time I fed him was lovely. Ok so I may be remembering that through rose-tinted glasses. I was still very uncomfortable after the birth, covered in blood and sweat (I promised honesty!), still high from the pethidine and gas & air, starving hungry and really, really tired. But he latched like a pro and quite happily munched away for about half an hour while his Dad & I cooed over how beautiful he was. Later on when we had settled into the postnatal ward, I tried to feed him again. He promptly clamped his mouth shut and wanted nothing to do with me. "Alright", I thought, "that's fine. You've been born with plentiful fat stores to keep you going, you're probably a bit zonked from the pethidine. This isn't a problem". I held him and he went to sleep, so I lay down and snoozed for a while myself. Throughout the following morning I tried again to feed him, anxious to tell the midwives that he was feeding well so we could go home at some point that day. No matter what I did - all the tricks in the book about stripping his clothes off, tickling his feet, skin to skin contact, changing feeding positions - he wasn't interested. Even when we got home that evening, he didn't want to know. I was still reminding myself that this is ok, he was very awake and alert but just preferred to be held and look at faces.

Around midnight, something happened. I don't know what, but it's like someone flicked his 'hunger' switch on and peaceful snoozy baby morphed into Screaming Booby Monster. He fed and fed and fed and fed for three hours straight. I knew he wasn't latching properly, I could see that his mouth wasn't opening enough when I was putting him to the breast and I could feel that something wasn't right as I was feeding him but he was busy munching away and I didn't dare disturb him in case he resumed screaming. After 3 days, I was at the stage of toe-curling pain when he started feeding. Every now and then, I'd manage to get him to open his mouth really wide and the pain would be virtually non-existant for that feed, so I assumed that the issue was purely my laziness in getting him to latch properly and all I needed was to really concentrate on getting him to open his mouth wide enough each time and we'd be onto a winner. Oh, and to apply lashings of Lansinoh in between feeds. Not to digress, but I really do love that stuff, perhaps too much. I remember day five, waiting for family to come and visit and being in floods of tears because that particular morning he had fed solidly from 6am to 1pm without more than a few minutes break, and I felt like I was either going to lose my mind, or my boobs were going to fall off. I dreaded having to try and explain that he was just having a fanatical feeding day and I was fine with this, potentially having to field suggestions to maybe give him a bottle or justify why I didn't want to do that. Thankfully he mellowed out just as our visitors arrived and was mostly lovely company for the afternoon.

Through a series of clerical mishaps, we didn't see the midwife again until Baby T was 10 days old, at which point they weighed him and announced that not only was he back to his birth weight, but he'd actually exceeded it by a further 3 ounces. That was very exciting news to me and reassured me that although latching him on still hurt quite a bit (less so since I'd taken to smearing myself in Lansinoh!), he was clearly getting enough milk, so it was all worth it. I casually mentioned the discomfort to the midwife, but said I wasn't worried because he was gaining weight really well, had masses of wet and dirty nappies so everything must actually be going fine. She decided to check him over anyway and within seconds had spotted that he had a tongue tie. This was a relatively new concept to me as tongue tie wasn't as widely known about when I did my training or when my other children were babies. If you feel underneath your tongue, you'll find a tiny thin bit of flesh attaching your tongue to the bottom of your mouth. In babies with tongue-tie, that bit of flesh is too short and/or attached too far forward, preventing them from thrusting their tongues forward and thus latching on to the breast properly.

I can't tell you how thrilled I was when she said that to me. That may sound really ridiculous but I was starting to lose faith in myself. As I said before, I've breastfed three other children, trained in breastfeeding support and spend an inordinate amount of my spare time reading up on issues surrounding breastfeeding. Establishing breastfeeding with my own baby should have been a doddle! Admitting that I had sore nipples from a poor latch was pretty embarrassing to be honest, so being told that it wasn't my fault was music to my ears! Best of all, it was something that could be remedied! She rang the community midwives office to ask for a referral to our resident lactation consultant, who happens to be a bit of an authority on tongue tie, and I was astonished for her to then ask if we were available to pop in and see her the following morning for a consultation and possibly to have Baby T's tongue tie divided. That's pretty fast moving for any NHS procedure, but in the context of what I've read of other parents waiting weeks to see someone, battling to have a tongue tie properly diagnosed or even find a doctor who recognises that such a thing exists, this was absolutely monumental.

