Laura Richmond

Dear everyone, You might remember that the title of this book - 'All My Worldly Joy' comes from a letter to Henry VII from his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. I think of her sometimes - 12 years old, newly widowed and heavily pregnant, alone and unprotected in what was then a lawless region. She went to her brother-in-law's for safety and almost died giving birth to Henry. She never conceived again, but devoted her life to getting Henry on the throne. I wrote about her for part of my PhD thesis, which was about vowesses: medieval women who took vows of chastity without joining a convent. They were uniquely half-religious, and when I started researching them I thought that must have been really difficult, to be half one thing and half another like that. It was something I related to, feeling always on the fringes of things: having come from a working class family and had a middle class education, being too gay to be straight and too straight to be gay, opting for joint honours degrees so that I was awkwardly straddling academic departments, hovering on the periphery of every social gathering.... I have never been a singleminded sort of person and never felt fully part of anything. As a teenager I was struck by the poem 'Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan', in which Moniza Alvi writes about being 'of no fixed nationality / staring through fretwork / at the Shalimar gardens.' Vowesses taught me that liminality can be a position of tremendous strength. You just need a bit of self-belief, and for others to recognise the value of what you're doing. I was explaining this - the bit about vowesses, not about myself - during a lecture a few months ago, and a woman put her hand up and said that she didn't think much of these vowesses, because "they wanted to have their cake and eat it too." I thought that it would be a shame to have cake and not be able to eat it. All My Worldly Joy is not a book about vowesses, and yet I see them peeping around the corners of it sometimes. For example: in 1536, Agnes Smythe, a nun at Syon Abbey whose sister happened to be a vowess, prevented Henry VIII's men from getting their hands on the convent seal. (During the dissolution of the monasteries this was a big deal and would have interfered with the nuns' ability to communicate and receive income from their lands....) One of Henry's men wrote back to the king, describing Agnes as 'a sturdy dame, and a wilful'. Words to live by. Sometimes it just comes down to grit and sheer bloody-mindedness. I was sturdily wilful as I wrote up that PhD with a sick toddler who only slept in brief bursts, while my marriage endlessly circled the drain. I remember how the tiredness saturated me, like a sponge. I remember the tears pricking my eyelids at the slightest - or no - provocation. I remember staying away from my friends so that I wouldn’t be horrible to them. And I am sturdy and wilful now - and much happier. My friend Nikki embroidered the quote on to a t-shirt for me. Pre-orders for the book are still coming in, but they're coming in slowly, and I'm concerned that Unbound might at some point decide to just release it as an e-book. I don't even read e-books! It would mean no lovely signed copies, no marketing and no copies in the shops... I would be so gutted. So I've switched tactics a bit and am now sturdily and wilfully applying for grants which would help with the costs of the first print run. Thankfully there are a few out there which specifically fund "hard to fund" projects and things that don't sit neatly into other categories. This book would have made such a difference to me and I believe it will really empower health professionals who are working with mums affected by trauma. Also, if all of you persuaded just one other person to buy a copy we'd be there, so please do spread the word amongst your friends and colleagues. I have no regrets about not going the traditional publishing route with this book: I wouldn't swap the freedom to be honest and 'unmarketable' or all of your support and community for the world. And I'm bloody well going to make it happen! On that note, actually, some of you might also fancy Rory Hobble and the Voyage to Haligogen by Maximilian Hawker. It's a children's fantasy novel in which the protagonist has OCD, seeking to destigmatise mental health and social care involvement for kids. It looks really cool, and has until 11 March to fund, so do go and support it if you'd like. Arthur will be six tomorrow - he's calling today his "birthday eve." He is very, very excited and will have a party at the soft play with all his friends from school. You might want to read the blog post I wrote last year about birthdays and birth trauma. I feel more overwhelmed than usual, but the PTSD symptoms are definitely getting easier every year. That said, their absence seems to magnify the sense of loss. I'm sorry I was so out of it when he was little. I wish I could get that time back. I am rather intensely enjoying him as he is before he gets any bigger. I want to tell you all about the next piece of peer support work i'm doing, specifically in NHS perinatal mental health services, but that will have to keep until next time! Thank you all so much for being here. With love, Laura x

