Wordless Wednesday: first snow

On Sunday night they said it would snow. On Monday morning we woke up in the dark (customarily – 5.30 am is pretty standard round here) and peeped through the blinds  … and there it was, glistening softly. SNOW!

I didn’t realise until now how dark this photo is – coz we raced outside as soon as we could legitimately pronounce it light enough to play.

As it got a bit lighter, we headed across the road to the river:

“Here’s some snow! And there! And here! And there too!”

That’s our house in the background. (I’m desperate to tell you that the layer cake effect is not permanent! The brick part is our new top storey – plaster to come.)

Which was looking positively glacial:

There was enough snow for a snow-dude!

Maja looks a bit like Suri Cruise here.

He was as happy as we were.

 

Humour me. You see it, right?

The night-weaning chronicles

Just wanted to round up our recent collection of night-weaning stories, attachment-parenting style. I’m proud of this little series – I feel like it could have possibly had some real-life impact: if this blog has that potential then I’m satisfied.

To wrap up:

Throughout August and September, I chronicled our own journey:

here (where I mused that it might be time to start), here   (where I first seriously contemplated the project),  here (where we had a bit of a false start), here (after a successful Night 1) here (after Night 3) and here (where I recapped a little and told you about the first test our new regime faced).

While that was happening, we also featured some other mummies’ stories:

Stef was one of my personal inspirations for getting started. She told us her story here. Stef’s family basically followed Dr Jay Gordon’s gentle approach,with successful results.

Sarah‘s family also started with Dr Gordon’s guide – tailoring it for their own energetic little man and tackling the project at their own gentle pace. She told us all about the ongoing project here.

Emma has been in the game longer than any of us others … she’s had a little night-milk junkie on her hands for almost three years now. But when she decided to embark on the night-weaning project, taking (like we all did) the gentlest, most natural approach, she had surprising success.

If anyone else has a night-weaning story to share, whatever your methods or philosophies were or are, please get in touch with us – I’d love to keep sharing these stories!

Daisy

Little Mister’s mummy on defining “it all”

The dynamic between ‘work’ and mothering  – the extent to which they are or should be exclusive – is something that really interests me. It’s an issue (like so many issues in the mummy world) that it seems like you can’t take a stand on, either theoretically or practically (and regardless of the position you choose), without facing a whole lot of consequences. But here’s the thing: taking that stand, whatever it is, so often involves an act of bravery on the part of a mother – that’s something we should be celebrating.

I came across Hello Little Mister‘s story today, and wanted to share it. Thanks heaps, Little Mister’s mummy, for letting us reblog!

***

AFTER years of working late, putting extra pressure on myself to do better, secretly trying to outdo my colleagues and calculating which moves would help me get ahead – I’ve given it all up. It’s been two weeks since I worked my last shift on the newsdesk, two weeks since I logged in, two weeks since I agonised over what would make the front page, two weeks since I sat around a table at a meeting, and two weeks since I went in to the office.

Work it!

I’ve not shared stories with workmates about the weekend, I’ve not worn my court shoes, I’ve not joined in any group email banter laughing about some aspect of our job, and I’ve not lowered my voice while making a cup of tea and gossiping with another journo.

Since the Little Mister was four months old, I’ve only been working two days a week. But by resigning, I’ve given up something more than the paychecks.

Of course I agonised over quitting. I don’t quit. After years of manouevring, I was finally moving along the path I had planned, and I was making my way along it nicely. Of course, I thought before he was born, I could have it all.

When he was four months and I went back to the office, it hit us all hard. For two days a week, he went on hunger strike. Every week. He screamed at Tony. A lot. His weight kept dropping until he nearly fell of the chart and Plunket made us keep going back for weigh ins. He started waking every two hours through the night, my hungry baby.

The dreaded Plunket chart.

My entire week was consumed by trying to express enough milk to leave for him. We all got more and more tired and stressed. But it never felt like we weren’t coping. We were all, I still believe, getting so much out of it.

