The Mule

The first time I gave birth, they took the placenta away. They didn't ask. They just took it, and of course, I didn't notice. I was busy, waking up from the dream of birth, and falling in love with the first creature I laid eyes on. Weeks later, in the darkness of night, I remembered. Where was it? I had wanted to keep it. What had they done with it? Could I get it back? No. It was gone, and strange as it sounds, I cried. Not so much for the piece of my flesh - lost. I cried for the bigger loss it somehow stood for - the birth I wanted, but didn't get. Somehow, the birth I wanted got replaced with the birth they wanted. And, in the birth they wanted, nobody keeps their placenta. Why would they want to do that? So I cried, for the flesh lost, and the dreams disregarded. The second time I gave birth, they took the placenta away. They didn't ask. They just took it, and of course, I didn't notice. I was busy, waking up from the dream of birth, and falling in l...

This week, the fight to save Independent Midwifery intensified, as five hundred people congregated in London in silent protest. I wasn't able to be there, but I was thrilled to play my part in the day by writing this article, Why Independent Midwives are key to the fight for birth freedom , which appeared in the Telegraph online on Monday morning. Of course, this was very exciting for me on a personal level too, as this is the first time I have had an article published at this level. It's amazing what can happen when you "Switch Off Your Television Set and Go and Do Something Less Boring Instead" - two years ago I started out writing tentative little numbers about fish fingers and my daily struggle to leave the house , and today I found myself sat at a table in a London studio, with cans on my ears and a fuzzy mike in my face, being asked to make sense of some of the issues around the current state of birth freedom in the UK. I was joined my ...

The following article appeared in the Huffington Post today. Independent  Midwives, the only alternative to NHS maternity care available in the UK, are currently under threat. This Monday – 25 th March – they are taking to the streets of London in protest at a E.U.Directive that requires all registered health professionals to have mandatory insurance. Independent Midwives (I.M’s) won’t be able to get this insurance – due to their low numbers and the potentially high cost of claims the premiums would be prohibitively expensive – and unless the Government answers their call to help them find a workable solution, they face becoming illegal and extinct from October 2013. I first came across I.M’s during my second pregnancy in 2010. Having had a hospital forceps delivery with my first baby that, both physically and emotionally, took a long time to recover from, I knew the impact that a birth experience could have, and planned to have a home water birth with baby ...

Here's something every pregnant woman might like to know: during labour, you will be given a routine vaginal exam every four hours, and this will be used to check your cervical dilation, and to chart your progress. Your midwife might mention this at your antenatal appointments, but here's what she probably won't tell you - the exams are optional , you can refuse them, and unless there seems to be a problem or you actually want to know how dilated you are, it's probably better that you do, since this invasion of your privacy can actually bring you out of your Labourland trance, making your 'mammalian self' feel threatened and slowing or halting the very progress they are trying to check. Learning about the various procedures, such as 'V.E's', that are likely to take place during your labour and birth can help you to make truly informed decisions about whether to accept or refuse them. It can allow you to think about the kind of labour you really ...

Every generation likes to think they're free, and often only the clarity of hindsight reveals just how restricted they actually were. My mother, for example, thought, like many women in the 1970's, that it was the very pinnacle of freedom to have her labour induced, to be able to choose on which day of the week her baby came, and to be in a hospital which offered 'state-of-the-art' care for her and her baby. Looking back on it now, she can see just how far from freedom she truly was: shaved, enema'd and pethidined, with no formal talk of consent, and later, ushered sternly back to bed by Matron as she wandered the hospital corridors, drug-hazy and looking for the baby they had taken from her. Nearly forty years later, that baby - me - is pregnant for the third time, and wondering - am I free? Do I have full freedom of choice to have the birth I really want and need? Can I feel assured that anything that is 'done to me' in the name of medical science will ...