Dear everyone,

You might remember that the title of this book - 'All My Worldly Joy' comes from a letter to Henry VII from his mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. I think of her sometimes - 12 years old, newly widowed and heavily pregnant, alone and unprotected in what was then a lawless region. She went to her brother-in-law's for safety and almost died giving birth to Henry. She never conceived again, but devoted her life to getting Henry on the throne. I wrote about her for part of my PhD thesis, which was about vowesses: medieval women who took vows of chastity without joining a convent. They were uniquely half-religious, and when I started researching them I thought that must have been really difficult, to be half one thing and half another like that. It was something I related to, feeling always on the fringes of things: having come from a working class family and had a middle class education, being too gay to be straight and too straight to be gay, opting for joint honours degrees so that I was awkwardly straddling academic departments, hovering on the periphery of every social gathering.... I have never been a singleminded sort of person and never felt fully part of anything. As a teenager I was struck by the poem 'Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan', in which Moniza Alvi writes about being 'of no fixed nationality / staring through fretwork / at the Shalimar gardens.' Vowesses taught me that liminality can be a position of tremendous strength. You just need a bit of self-belief, and for others to recognise the value of what you're doing. I was explaining this - the bit about vowesses, not about myself - during a lecture a few months ago, and a woman put her hand up and said that she didn't think much of these vowesses, because "they wanted to have their cake and eat it too." I thought that it would be a shame to have cake and not be able to eat it.

All My Worldly Joy is not a book about vowesses, and yet I see them peeping around the corners of it sometimes. For example: in 1536, Agnes Smythe, a nun at Syon Abbey whose sister happened to be a vowess, prevented Henry VIII's men from getting their hands on the convent seal. (During the dissolution of the monasteries this was a big deal and would have interfered with the nuns' ability to communicate and receive income from their lands....) One of Henry's men wrote back to the king, describing Agnes as 'a sturdy dame, and a wilful'. Words to live by. Sometimes it just comes down to grit and sheer bloody-mindedness. I was sturdily wilful as I wrote up that PhD with a sick toddler who only slept in brief bursts, while my marriage endlessly circled the drain. I remember how the tiredness saturated me, like a sponge. I remember the tears pricking my eyelids at the slightest - or no - provocation. I remember staying away from my friends so that I wouldn’t be horrible to them. And I am sturdy and wilful now - and much happier. My friend Nikki embroidered the quote on to a t-shirt for me. 


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/EQ5Nr9VW4AgwYHO.jpg?v=1690912210" width="483">


Pre-orders for the book are still coming in, but they're coming in slowly, and I'm concerned that Unbound might at some point decide to just release it as an e-book. I don't even read e-books! It would mean no lovely signed copies, no marketing and no copies in the shops... I would be so gutted. So I've switched tactics a bit and am now sturdily and wilfully applying for grants which would help with the costs of the first print run. Thankfully there are a few out there which specifically fund "hard to fund" projects and things that don't sit neatly into other categories. This book would have made such a difference to me and I believe it will really empower health professionals who are working with mums affected by trauma. Also, if all of you persuaded just one other person to buy a copy we'd be there, so please do spread the word amongst your friends and colleagues. I have no regrets about not going the traditional publishing route with this book: I wouldn't swap the freedom to be honest and 'unmarketable' or all of your support and community for the world. And I'm bloody well going to make it happen!

On that note, actually, some of you might also fancy <a href="https://unbound.com/books/rory-hobble-and-the-voyage-to-haligogen/">Rory Hobble and the Voyage to Haligogen</a> by Maximilian Hawker. It's a children's fantasy novel in which the protagonist has OCD, seeking to destigmatise mental health and social care involvement for kids. It looks really cool, and has until 11 March to fund, so do go and support it if you'd like. 