Tony was able, twice a week, to look after his four month old son completely on his own. He got him to eat (eventually), he got him to nap, he bathed him, played with him, put him to sleep, sang songs with him, shared precious cuddles, and was the best dad in the world.

He became the Little Mister’s favourite person. Our little boy was so lucky to get this amazing one-on-one time – and they learnt so much about each other while I wasn’t there. I got to keep on moving along that work path I’d been carving out, and I loved it. Even though I was exhausted, I so enjoyed those two days of being among adults in that other world.

Still, on those mornings before work, I had to perform a feat that surpassed winning the Krypton Factor just to make it on time. Planning ahead and taking packed lunch and dinner to the office had never been so hard as in these months when we seemed to have no time to cook, or eat – unless it was takeaway or toast. I would try desperately to feed the Little Mister up before I left incase he decided to go without for the next nine hours. His naps were carefully orchestrated so he’d be due a very long one when Tony took over.

Looks like fun, doesn’t it?

Tony would get home (or meet me at work) at a speed faster than lightning and each week we performed the miracle of getting out of the door by 12.36pm. There was the odd stretch of the truth that ensured he had Friday afternoon off, we called in favours, played sympathy cards, and did whatever it took for me to get to work without us putting the Little Mister in daycare.

I fed him in the work car park, in the health nurse’s room, in the empty office on our floor because I was running out of time to get the newslist done. Tony walked around and around Wellington with him so he would stop crying and sleep through his hunger. I spent the shift planning when I’d get a chance to express, carried sterilised equipment round in my handbag, always made sure the unused fridge was plugged in, and was careful to hold my bag upright in the taxi home. I experienced infections, discomfort, pain that only a working, breastfeeding woman can know.

Finally, logistically, it got too hard. If we didn’t want to do daycare, and if Tony was to keep studying and needing those working hours, we couldn’t keep on. Even when the Little Mister finally realised formula would fill him up in a way his shattered mama was getting less and less able to do, even when he started sleeping a little better, we couldn’t keep on with this life.

I don’t feel like I’ve quit wanting it all. Maybe right now my definition of “it all” has changed. In these two weeks, he’s suddenly gone down to one wake up at night. He’s started crawling. He’s lengthened his naps to two decent stints. We’re in our routine, seven days a week. I’m not checking work emails on my phone while feeding him at night. I’m not glued to the headlines at what also seems to be storytime most nights. Is it making a difference?

And you thought your old boss was demanding.

I love my new working week, which is spent doing my very best for the Little Mister. I do miss my old working week, but when he’s a little older, I think we will find a way to marry the two. Somehow.

I have given up what I’d worked for. But part of that is because we’ve decided to move to London and be with our family there so they can share these special years with us.

I no longer believe you can have it all, at least not the “all” I once wanted. The “all” has now shifted – and I’m still not quite sure what it is. When I figure that out, maybe then I’ll figure out a way of having something close to it.

Kiran

Adventures on the intronet

So I went to the Frankfurt Bookfair, saw and appreciated the sights but came home feeling like I hadn’t really connected. Nothing had really happened.

But. Here’s what has happened since:

• The one industry person I talked to at the fair – who I already do a bit of work for – emailed me about an awesome new project he wants me to work on.
• Elizabeth Knox (Elizabeth Knox!) commented on my post, noting that she too had been feeling a bit alienated by it all.
• I had a little tweet conversation with Hinemoana Baker (@Hinemoana: I mentioned her Transit of Venus work in my post) – and she commented that she’d read what I wrote too – and that she too had found the Fair huge and overwhelming.
• The New Zealand at Frankfurt people (@NZatFrankfurt) favourited our tweet linking to my post.

This little list of connections might seem meagre, but each of them individually has given me such a little ping of satisfaction. The last thing I said in my post was that I felt like I wasn’t a member of the club – but within a week of coming home, these incidents have made me feel like maybe I am in the club. Or, at least, that my membership application could be considered. What’s going on here?

Glad you asked.