As the evening wore on, I started to feel nervous about the morning's appointment. The excitement had worn off, and instead apprehension about the idea of dividing his tongue tie crept in. It's a tiny, tiny procedure. It takes half a second at most and the staff who do it are very well trained. From what I'd read, it's less distressing to a baby than the standard heel prick test almost every baby in the UK has at 6 days old, or the vaccinations at 2, 3 and 4 months old. But still... something about the idea of anyone sticking a pair of surgical scissors into my baby's mouth to snip a bit of flesh... Well quite frankly the very idea of it brought me out in cold sweats.  I prepared myself mentally to argue every which way against having it divided until I was absolutely certain that it was necessary and that doing so would improve Baby T's wellbeing.

The appointment was actually much less alarming that I'd convinced myself it would be. The midwife was lovely, very comforting but also straightforward and no-nonsense. She went through the assessment paperwork with us and explained how they determine the severity of a tongue tie in terms of how it impacts a baby's ability to feed. We also talked through how long and frequently Baby T had been feeding - not easy considering that I hadn't been paying attention and just fed him if he wailed! I pointed out that I was very reluctant to have the procedure done as my pain and discomfort was reducing through me really concentrating on getting his latch right, and he was clearly getting enough milk because his weight gain was really good. It wasn't until we looked again at his feeding pattern that I realised his weight gain was so good because I had probably spent about 70% of my time doing nothing but feeding him over the previous eleven days. Newborn babies are supposed to feed a lot; their tummies are tiny - walnut sized really - so they fill up quickly and also empty very frequently! I had simply put down his frequency and length of feeding to normal newborn behaviour, but actually from the midwife observing him feed, we could both see that he wasn't getting a lot of milk in one go, so needed to feed for ages on end to fill up. Closer examination of his mouth showed us that his tongue tie was actually pretty bad and he could barely move his tongue around - certainly not enough to ever be able to latch on properly to be fed. Although his weight gain had been great so far, that would most likely tail off quite quickly and he'd start to struggle. I didn't want to leave it until he was older to have the tie divided because it would be more distressing to him then, so we decided to go for it. I wimped out of holding him and asked my husband to take over while I got ready to feed him. The moment it was done, he squawked a little but he was handed back to me immediately and settled down to feed. I promptly burst into tears and gripped him fiercely but once I calmed down it dawned on me that I couldn't feel any pain from him feeding!

For the next couple of days, I carried on really concentrating on getting him to open his mouth wide and latch properly - the midwife had warned that he'd effectively need to re-learn what to do with his mouth now that he could move his tongue properly - but the real surprise was how much shorter his feeds suddenly were. Whereas I'd previously sit for half an hour or more to feed him, he would now either fall asleep or un-latch himself after something more like ten minutes. I haven't had him weighed again yet, but he's outgrown a handful of his first outfits and started to develop chubby cheeks and thighs.

Since having the tongue tie sorted, I've tried very hard not to worry about anything breastfeeding related. I'm no longer in pain, Baby T is most definitely putting on weight and becoming more alert and interactive, he's sleeping well (that's another blog in itself ;-) ) and is generally wonderful to be around. Aside from a couple of days feeling under the weather with mild mastitis, all has been much smoother for the last two weeks. The health visitor is coming again this Friday and will weigh him again so I'm looking forward to seeing how well the weight gain is going now - especially as there is a small part of me competing with a friend whose baby is the same age and is gaining weight like a professional!

If there is one thing I would hope an expectant mother to take from this post, it is to accept that the early days are not going to be a picnic - and that that's ok! Read lots, talk to other breastfeeding mums and health care professionals, but also accept that when you're sore, aching, exhausted and bewildered by a tiny, wailing creature for whose wellbeing and survival you are entirely responsible, all that preparation will go out of the window and even the most seasoned breastfeeder will falter without the right support at hand. Without the local midwives and lactation consultant really knowing their stuff and reaching out to offer me the help I needed, this last month would have been infinitely more troublesome than it has been. I think we've just about settled down now and I feel confident and comfortable with breastfeeding. Now all I have to sort out is my wardrobe! Finding summery tops that I can breastfeed in comfortably is harder than it sounds - particularly as 'comfortably' for me absolutely has to mean that I don't worry about flashing bits of wobbly belly at anyone. So far I've favoured the two layered approach with a vest top underneath a baggier top, so I'm exposing the minimum amount of flesh possible. That's fine while the weather is so grim, but if it warms up over July & August, I'm going to have to go shopping!