Arthur will be six tomorrow - he's calling today his "birthday eve." He is very, very excited and will have a party at the soft play with all his friends from school. You might want to read <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/happyish-birthdays">the blog post I wrote last year about birthdays and birth trauma</a>. I feel more overwhelmed than usual, but the PTSD symptoms are definitely getting easier every year. That said, their absence seems to magnify the sense of loss. I'm sorry I was so out of it when he was little. I wish I could get that time back. I am rather intensely enjoying him as he is before he gets any bigger. I want to tell you all about the next piece of peer support work i'm doing, specifically in NHS perinatal mental health services, but that will have to keep until next time!

Thank you all so much for being here.

With love,

Laura x

'A Sturdy Dame, and a Wilful'

Hi everyone, Hope you're all doing OK - or as OK as is feasible right now. I wanted to check in to wish you a merry Christmas (or as merry as is feasible right now!) and to thank you for your patience with The Book That Took Forever. I have a little bit of news on that score and it feels exciting to be getting in touch about that rather than some other tangentially-related thing. So - long covid did an absolute number on my cognitive abilities this year and, as you know, recovery has been slow and unpredictable and a bit fraught, but I think I'm almost there. I have some ongoing vascular issues and can't tolerate much in terms of exercise, but generally I'm feeling much more like myself. My confidence, though, had taken a big hit and needed to be slowly built back up as much as my immune system and everything else. The book came to a standstill, both in terms of writing and crowdfunding, and I had got myself into a tangle of anxiety and avoidance. The Unbound authors have a Facebook group which I had started using as a stick to beat myself with: "Look, Steve has finished his book. Where is your book, Laura?" and then stopped looking at almost altogether. But just by chance - or perhaps because the universe took pity on me, or the universe was fed up of my constant wailing and self-flagellation - I happened to see a post from someone who was offering some writers' coaching. I e-mailed him immediately: "Please! Help! I'm terrified of my own book!" (not my exact words but that was the gist). And we've only zoomed once so far but already it's really helped. Just talking about the book made me stop avoiding it enough to get some of the excitement back, to be reassured that these are very ordinary writerly anxieties, that this is an important project and one I'm capable of delivering. And so we are back on course! The second draft is shaping up and I'm going to get back on the crowdfunding in the new year. It's not an easy book to write, and these are not easy circumstances in which to write it, but I have a strong record for doing hard things. Five years ago I was afraid that I couldn't finish the PhD, with my sick toddler, my mental health in the toilet, my marriage endlessly circling the drain... The sleep deprivation, in particular, was just exquisite torture. And I had written all this stuff and it wouldn't arrange into a structure. The whole thing just loomed like a mountain in the distance and I couldn't see a route by which I could even get near it. In the end, though, it got done and the examiners loved it. There is something particularly gratifying about polishing off something ambitious, knowing that the odds have been stacked against you from the start. It often takes longer than planned but gains immeasurably from the struggle that went into it. I am so grateful for your support. Thank you for believing in me enough to stump up for a book that doesn't exist yet. Thank you for waiting for it so patiently as hurdle after hurdle has come up. Thank you for all your emails and messages. I have met so many wonderful new people through this venture. I'm also very grateful to my new coach: giving up your time to help a stranger write a book is such a lovely, selfless thing. And I'm grateful to Unbound, who took a punt on me and are putting up with what must be one of the longest crowdfunding campaigns in history without a murmur of complaint. And I have this all-embracing network of friends and family around me, without whom I would most definitely manage fuck all. I hope you all have a peaceful, joyful Christmas and new year. I don't want to add to anyone's to-do lists but drop me a line if you feel like it. I'd love to know how you are and how the year has been. With love, Laura x

Hi everyone, 
 
Hope you're all doing OK - or as OK as is feasible right now. I wanted to check in to wish you a merry Christmas (or as merry as is feasible right now!) and to thank you for your patience with The Book That Took Forever. I have a little bit of news on that score and it feels exciting to be getting in touch about that rather than some other tangentially-related thing. 
 