Well, I think that maybe what’s going on is a curious shift in focus … The stock-in-trade of book people (let’s call us werds) is merely words. But the conventional idea is that the wordy products werds create don’t quite exist until they’ve been tangibly collected, sold, marketed and discussed – shared – in real life. An event like Frankfurt really reinforces that idea. But my curious experience was that the Fair itself – the tangible part – didn’t really exist until I had discussed and shared it in my ‘non-real’ life.

Old model = the tangible stuff (the hardcopy book, the face-to-face discussion) was the point; the words were nothing without that packaging.

New model = the words themselves are the point, and the tangible stuff merely provides werds with a place from which to leap into flights of werdiness, on a journey that is new, exciting, and shared, but in a particularly introverty way.

Frankfurt: real life depresses the hell out of me.

Book people tend to be introverts. When I worked for a large (by NZ standards) publishing firm in Wellington there was an editorial floor and an everything-else floor (sales, marketing etc) and the auditory difference between the two was quite astounding. Second floor: music, laughter, stories about the weekend being exchanged, excuses being found to visit the shared kitchen. First floor: a pin could have dropped and we all would have jumped at the clatter.  We told each other about our weekends via email. We liked it like that.

Social media is misnamed, because the term makes it sound a bit like a party. (Run, werds: run!) Actually, social media is very, very quiet; silent in fact: It’s just a huge collection of words. Social media is our aeroplane – it’s where we board to go on those flights of werdiness I was mentioning. Let the extroverts hang out below at the parties, talking about other parties. The internet is our place. We feel comfortable here. We get stuff done here. And it’s becoming the way stuff gets done in general: the accepted way, the logical way, the efficient way.

It’s too early to say, I think, but there’s a good chance Maja will be as introverted as her parents. If the world she’s growing up in was the same as the one I grew up in, I would worry on her behalf a little bit for that reason. The world I grew up in was definitely geared for the extroverts.

But increasingly, I think, it’s looking like the introverts shall inherit the earth.

Isn’t that exciting?? *shuts door, makes cup of tea, settles down alone, happily, to google obscure punctuation marks and check twitter*

Daisy

Emma explains: Night-weaning

Daisy asked me a little while ago to write something about my approach to night weaning my nearly three-year-old, as she knew I tend towards gentle methods. I’d been putting off writing this, as I’d been wavering between the ‘wait for her to do it in her time’ approach or the ‘let daddy take over at night’ approach.

‘Fairytale night’ by Iridescent Happiness on Deviantart.

My general parenting philosophies are to let my children develop at their own rate and to go with the flow unless something is a problem. My daughter had been in our bed and breastfed when she ‘asked’ every night since she was born and for the most part this had not caused a problem for us – she didn’t wriggle, and would just need a quick feed for her (and I) to drift off to sleep again. I hardly even had to wake up. This meant no crying and more sleep for all of us, including her older brother. I didn’t keep track of feeds. Some nights I’d feel like we swapped sides many times, other times I’d wake up stiff from not moving which meant she’d only fed once or twice.

My son had started sleeping through with no help from us around six months old. Some nights he’d need a comfort feed while teething, but once the tooth was through he’d go back to sleeping through again. However, he also spent most of the night in his cot and weaned completely at around 15 months when I was pregnant with my daughter, so the second time around has been a bit different.

I’d still been confident that she’d sleep better in her own time, and around her first birthday she did spend most of the night in her cot and I was hopeful that was going to be it. Then teething hit – she didn’t get her first tooth until just after her first birthday – and sleep went out the window. Since then it had never felt like the right time to change anything with nighttimes. The status quo was mainly working, we were waiting for all her teeth to come through, and it just seemed like too much effort. I hadn’t been feeling sleep-deprived, and I didn’t feel tied to the house, as she was quite happy to go to sleep for my husband if I was out. Another factor is that our spare room is not insulated and freezing and damp during the winter so it wasn’t a nice prospect to camp out there.

Image from The Vintage Moth.