While I'm on the topic of breastfeeding, I'll take the opportunity to shout out to a few other blogs worth reading if you're a breastfeeding woman, or pregnant and want to read more:

For great tips on fashionable clothes and breastfeeding (because I'm still a girl and still love clothes!): Milk Chic Breastfeeding Fashion blog and website

For amazingly eloquent and stirring pieces on new research or responses to coverage in the media:
The Analytical Armadillo blog (from a certified lactation consultant)

For great info and more bare-bones truth about breastfeeding:
Dispelling Breastfeeding Myths blog

Edited to include the lovely Kim of the Little Leaf (I've just discovered her blog and am a little bit in love with it)


And a list of helplines from the NCT is available HERE

One final edit - I saw this just now and needed to share it!

Next time - Bedsharing!

My birth story, as promised!

I am delighted to announce that baby Theodore William was born at 11:46pm on Monday May 14th after a relatively short but intense labour! Many apologies for taking an age to blog again, but it turns out that tiny babies are really quite time consuming!

In keeping with the theme of my blog, I would like to share my birth story and relate it back to the pregnancy, birth and parenting philosophies I am so passionate about. One of my favourite other parenting blogs to follow is Birth Without Fear, primarily a collection of birth stories focusing on giving birth back to women as opposed to it being the highly medicalised, intervention-driven phenomenon we often see it as today. Although the majority of the experiences shared within are drug-free home births, there are also stories of caesarean section, hospital deliveries and birth following induction of labour. The focus isn't so much on "all natural" birth, but more about empowering women to feel in control of their birth, no matter what shape it takes. I have found over the last 7 years as a mother that it is very easy to have decisions taken out of your hands and governed by hospital policies and common medical practices, even if that doesn't fit with your own ethos and comfort zone. Rebelling against these practices can be very frightening, especially when you are essentially arguing with a highly qualified medical professional about what they do for a living. One of the most helpful tools I was given at antenatal classes in my second pregnancy was the B.R.A.I.N acronym to use when questioning proposed procedures during pregnancy and birth. 

B = benefits What are the positive outcomes from this course of action?

R = risks What potential negative consequences are there?

A = alternatives What else could we do instead?

I =  intuition What does my gut tell me about this?

N = nothing What happens if we do nothing now and let things continue as they are?

I used that when it came to my second son's birth and the result was a very calm labour during which I felt entirely in charge and had nothing but good feelings when looking back on it. Unfortunately I lost that grip when it came to the birth of my daughter two and a half years later, and wound up with a very frightening experience, with hospital staff intimidating me into accepting procedures that I didn't want (or, on reflection, actually need) and at one point going as far as making me cry. Coming to terms with that birth took me a long time, and I was determined this time to recreate the birth of my second son as much as I could. The details needn't necessarily be the same - I had a lovely drug-free water birth then, which was easy to arrange because I had no complications during the pregnancy at all. My logical head knew that things may not go the same way this time if I was at all unwell through the pregnancy, but the important thing when preparing emotionally to give birth again was to feel that the birth was MINE, not the midwife or doctor's; the decisions made about my care would come from what I wanted, not what I felt pushed into; and I wouldn't be afraid to challenge any proposals that I didn't feel comfortable about. Beyond that, I didn't have much of a birth plan. When the midwife asked me about it, my answer was simply that I wished to be left alone as much as possible and have as few interventions as I could.

And now for the confession part... My promise from 3 weeks ago was, after all, to be honest about how far my preaching lives up to my practices! 

My birth this time didn't really go the way I wanted. It wasn't intervention-free, I wasn't relaxed and calm throughout and at times I was very frightened - too frightened to refuse having my labour induced or to articulate why I didn't want to be put on an IV drip to intensify my contractions later on. Everything I had practiced about B.R.A.I.N. and feeling in control of my labour went out of the window and I quite literally hid behind my husband at one stage! 