So - long covid did an absolute number on my cognitive abilities this year and, as you know, recovery has been slow and unpredictable and a bit fraught, but I think I'm almost there. I have some ongoing vascular issues and can't tolerate much in terms of exercise, but generally I'm feeling much more like myself. My confidence, though, had taken a big hit and needed to be slowly built back up as much as my immune system and everything else. The book came to a standstill, both in terms of writing and crowdfunding, and I had got myself into a tangle of anxiety and avoidance. 
 
The Unbound authors have a Facebook group which I had started using as a stick to beat myself with: "Look, Steve has finished his book. Where is your book, Laura?" and then stopped looking at almost altogether. But just by chance - or perhaps because the universe took pity on me, or the universe was fed up of my constant wailing and self-flagellation - I happened to see a post from someone who was offering some writers' coaching. I e-mailed him immediately: "Please! Help! I'm terrified of my own book!" (not my exact words but that was the gist). 
 
And we've only zoomed once so far but already it's really helped. Just talking about the book made me stop avoiding it enough to get some of the excitement back, to be reassured that these are very ordinary writerly anxieties, that this is an important project and one I'm capable of delivering. And so we are back on course! The second draft is shaping up and I'm going to get back on the crowdfunding in the new year. 
 
It's not an easy book to write, and these are not easy circumstances in which to write it, but I have a strong record for doing hard things. Five years ago I was afraid that I couldn't finish the PhD, with my sick toddler, my mental health in the toilet, my marriage endlessly circling the drain... The sleep deprivation, in particular, was just exquisite torture. And I had written all this stuff and it wouldn't arrange into a structure. The whole thing just loomed like a mountain in the distance and I couldn't see a route by which I could even get near it. In the end, though, it got done and the examiners loved it. There is something particularly gratifying about polishing off something ambitious, knowing that the odds have been stacked against you from the start. It often takes longer than planned but gains immeasurably from the struggle that went into it. 
 
I am so grateful for your support. Thank you for believing in me enough to stump up for a book that doesn't exist yet. Thank you for waiting for it so patiently as hurdle after hurdle has come up. Thank you for all your emails and messages. I have met so many wonderful new people through this venture. I'm also very grateful to my new coach: giving up your time to help a stranger write a book is such a lovely, selfless thing. And I'm grateful to Unbound, who took a punt on me and are putting up with what must be one of the longest crowdfunding campaigns in history without a murmur of complaint. And I have this all-embracing network of friends and family around me, without whom I would most definitely manage fuck all. 
 
I hope you all have a peaceful, joyful Christmas and new year. I don't want to add to anyone's to-do lists but drop me a line if you feel like it. I'd love to know how you are and how the year has been. 
 
With love, 
 
Laura x

An actual book update - for once!