Lately, however, I’d been getting more and more irritated by her feeding during the night. She would help herself and get annoyed if she couldn’t. I was feeling touched out and resenting the night feeds. She also didn’t seem to actually be drinking much, as she’d been dry overnight for months. The spare room had warmed up and had been aired out after winter. It was time to make a change.

So two weeks ago I told my daughter that mummy’s breasts were feeling too tired at night to give her ‘boowa’ anymore and that daddy would give her cuddles during the night instead. She took this really well and repeated it back to me. Night one I fed her to sleep as usual and she was still asleep as I went to bed. I lay awake for ages, unable to get off to sleep in a different bed and away from her, and I kept waiting for her to cry. The first time happened around midnight but didn’t last long, then she had another short cry maybe an hour later. I fell asleep and woke at 6am not having heard anything else and thought it must have gone really well. It turned out she’d woken a few more times and had a little cry then attached herself like a limpet to my husband when she realised I wasn’t there. My husband was tired but knew it was for the best.

‘Sleeping child’ by Bernardo Strozzi (17th century)

The second night started off the same but she woke around 9.30pm for a comfort feed. She fell asleep and I tried to transfer her to our bed but she woke and got really upset, asking me to stay with her. I felt terrible but left her with my husband and went to the spare room and she was quiet within a minute or so. Then I didn’t hear a peep out of her all night! She did apparently stir a couple of times but went back to sleep with a quick back rub. The next few nights went even better – still waking a few times but no crying, and she fell back asleep after a cuddle. ‘We’ve cracked this,’ I thought.

Then on night 6 I woke to hear her hysterically screaming and asking for me and ‘boowa’. This was completely different to the other nights and didn’t seem to be stopping, so I reluctantly went downstairs and hopped into bed and fed her. I lay there worrying that I’d undone the good work of the past few nights. However, I thought there was also a good chance her last molar was coming through and that she really needed the extra comfort that only my breast could provide. I needn’t have worried, though, as the next night was fine and she slept well. Even better, on night 8 she slept through for the first time ever! She’d stirred at 10.30pm for a quick cuddle then slept till 6.30am. Success! We had another ‘sore teeth’ night a couple of nights ago where I needed to go in and feed her, but last night she slept from 10pm to 7am again.

For me, two weeks of mostly uninterrupted sleep has been fantastic. Although I hadn’t been feeling deprived, I’m sure my ‘normal’ state has been slightly sleep-deprived for the last 4.5 years (from when my son was born), so I’d just got used to it. My patience and tolerance levels have risen, and I feel more ‘on to it’ in general. I’m also less annoyed by my daughter’s day feeds, and it seems to have improved her nursing manners. My breasts weren’t engorged in the slightest despite cutting night feeds, so that confirmed that she was hardly drinking anything anyway.

Cover for ‘The Land of Nod’ by Margaret Evans Price, 1916.

I’ll camp out in the spare room for a bit longer to make sure this new development sticks and once she’s sleeping consistently the plan is to try and get her sleeping in her own bed in my son’s room. As much as I enjoy co-sleeping, a nearly three-year-old takes up a lot of space in a queen-sized bed, and it will be nice to reclaim it for ourselves.

I’m glad we waited till this point to make a change, as she had the reasoning ability and maturity to cope well with it. So my experience of night-weaning has been remarkably painless, and should give some hope to any other long-term, night-feeding co-sleepers out there!

Emma

Following Frankfurt

Dear Daisy,

I am sorry that Frankfurt wasn’t as straightforward as you had hoped. These markets are intense and highly competitive. At least now you have had that experience and enjoyed a tasty morsel of kiwi culture. Hopefully that’s enough of a fix to keep you from being homesick till next year.

I was talking about you recently at a baby shower when a friend quizzed me.

“How do you do it?” she kindly said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, as I desperately tried to sip some champagne with one hand pretending to be glamourous for a split second before the 21-month-old attempted to yank off my other limb.