Everything started on Sunday afternoon when my waters broke spontaneously and in epic fashion whilst I was folding laundry. That's never happened to me before so I was quite taken aback and not too sure what to do! I'd been experiencing bouts of contractions for weeks, although they always stopped after a few hours and I'd settled into a mindset of just not thinking about when labour might start. This was different though, because waters breaking means that labour is very imminent! According to the midwife, 60% of women go into labour within 18 hours of their waters breaking so I got very, very excited and called the labour ward. They asked me to come in and be checked over, which I did and then chatted about how things would go from here. They said that if I hadn't gone into natural labour by 8am the following morning, I should phone again to discuss induction. That's the first point at which I panicked. I've never been induced before... my labours have always started by themselves - two of them were before 40 weeks, so I have limited experience of going overdue at all. I have heard stories of induction though, none of which sounded very appealing, and from reading lots about the mechanics of labour, I understood that the artifice of inducing contractions meant that it would all hurt a lot more. Without the natural accompaniment of endorphins with the oxytocin release that governs natural labour, I would feel everything much more intensely. Bizarrely, that didn't fill me with much joy! I went home, determined to bounce around on my birth ball all evening, drink raspberry leaf tea 'til it came out of my ears, walk around as much as my achey hips would permit and eat the spiciest curry I could tolerate, all in the name of getting labour to start by itself! Did ANY of it work? Did it heck. Just as most nights of the preceding few weeks, I had contractions, they hurt quite a lot, they stayed regular and increased in frequency to every 8 minutes.... and then by 3am it all stopped and I cried. This time I cried because I knew the next day would bring a lot of examinations and procedures I didn't want, and would most likely culminate in me having the sort of labour I'd been afraid of all along.

At 8am I rang the labour ward as discussed and was advised to call back again at 11am to arrange a time to go back in. I tried to stay calm all morning and discussed my feelings with my husband, reminding him in particular that I remembered how much the Fear had affected my last labour and how much I regretted the epidural I had begged for when the midwife snapped at me and told me I'd be labouring for hours and was putting my baby at risk by refusing more interventions. I told him that I needed him to be my advocate this time, that if things went the same way and I couldn't cope, that I would need him to make me question myself if I started to waver on my faith in myself: "Remind me how much I hated the epidural, don't let me beg for one again". I googled frantically, rang midwife friends, posted on the Analytical Armadillo's facebook wall - all to find out as much as I could about what induction of labour would involve and what I needed to know about my alternative options. What I learned was reassuring - namely, I could go as far as refusing the induction and waiting up to a further 72 hours for labour to start spontaneously. The NICE guidelines accommodate that and have advisements in place for how to monitor pregnant women for any sign of infection which would indicate an urgent need to get the baby out. That appealed to me a lot more than having pessaries inserted or being hooked up to IV drips! The thought of being able to retrieve my natural labour after all calmed me down and we toddled off to the hospital to talk to the midwives.

Something very strange happens to me when I enter a hospital building. I'm not in my house anymore... I'm in the doctors' house. This is their territory, not mine. I have no right to question their opinions with my own amateur knowledge informed by Google and entry-level Biology textbooks. It might be hard to believe, but my bolshy-ness does a complete runner and in place is a meek and frightened girl, not a strong and determined woman. So I sat in the delivery room, pondering what would happen and trying to scramble together my recollections of the information I'd gathered that day. 

A lovely, lovely midwife came into the room and we started talking through the various paths ahead. She was smiley and reassuring, matter of fact in answering my questions and respectful of my worries. I don't recall exactly how, but the decision I made was to accept the induction there and then, not wait for the next 72 hours to pass then reassess. I'm aware that I felt apprehensive about deviating from the hospital's usual practice and defying the wishes of my - albeit lovely - healthcare professional. Without a team of like-minded people physically around me, urging me to push forward with me desire not to be interfered with, I'm afraid I didn't have the inner strength to go against the grain. It was a mixed feeling... on the one hand, happy to be a step closer to meeting my baby, at the same time deflated at my birth no longer being "mine" but instead morphing into the property of the doctors, to be assessed and evaluated according to their rigid checklist of events that would determine whether or not the progress I made over the coming hours was to their satisfaction. 