Dear everyone, I'm always really pleasantly surprised when I hear that someone's read one of these updates. I know, if this landed in my inbox, I would intend to read it later and probably not get round to it. And I would hate for anyone to feel any pressure. I was even more surprised this week when one of you, whom I've never actually met, messaged me on Twitter to ask how the book was going and why there hadn't been any updates for a while. I'm genuinely touched that anyone is that interested. It had been on my to-do list for the last three or four weekends, to write one of these, and I hadn't got round to it partly because I'd been catching up on work - my poor boy has been hokey-kokeying in and out of school because of covid cases in the class - but also, if I'm honest, partly because I felt a bit reluctant to intrude on your time and attention. It is, however, long overdue. I noted with some shock that I haven't updated you since March! So - crowdfunding-wise, we are £1.77 under 75% funded! Gosh. And, writing-wise, I expect to have a complete second draft by Christmas. It's been a huge leap from first draft to second. The first draft was essentially just stream-of-consciousness arranged into some sort of order and stitched together with old blog posts, talks, rants, poems, and goodness knows what else, while the second draft is, well, an actual book. I am, perhaps rather optimistically, hoping that it won't require a huge amount of editing from there, although there will definitely be improvements to be made. It's really coming together. I feel like I'm carrying around this glorious secret. There is so much unexpected in this book, so much that is filling my head, that has filled my head for years, and hopefully sometime next year it will also be in your head. I think some of it will really surprise you, even those of you who know me well. I oscillate between thinking that this book is utterly fantastic and will change the world, and thinking that it's drivel and will only serve to acutely embarrass everyone forever. We shall see, I guess. I write for 45 minutes most days, set a timer and everything. It's the only way I can fit it in but, actually, it works a treat: keeps it ticking over, and present, so that my mind does a lot of the behind-the-scenes work of writing even when I'm not actually writing, and then ideas and solutions come to me when I'm washing up or on the school run. I have learned the hard way never to leave it alone for more than a week. If I allow too much space between myself and the book, fears creep in and fill that space - stage-fright, really: it's because it's about me. Last year, when I had covid and then long covid, and it was completely disabling, that left too much space and I became completely paralysed by fear - fear that it won't be any good, that everyone will think I'm a twat... I've decided it's a risk that I'm willing to take. This book is not yet what I want it to be, but I really think it has the potential to get there and to be something quite unlike anything else. You have all been so patient with me through all of this. Not just the long covid (not gone but greatly improved), but my marriage breaking up before that, and work... I've been working so many part-time, fixed-term jobs. It's great in lots of ways - I love what I do - and I get to do so many different things and learn so many new skills. I'm currently senior research and involvement officer at Bliss, the neonatal charity; and a research assistant at the University of Manchester, developing a social network intervention for mental health; and a lived experience research consultant for Mind and UCL, developing a virtual reality treatment for depression; and I'm about to start two days a week setting up a peer support service at one of the new maternal mental health hubs in London... And then there are still history projects on the side, a gig at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, lecturing a few times a year, being a patient rep at the Royal College of Psychiatrists... And that's all just at the moment. It's all so rich and varied and valuable, but it's not sustainable, living like this, working such long hours, reminding myself in which context I'm speaking every time I pick up the phone, and having to hustle, hustle, hustle, shine very brightly, try to impress everyone in hope of creating opportunities for myself. I've been applying for jobs all over the place, trying to land myself something permanent - my holy grail, a bit of stability - for a while now with some close calls but no luck. I hope my next update will be the news that I've finally pulled it off. It would speed up the book as well. This has been a bit of a long one, so I will bid you adieu for now. I can't believe we're nearly three-quarters of the way to being funded! Thank you so much for being here, and supporting me, and bearing with me while I take a very long time to finish a book. I hope you're well and as happy as anyone is at the moment with... *gestures vaguely out of the window* With love, Laura

Dear everyone,

I'm always really pleasantly surprised when I hear that someone's read one of these updates. I know, if this landed in my inbox, I would intend to read it later and probably not get round to it. And I would hate for anyone to feel any pressure. I was even more surprised this week when one of you, whom I've never actually met, messaged me on Twitter to ask how the book was going and why there hadn't been any updates for a while. I'm genuinely touched that anyone is that interested. It had been on my to-do list for the last three or four weekends, to write one of these, and I hadn't got round to it partly because I'd been catching up on work - my poor boy has been hokey-kokeying in and out of school because of covid cases in the class - but also, if I'm honest, partly because I felt a bit reluctant to intrude on your time and attention.

It is, however, long overdue. I noted with some shock that I haven't updated you since March! So - crowdfunding-wise, we are £1.77 under 75% funded! Gosh. And, writing-wise, I expect to have a complete second draft by Christmas. It's been a huge leap from first draft to second. The first draft was essentially just stream-of-consciousness arranged into some sort of order and stitched together with old blog posts, talks, rants, poems, and goodness knows what else, while the second draft is, well, an actual book. I am, perhaps rather optimistically, hoping that it won't require a huge amount of editing from there, although there will definitely be improvements to be made. It's really coming together. I feel like I'm carrying around this glorious secret. There is so much unexpected in this book, so much that is filling my head, that has filled my head for years, and hopefully sometime next year it will also be in your head. I think some of it will really surprise you, even those of you who know me well. I oscillate between thinking that this book is utterly fantastic and will change the world, and thinking that it's drivel and will only serve to acutely embarrass everyone forever. We shall see, I guess. 