“You know, being a mum and working in a full-time job in the film industry and you still mange to write a blog – HOW do you do it?”

“Ha…” I am distracted as the toddler beast breaks free and attempts a base jump. Pause …. 3 … 2 … 1 … base jump complete – toddler intact. Return to conversation. I am suddenly humbled ,realising she too is a mother and a creative entrepreneur in her own right.

“Well to be honest I don’t; I haven’t written anything interesting since I was living in positive poverty while taming chickens and climbing mountains! I am tired and cranky all the time, my fiancé is a stay-at-home dad and it’s Daisy and her collective who do all the work on the blog. She does this while breastfeeding, renovating and being the breadwinner for her brood.”

“Daisy sounds like she is a pretty cool chick.”

“Yes, yes she is.”

So there you go. Daisy I want to thank you for maintaining our little blog. To make up for my lack of blogging I am treating you my dear friend to a delicious excerpt from Bitch and Famous by Wendyl Nissen.

Zelda

The Female Confessional – by Wendyl Nissen

Here is an extract from the book Bitch & Famous by talented author Wendyl Nissen. Wendyl was a mega-stressed bitch magazine editor now turned green goddess who invents natural cleaning products. Wendyl’s motto: It’s Okay to Be a Nana.

Thank you Wendyl for letting us share this beautiful piece of writing.

Zelda

************

The Female Confessional

Leaving town for a while has several advantages. You get to eat really good food, live among cultures and buildings created long before the Auckland Town Hall and say to your enthusiastic uber-tourist husband with endless monotony… nice church, nice art, nice fountain, and in Rome, nice ruins, nice Pope.

The disadvantages are that you return broke, miss your kids so much that the place behind your ribcage physically aches, and you long for your mates.

And none more so than the one you lunch with… your Dear Friend. The one you talk to every day, whine, drink wine, rejoice and cry with. That one woman you trust above all else to be honest, objective and tell you when you’re being a stupid bitch, or if you really have been wronged. The one who will always take your call even if she is in the middle of a disaster at work, and will always keep a bottle of wine in the fridge just for you. You miss her most because when in Europe you see the two of you everywhere. In a dainty Paris restaurant, sipping kir royales, slurping snails with an unusual intimacy and tucking into two pork chops and a carafe of wine, all the while chattering as only two women can do over lunch. Barely pausing for breath the chat goes on and on, at times the Dear Friends lean in close, barely missing the garlicky green snail shells with their breasts as they share the most intimate information and then lean back giggling like two schoolgirls they once were, 50 years ago.
There is nothing more rewarding, uniquely feminine and ultimately as healthy as the relationship developed between two women of a certain age who like to lunch.

Observers will never know just what Dear Friends have discussed but one thing will be certain. The two of them have, do and will share information they will tell no one else. They are essentially each other’s priest and the restaurant the confessional. Both leave less burdened by the travails of life and return to it unburdened by doubt and insecurity…

… In a woman’s lifetime she can have several Dear Friends if she is lucky, but only one at a time. There are no qualifications for the role except an understanding of each other’s life, a level of trust and a huge love for each other which inspires loyalty, respect and humour. And Dear Friends don’t live in each other’s lives. You won’t find them hanging out at each other’s house in the weekends. They are too old for that and weekends are for kids the partner and the house. Lunch is the Dear Friends temple.

Back in New Zealand Dear Friend is waiting. There’s been no chance of a catch-up for months as we’ve both been travelling and texts every day can only say so much. Where to start, and how to finish? One day perhaps we’ll scoff snails in Paris, trundle along the canals of Venice or cry on the banks of the Tiber in Rome. But for now it’ll be a long lunch in Ponsonby, which is just as it should be.

Want more Wendyl?
Follow on twitter @wendylnissen or check out her Green Goddess blog 

The Frankfurt Book Fair, and trying to have two careers

So I wanted to tell you about my experiences at the Book Fair, which only vaguely comes under the ‘honest parenting’ banner … but thinking about it, my experiences there are probably telling of the fact that I’m trying to be the very best mother and the very best print editor I can be. Essentially I’ve got two rather unwieldy career ambitions on the go at any one time. (Not something out of the ordinary, of course. Most of the mothers I know are attempting the same.)