The midwife explained that step one would involve inserting a pessary containing synthetic prostaglandins to help my cervix soften and begin to dilate. Hopefully this would be all that was needed to get labour going into full swing, but if not I would then be given an intravenous drip of more synthetic hormones intended to either start contractions or to make existing ones stronger. If that happened, I would need to be hooked up to a machine to have my baby's heart rate constantly monitored, and this would ideally take place with me lying down... for the entire duration of my labour. THAT completely freaked me out. I don't *do* lying down in labour. The geography of it just doesn't work! Forget everything you've seen on tv - labouring lying down is the least convenient position for a baby to try and exit the womb. The birth canal slants in such a way that you would end up trying to push the baby out uphill, all the while with the weight of said baby pressing back against you, limiting your blood flow through the arteries running along your spine. ICK. No way, Jose. I've done that once in my first labour when I didn't know any better and it was evil. Furthermore my son then needed to be resuscitated after the birth, something I'm confident wouldn't have happened if I'd been in a better position when labouring and pushing. 

With fingers crossed and prayers said, we toddled off to the antenatal ward to wait for the pessary gel to take effect and hopefully get labour moving. I sent my husband home at this point to see our other children because I didn't think there was much point him mooching around the ward waiting for something or nothing to happen. I had my tens machine (borrowed at the eleventh hour from a friend!), Jaffa cakes, birth ball and - most importantly - the whole bay to myself! Six beds on the ward and none occupied. I was very relieved to have a big open space to myself, so I set about bopping on the ball, snacking to get some energy back and chatting to the two student midwives who were pottering around. After a very short while, the contractions ramped up and I was confident things were moving as I'd prayed for. Two hours after the gel had been done, the senior midwife on the ward started to flap a bit and asked if I'd like to be examined to see if I'd progressed and should be moved back to the delivery room. I was ok with that (more anxious to know if all the pain was finally getting me somewhere!) so they checked me over and cheerfully announced I'd reached the magical 4cm dilated which indicated I was now in Active Labour. This was it, all hands on deck, no going back now - and more importantly, I had escaped the dreaded IV drip. The thought occurred that I should probably call my husband to come back to the hospital as we had originally agreed that he wouldn't return until after our kids were in bed, but the midwife and I suspected things may be moving faster than that! 

When we got back to the labour ward, husband dutifully in tow, I met with the midwife who was to care for me throughout the rest of my labour and the birth (assuming her shift didn't end first anyway!). I wasn't sure if I liked her to start with... She was very pretty, beautifully made up and quite glamorous looking. When you're in the throes of labour and feeling at your least dignified, it smarts to see someone looking lovely at you! Fortunately she was absolutely delightful, made me giggle and put me at ease. We were furnished with a radio to listen to Classic FM, jugs of ice water to keep me refreshed (although my husband qualified for several cups of coffee throughout the evening, hmmph) another birth ball and extra pillows so I could experiment with moving around and getting comfortable. At this point, I felt fantastic... I had defied the doctors' expectations by responding so quickly to the induction, I was in control of my labour, I was mobile, lucid and very excited about meeting my baby soon. My husband took a photo on his phone of me beaming with the gas & air pipe in one hand and a cup of water (held aloft like a chalice of fine wine!) in the other, and sent it to my Mum, who had been fretting about how I was coping. The pain increased and my contractions were 2 minutes apart from here on in. I leaned on my husband for support, taking great comfort in burying my head in his shoulder whilst standing on my tip toes (goodness knows why that was more comfortable than just standing!), pressing the BOOST button on the tens machine and going for gold with the gas and air. I had tried the ball, kneeling on the bed, leaning on pillows etc, but everything other than standing upright was unbearable agony.

I had last been examined just after 6pm, so the midwife said they would check again around 10pm if I consented. By 9pm, I was certain I felt the sort of pressure that indicated being ready to push, so we decided to check again and see how things had gone. My heart sank when she paused before telling me I was still only 4cm. After 3 hours of utter agony, nothing had happened. My body wasn't cooperating with me after all. Weeks and weeks of slow latent labour, of promising myself that it would mean that, when the time came, the groundwork would have already been done and the birth would be smooth sailing, then gradual realisation that my body and I were no longer in tune. All that pain and frustration just to get my hopes up for those few hours in the delivery room, only then to feel utterly crushed and like we were back at square one. To add insult to injury, the midwife then had to break the news that she was duty bound to inform the doctors of the outcome of the examination, and that they would certainly press for me to have the drip to intensify the labour. At that point, I had a complete meltdown. The idea of making an already unbearable labour more intense after taking away the faith I had only just restored in my body... I'd felt that Fear before, in my last labour. I had had maybe 10 hours sleep in total that entire week and didn't have the energy to deal with the pain any longer. I felt the words "please, please make it stop" leave my lips before I burst into tears and begged for them to call the anaesthetist. If I was going to be labouring for hours, I may as well lessen the pain. The labour wasn't mine anymore anyway. The doctors would shortly be arriving to take over and mould it into THEIR delivery, according to their specifications of how a labour should progress. Why should I fight and embrace the pain of a labour that didn't belong to me. 