The question of whether or not babies can learn to 'self-soothe' continues to divide parenting writers and experts. Does a baby left to cry alone in their cot eventually find ways to comfort themselves, to make themselves feel better? Or do they simply stop crying after a while because they realise that nobody will come and that there is nothing they can do about it - they learn that they are helpless? Let's look at this from a fresh angle. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, let me ask you a question: How do YOU 'self-soothe'? Think for a moment. The shit is hitting the fan. You are distressed. You have lost your job. Your relationship flounders. Someone close to you is sick. The usual suspects. You feel 'emotional'; you are upset, jangled, stirred. What do you do? How do you try to regulate yourself, to bring yourself back into balance? You might sit with your difficult feelings for a while, aware that they are part of life's patte...

Dear Daughters Brace yourselves, I have a confession to make. It may or may not surprise you. Here goes... I don't like being woken up in the night! I REALLY don't like it! I can't stand it! Maybe you thought it just washed over me - all part of the service - like chopping cheese into chunks or sitting through Waybaloo - well you're wrong. Being woken up and dragged from the delicious depths of sleep two, three, four, five times a night is WAY more irritating than that! WAY MORE! And, quite frankly, I'm bloody well sick of it! It's not just the nights - which are bad enough - it's the evenings too. For five years now I have had my enjoyment of every single evening compromised in some way, either because I've been trapped in a bedroom breastfeeding, singing, storytelling or simply begging you to go to sleep, or because I've had to abandon my delicious food / fascinating film / other grown-up activity, and go back upstairs to soothe you back to...

Sometimes I pass the place where we once lived And glimpse three ghosts arriving at the door A woman - me, a man, a newborn child, Alighting, in the darkness, shocked and sore. I watch them cross the threshold, disappear, They don't exist now - all of them are gone, For brand new parents barely last a day, And babies only live 'til they are one. In twenty years I'll show you our old haunts: "We used to come here once when you were small" You'll shrug, but I'll see flashes everywhere - Each gate you climbed, each park, each village hall.        Our lives move on, we change, evolve, adjust,         Leaving our trace, our imprints in the dust. If you are partial to sonnets about parenting you might also like:  I Lie With You Until You Are Asleep

Responsive Parenting begins in utero, as we start, however tentatively, to recognise a life at once within and beyond ourselves, and to consider their needs alongside our own. It is this deep and strengthening connection with another person, and the resulting desire to respond to their needs rapidly and with love, that forms the bedrock of Responsive Parenting. Responsive Parenting is not about how we feed our babies, how we transport them from a to b, or where we lay them to sleep. It is deeper, and much much more important than that. Maternal responsiveness - the way mother (or other main caregiver) watches, understands and meets their child's needs - has been shown in study after study to be fundamentally important to everything from language acquisition, to social competence, to long term emotional well being. Here is my definition of Responsive Parenting: Responsive Parents: Observe their children, notice and interpret their cues, and take prompt action. Respond to the...

The UK news this week has been dominated by the story of Jimmy Savile, the television presenter and media personality currently under investigation for a string of sex offences. It's emerging that Savile, who died in October 2011, abused a series of young people - the exact number is yet to be established - over a showbiz career that spanned several decades. Our reaction: shock, horror, sadness even, but surprise? Not really, because, we sort of knew, didn't we? We sort of know. We have uneasy feelings, gut reactions, hunches, intuitions, sixth senses. The hairs stand up, very slightly, on the backs of our necks. We don't know how we know. But we do. No one could capture this better than poet Simon Armitage , a former social worker, in his poem, The Guilty : They look us dead in the eye and deny it. They turn out their pockets - nothing but biscuits and shreds of a tissue. They will undress their children this very minute. Suggest their names, they are astonished. ...

Freedom for Birth, a new documentary film about human rights in childbirth, was screened in over a thousand locations across the world last Thursday, and I was there, keen to take part in a 'Mother's Revolution' supported by leading lights from the field - Ina May Gaskin, Sheila Kitzinger, Michel Odent - all calling for women to 'take back birth'. The film took as its focus the plight of Agnes Gereb, the Hungarian midwife currently under house arrest for attending women in illegal home births, and the related case of Ternovszky vs. Hungary, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that every woman has the right to choose where and how she gives birth. Quite clearly, there are some circumstances in which the compromise of freedom and the violation of human rights are tangible, for example when imprisonment is involved, or, as in another case touched on in the film, a woman's baby was taken away on the grounds of negligence because she has refused med...