If I had to sum up my experiences at the huge, bewildering, magnificent Book Fair in a word, it would unfortunately enough be ‘disconnection’. I bought a trade ticket and was there on the last of the trade days, but most of the discussion that was going on then was not about how books are made (my side of the equation) but about what happens to them after that. Well, I had always suspected that would be the case; my fantasy of distributing business cards hither and thither to the exactly appropriate people was a best case scenario. Jeezus, sorry, I sound like Eeyore here.

“I might have known,” said Eeyore. “After all, one can’t complain. I have my friends. Somebody spoke to me only yesterday. And was it last week or the week before that Rabbit bumped into me and said ‘Bother!’. The Social Round. Always something going on.”

So anyway, there was that. And it meant that I couldn’t step into any of the discussions that were taking place, because (a) they weren’t my type of discussions, professionally and (b) anyway, I’m inherently introverted and I don’t just step into discussions.

But, in a way, the disconnection I’m talking about was as positive as it could be. I was as in this space, this universe (my universe, I dare hope), this booky-ness as deep as I could be as an observer. I spotted/bumped into Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Knox, Peter Gordon, Eleanor Catton, Alan Duff, Joy Cowley. I thumbed through Gecko Press’s latest, Mr Whistler.

I unintentionally ran into the Huia team, who I often do work for, and sat through a couple of presentations in the NZ pavilion with them. I caught the end of Glen Colquhoun’s and Hinemoana Baker’s Transit of Venus stuff, which made me cry for its mere New Zealandy-ness, and then watched the multimedia presentation the NZ people presented on repeat to introduce ze Germans to our words, and I recognised and fiercely loved almost all of the words they chose. And then the next day, outside of the Book Fair in Frankfurt itself, we walked around and over quotations like those on the Wellington writers’ walk, and found a little exhibition on a contemporary NZ/Samoan artist, Francis Pesamino, and one on NZ zines. Randomly, wonderfully, in a warm little white room as the European Autumn drizzled outside, I found the words of Sarah Jane Barnett in Hue and Cry (loosely classified as a zine) and with that ping of recognition I felt like I belonged in a way I don’t often, here in my little Hungarian village.

So it was all a very validating experience, if it wasn’t transformative.

Now I can’t really decide on my point. Maybe I’m trying to convince myself not to worry about what feels like a 22-month-long plateau in my ‘real’ (?) career? It was reassuring to test my measure of myself as a NZ booky person against this purposeful large-scale display of NZ booky-ness and find comfort, familiarity, meaning … love. And being away from my own little bookworm (‘read it, Mummy? READ IT?) made me really think about which one is the ‘real’ career, of course: I think ultimately I came home with a strong sense of validation in both of them. So I’m happy.

My remaining nagging sense of dissatisfaction comes with the fact that I really wish I could have nodded eruditely at Manhire as he floated ethereally towards me on the conveyer-belt thingy (the Fair is huge, like an airport). Or that I could have reminded Glen Colquhoun that he knew my name once, when we were both frequenting Steele Roberts‘ offices – or blurt out to Elizabeth Knox how much I appreciate her blog, which always catches me demanding a close reading. I’m not in the club.

But I will be one day.

Daisy

Holiday

Well, I’m back from my three nights away from my little bee …

I feel refreshed.

I didn’t expect to say this … I honestly thought that maybe I’d get through Night 1, and then Nights 2 and 3 would be unbearable and unbearabl-er, as I struggled under the weight of Mummy-Guilt at not being there for her and the raw pain of her absence.

Not so!

The first night I slept like a baby (I hate that stupid simile. I slept like a … like a non-breeder, dammit!) The second and third nights I slept even better. I woke up in the mornings and looked at my face in the mirror, and I looked … healthy. No dark circles, no wan resignation writ large on my face  – the person who looked back at me was not a mummy; she was a person. It was weird.