As he'd promised that morning, my husband started to remind me how I felt last time after the epidural - that I had regretted it instantly, that I mourned the pain from the birth because I no longer felt it, that my daughter had been born half an hour after it had been administered so I always felt that it had been a pointless intervention. The midwife stepped in and held my hand. After that contraction passed and I was back in the room, she talked to me about what my husband had said. I expected her to come down on the side of knocking me out, but to my amazement she really took on board how I had felt last time and started talking me through other ideas. She suggested pethidine as an interim measure, saying that at the least it would relax me a bit and stop me panicking. If we were lucky, I may even be able to sleep a little while and regain some energy to face the rest of the labour. I fell in love with her a little when she then also promised that she would do her best to fight my corner and delay the doctors putting up the IV drip to give me time to get back in control. I was reluctant to accept the pethidine because I had had it in my first labour and felt very sick, but by this stage I knew I needed to make A decision and regain my control, so I told her to get it over and done with before I changed my mind.

After that, everything is a blur.  I vaguely remember stripping off the gown I'd put on over my vest earlier in the evening and climbing up onto the bed. The next thing I recall is the final two pushes before my son was born, and then leaning face down into the pillow for a couple of minutes asking myself if that really was it, was it really all over! The midwife then pointed out that it had only been 25 minutes between the pethidine injection and me getting into position to push! I had gone from just 5cm dilated with half my labour still to go and in absolute emotional breakdown, to pushing my baby out in less than half an hour! I remember murmuring "is it really over?" half a dozen times and feeling incredibly relieved that the pain had finally stopped. Even so, I really didn't want to let go of the tens machine controls! It had become such a comfort to me that I needed to hang onto it for a few moments until it really sank in that the hurty bit was done with. In truth, I felt a little shell-shocked. I hadn't expected such a managed birth, or to feel so frightened and small especially as this was my fourth birth and I've researched so much about relaxed birthing techniques!

So that was it. It didn't go the way I had wanted, but I can say that I felt in tune with my midwife and that she respected what I was trying to achieve with my birth and did everything she could given the circumstances. It's difficult to say out loud that your birth didn't go to plan, because very often people's response is to say that it shouldn't matter because you still have a healthy baby from it. Actually, it DOES matter. Can you imagine responding to a crestfallen bride on her wedding day that it didn't matter that everything had gone wrong on the day because she still had her husband out of it? We afford women the right to demand their perfect wedding day and we should do the same for their perfect birth, and moreover we should accommodate women needing to work through the barrage of emotions that comes around if they wind up with a birth that feels completely alien to them. I have been offered the Birth Afterthoughts service from my midwife since being discharged from hospital, which I declined because writing everything out here has been therapeutic enough and I feel at peace with how things went now. I know women who've had really traumatic births though and who still need a lot of support to deal with that.

I won't be having any more children but all my experiences of childbirth have reinforced my passion for giving birth back to women, empowering women to feel in charge of and in tune with their own bodies and not to feel afraid of the frankly awesome things we do whilst bringing new life into the world.

Quite frankly, we women rock!

*THAT* Time Magazine cover...

How could I not blog about it? I mean really... Everyone and their dog seems to have an opinion on Time's May edition front cover photo and it seems to have caused quite the whirlwind. Never one to resist a good bandwagon, I feel it's only polite for me to contribute my two-penneth on the matter. 

You can't possibly have missed it, but just in case you have, here is the image in question:

The lady is 26 year old mother of two, Jamie Lynne Grumet from Los Angeles, and the child is her near-4 year old son, Aram. So there's the introductions done with: Jamie and Aram, meet the world. The world, meet Jamie and Aram. OH! But wait... I forgot the pivotal character in this photograph - Jamie's BREAST. And oh my word, look where it is! Aren't we all just shocked to our very core? No? Oh... No, neither was I. It's a woman, breastfeeding her son. That's it. I have no reaction to it beyond that. I've known plenty of mothers and children who've enjoyed breastfeeding up to and beyond 4 years of age and it's just one of the many things that some parents and children enjoy doing together and others don't. 

