Leaving the house with a baby or small child is a feat worthy of a medal. When I first did it with my two-week-old son, I sent my husband a photograph to celebrate. In the photo, my tiny baby is in the newborn insert of the baby carrier. It’s a warm day in March, and...
In this month’s blog, I share how my childhood Christmas story was and continues to be shaped by intergenerational trauma. On Christmas Eve 1963, Alexander and May were coming home from a party with friends when the car they were travelling in...
I ring my bell, but they don’t hear. I shout, but they don’t hear. I wave my hand, but they don’t see. Eventually, I swerve my bike around them and make tut-tut noises. When I was working with a man with vision impairment, he referred to them as “the...
What is an acceptable amount of crazy for mothers? I certainly identify with the idea of ‘normal crazy’, a term I discovered in my recent Master’s thesis proposal research. There have been times I have felt out of my mind during my matrescence. The researchers suggest...
Having been a social planner for over ten years, I am acutely aware of how historical town planning has overlooked the needs of women and mothers. In their article for The Conversation, academics Dorina Pojani, Dorothy Wardale, and Kerry Brown...
As I stood in the kitchen chopping up veggies for the soup I was making to ease my three-year-old son’s croup, I saw a figure flash past the back door. My first thought was, “oh, my husband must have come home early to take over sick child duties”. But it wasn’t my...