Before holiday (dramatic reconstruction – image from Faces of Meth)

After the holiday (dramatic reconstruction – image source unknown) Oh come on, let me have it. We both have curly hair, at least. Puh.

 

But it was also completely normal – I slipped so easily back into the rhythm of the night being for sleeping and the day being for sitting around sipping coffee and talking about books that it was as if these past 22 months had never been. I thought of my family often, but it was with fondness, not pain.

All this sounds far too rosy, doesn’t it? It’s perhaps a little worrying.

Should I not have had a child?

Should I have sown my wild oats for a few more years?

No, of course not. The moment when Maja and I saw each other in the airport carpark last night was the best moment of the whole holiday … I don’t know who was more deliriously happier about it, she or I.

The whole trip felt good – it felt deserved; it felt validating; it even felt a little bit like therapy. It was definitely a holiday – and a lesson that we should be allowed to take time out from this mummyhood business. That it is justified.

Right then, back to the grindstone. I have some dark circles, fine lines and adult acne to restore to my visage. Sigh.

Daisy

Lize’s word on the web: re: birth

The most important, most powerful, most special event in my life, was giving birth to my baby.

(for the non-baby folk reading D&Z: yes, I could rewrite this same sentence and replace “birth to my baby” with “meeting my partner” or “deciding to move to NZ” or “starting my own business” etc.  I am of course a human being comprised of important events throughout my life not a product of merely one, but today’s post is focusing on the birthing experience in particular.)

Watch this.

Toni and Alex are my heroes.  There are some things in life you wish with all your heart that you could’ve done or be a part of, and this endeavor by One World Birth is exactly one of those times.

The Rent Tent – Image from nuttermother.com

This is a fact.  The modern woman, the Lize of 2010 (pre-baby), had no clue to what it meant to have a baby.  The art of being woman, of being there for one another during childbirth, of sitting together with your peeps in the  red tent hanging out menstruating and being ok with it,  is lost.  There’s no argument.  It is the saddest truth about our society today, that we do not know how to give birth.  If we are having to fight for the freedom of midwives, we have no clue.

(I’ll do a quick side note and give New Zealand big props for giving me the opportunity to give birth with a midwife, free from unnecessary medical intervention.  NZ you are miles ahead of the rest of the word.*).

One World Birth inspired me.  I’m putting it in writing (just finished Michael Hill’s A-MA-ZING book Toughen Up; he talks about setting goals and writing them down).

My goal: I’m going to organise (and be apart of) an exhibition that will ask women to comment on child birth. Whether that be from own experience or perception. Whether it be positive or negative.

The aim: to bring society face to face with the act of giving birth. To inspire, to critique to question.

This will show beginning of 2013.  I’ve got the gallery booked.

And this is my argument for why we should all care and talk about birth. (e.g. why you should be involved in this exhibition).

Artwork from rubylane.com

Giving birth to a human being is a big deal.  The physical act of bringing your child into this world takes bravery, strength, support, the utmost trust in yourself and those around you and I believe that If we were present at our sister/auntie/neighbor’s birth, we would know this fact undeniably.  All fears woman (and society) might have will melt away when they see and feel the all encompassing love coursing through the air, your very being, when a baby is held for the first time. The connection to the world and your fellow humans are so powerful, it makes you re-evaluate life as you know it.  Unfortunately I don’t think this will be a reality any time soon, so in the mean time we can talk about it honestly. The good, the bad and the ugly.  Birth is a big deal.  It’s the moment your child’s journey in this world starts.  The first day of loving your human for the rest of their life. Birth, it is the biggest deal.

If everyone cared about each and every birth, each child born into this world.  We will have the paradise many wish for here on earth.
And that is something to strive for, to fight for, to believe in.

Every person in this world is entitled to that kind of love and commitment. Lize.

*Having modern medicine to help save lives during birth is the most wonderful thng, this is not a rant trying to deny that fact.