There is, however, something I really, really don't like about the magazine cover. That caption... right there... Are You Mom Enough? Ick, yuk and shudder. I'm not even sure where to begin with dissecting this one. Firstly, every woman who has ever been pregnant is a mother. One-hundred per cent. There aren't degrees of motherhood, there isn't a checklist of achievements and activities that you tick off and at the end there's a shiny medal. I don't care how or whether you gave birth, how you fed your baby, where your baby slept, how you transported him or her around - we are all 100% mothers and should support and care for each other in that. There are plenty of parenting choices that I don't like and wouldn't practice myself, some that actually upset me a little because of the reasoning behind them or research demonstrating potential long term negative effects - but I am no "more" a mother because I of the things I do or don't do with my children. It just isn't a competition. 

The juxtaposition of that dreadful, loaded question with the image really sets up attachment parenting as the sort of movement that DOES consider parenting to be a competitive sport though. It's no wonder that the general public see us as weird, yoghurt-knitting hippies with superiority complexes because we practice x, y and z. I made the terrible mistake of reading comments from the general public on a range of websites that had written about this issue over the last couple of days, and some of them really made me incredibly sad. The vitriol directed at attachment parenting and the people who practice it is intense in places. Allegations of child molestation and paedophilia, accusations that this sort of parenting produces dependent, slothful adults who don't know how to function, and the favourite "it's all for the mother's selfish benefit". Selfish? Child abusers?? That hurts. It's also untrue but that should be obvious anyway - right? Well here's the problem... The mass media LOVE a juicy contentious issue to whip the public up into a bit of moral outrage. It sells, it's sexy news. I have never read or even considered Time Magazine before (I don't think it's a big thing here in the UK anyway) but here I am writing about it having spent a lot of today reading what other people have written about it. So clearly it's NOT obvious that we're not all judgmental lunatics. 

Actually if you go out and meet the sorts of women who breastfeed their children to whatever age, share a bed with them, use a sling or carrier more often than a pram or stroller, you'll find that, on the whole, we're really very ordinary. In fact, I defy anyone to single out one parent in their entire social circle who has not, at some stage, either breastfed (even only once after birth), slept in the same bed as their baby (even just one night out of sleep-deprived desperation!) or carried their baby in a sling of whatever design.

Very few of us are bonkers and self-righteous - naturally a few are, but then you find bonkers, self-righteous types in all walks of life! Just because some people who prefer bed-sharing, breastfeeding and baby-carrying are a bit nuts, this doesn't automatically mean that ALL parents who adopt this approach to raising their children are funny in the head. Somehow the sweeping generalisation that we are seems to have become the normal perception of attachment parenting, and sadly coverage like the Time magazine front cover really only serves to fuel that misconception.

Reading an interview with the lady in the photograph, something jumped out at me about her appreciation of Dr. Bill Sears - the man credited with pulling together the philosophies behind attachment parenting and shaping it into a defined 'style' of raising children. When asked if she was a fan of his, Ms. Grumet replied that she finds him to be "a gentle spirit... nonjudgmental and relevant... The way he does it is graceful and educating rather than condemning"

That's a perfect summary of how I feel we should all treat one another in our journey as parents. It's what attracted me to join support groups for attachment parenting and why I enjoy reading the blogs and books written on the subject. I have encountered judgment and condemnation, but as a recipient from those who don't understand what my parenting choices are about, because they have chosen not to educate themselves about it but instead to make assumptions gleamed from snapshots misrepresenting the whole area - rather like this magazine cover. Or like the Channel 4 documentary on "Extreme Breastfeeding". Or like the plethora of Daily Mail articles maligning parents and particularly mothers at any given opportunity... You get the idea. It is very difficult to find a piece of popular media that presents attachment parenting or any of its constituent elements in a positive and open-minded light. In fairness, why would they? It's not interesting if you talk about it sensibly and encourage people to make up their own minds. It sells FAR many more issues if you get people really riled up, set parents up as warring factions hissing and spitting at one another's choices. Throw in some really obtuse reference to sex and you're onto a winner! 

So there is my opinion on the debacle. The fact that the woman in the picture is breastfeeding a four-year old is neither here nor there. I'm far more concerned by the unfortunate message that is being given out about attachment parenting and the people who embrace it.