When was the last time you actually stopped?

Tomorrow (Thursday 30th July) 10am - 11am BST I’m leading a writing sprint on Zoom, on the theme WRITING MATERNAL BURNOUT. I’d love you to attend. More info here.

For what its worth (what IS it worth?) I never use AI in my writing, both here and on my website. This is 100% human-made.

If I started with, How are you? what would you reply?

Say we’re sitting across from each other — or, in fact, side by side on a bench, so that we can still attend to the kids we’ve had to bring to this catch up.

Say they play nearby, helping each other on and off a swing. They happily make up a game involving the slide and toys they’ve brought along.

Say I ask, How are you doing?

Do you go to your mind for the answer? Or your heart? Or your body? Do you automatically say “Good! We’re fine!” — because we are, aren’t we?

We are good and we are fine.

Most of us with school-aged kids are now into the summer break — for me, a juggle of holiday clubs and trips. My husband sprained his ankle playing football (the tit) and so I am — in a general sense — TIRED*. If I close my eyes and check in with myself, I find I am over-caffeinated and dehydrated. My hips hurt. I need to pee. My right shoulder is tingling where a knot is developing. My mind is full of the ticker tape of who-needs-what-next.

What about you?
How are you?

Tired is such a catch-all, like fine. In the months after my first baby was born, I wanted new words for tired. I began to imagine a dictionary just for me and the other mothers I saw around me. We were not just exhausted or depleted, we were whole new landscapes of tired, new shades of tired. I scrawled a colour-coded scale numbered 1 — 10 which I stuck on the kitchen pinboard. I wanted my husband to understand the gradations. 9-tired, 7-tired. I had chronic post-natal insomnia so mostly it was 10.

Being with and IN my body is uncomfortable. It is laden, I suspect, with grief. Recently I wrote a short story about a woman avoiding her grief. The portal, the channel, the wherever-creativity-comes-from is alive with something seeded in my own experience.

What about you?
How are you?

In the late days of my second pregnancy I wrote about the pressure on my pelvis — surely my baby and my innards were all about the fall out? Weeks later, about the sharp, not-unpleasant pain as my breasts letdown. When the kids were babies — both in nappies with COVID bringing another dimension to my already-altered reality — I wrote the first episode of a dystopian TV series in the notes app of my phone. They all started in my body.

(None of these writings have seen the light of day — YET! as my kids would say).

I want mothers everywhere to stop and to write from a place of attention, rest and deep personal listening.

I want us to write the body.

Tomorrow 10am - 11am BST I will run an hour-long writing sprint on Zoom — WRITING MATERNAL BURNOUT — which will contain some deep, restful practices of visualisation, with prompts to write to. I would love you to be there (or set aside an hour to catch up — I’m recording this Summer Series): To place a boundary around you precious time and honour your beautiful, tired body. (As always, we won’t talk or think about birth or birth injuries).

Book your spot here. £10 - £40 +bf.

“Writing is a form of freedom more accessible than many and there are forces at work that would like to withhold it from those whose stories most threaten the regimes that govern this society. Fuck them. Write your life.”
Melissa Febos, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative.

If you have any questions, thoughts, niggles, feel free to reply :-)

More soon!

Catrin.

If you’ve newly subscribed, WELCOME! I have a few spots left on my 8-week course, The New Mothers’ Writing Circle, starting Tues 8th and Thurs 10th Sept.

I work with mothers with babies and children from 12 weeks - 5 years old, using writing to navigate the mind-bending experience of matrescence and build community. More info here.

*If I admit it, I am a bit pissed off about his sprain. I had specifically said to my husband, “Don’t play football!” But yes, middle-aged men will be middle-aged men.