I write for 45 minutes most days, set a timer and everything. It's the only way I can fit it in but, actually, it works a treat: keeps it ticking over, and present, so that my mind does a lot of the behind-the-scenes work of writing even when I'm not actually writing, and then ideas and solutions come to me when I'm washing up or on the school run. I have learned the hard way never to leave it alone for more than a week. If I allow too much space between myself and the book, fears creep in and fill that space - stage-fright, really: it's because it's about me. Last year, when I had covid and then long covid, and it was completely disabling, that left too much space and I became completely paralysed by fear - fear that it won't be any good, that everyone will think I'm a twat... I've decided it's a risk that I'm willing to take. This book is not yet what I want it to be, but I really think it has the potential to get there and to be something quite unlike anything else. 

You have all been so patient with me through all of this. Not just the long covid (not gone but greatly improved), but my marriage breaking up before that, and work... I've been working so many part-time, fixed-term jobs. It's great in lots of ways - I love what I do - and I get to do so many different things and learn so many new skills. I'm currently senior research and involvement officer at Bliss, the neonatal charity; and a research assistant at the University of Manchester, developing a social network intervention for mental health; and a lived experience research consultant for Mind and UCL, developing a virtual reality treatment for depression; and I'm about to start two days a week setting up a peer support service at one of the new maternal mental health hubs in London... And then there are still history projects on the side, a gig at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, lecturing a few times a year, being a patient rep at the Royal College of Psychiatrists... And that's all just at the moment. It's all so rich and varied and valuable, but it's not sustainable, living like this, working such long hours, reminding myself in which context I'm speaking every time I pick up the phone, and having to hustle, hustle, hustle, shine very brightly, try to impress everyone in hope of creating opportunities for myself. I've been applying for jobs all over the place, trying to land myself something permanent - my holy grail, a bit of stability - for a while now with some close calls but no luck. I hope my next update will be the news that I've finally pulled it off. It would speed up the book as well. 

This has been a bit of a long one, so I will bid you adieu for now. I can't believe we're nearly three-quarters of the way to being funded! Thank you so much for being here, and supporting me, and bearing with me while I take a very long time to finish a book. I hope you're well and as happy as anyone is at the moment with... *gestures vaguely out of the window*

With love,

Laura

Better late than never?

Many of you will have been following the recent controversy around the NCT and infant feeding. The NCT president, Seana Talbot, resigned a couple of weeks ago, stating that she felt the charity was moving away from its original emphasis on breastfeeding and birth towards more generic parent support and perinatal mental health. Zoe Williams responded in the Guardian, citing the harm done by militant promotion of breastfeeding, and there were numerous letters in response. Hadley Freeman followed up thoughtfully in her column this weekend. This is all just the latest manifestation of an ongoing row around 'breast is best', and it's unfortunate, although not surprising, that the NCT finds itself right in the centre of it. I can't help feeling that what gets lost in all this are the mums and babies themselves. The issue is so emotionally charged for so many of us, because it's rooted in our own experience at the most vulnerable time of our lives. During pregnancy, I was advised by my psychiatrist not to breastfeed because I was on antipsychotic medication. I feel, now, that this was bad advice but back then I didn't question it. It became irrelevant because I had that absolute clusterfuck of a birth and in my son's early weeks I was too sick to attempt it anyway. Arthur had a tongue-tie, which is when the strip of skin connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth is too short, restricting movement of the tongue and often causing feeding difficulties. It's fairly common, although Arthur was a severe case. He could barely feed at all: it would take an hour to get 10ml of formula into him. He'd keep falling asleep and the midwives had me tickling his feet, tickling his chin, every trick in the book. One midwife even ran her hands under the cold tap and put them on his belly to keep him awake while I was trying to feed him. None of it worked. He was losing too much weight. He became jaundiced. The tongue-tie was the obvious cause but, because I wasn't breastfeeding, I was told we were "not a priority". They said I should wait until we got out of hospital, then take him to the GP and join a nine month waiting list for tongue-tie division (a procedure which takes seconds). But we couldn't get out of hospital while he was being treated for jaundice and I was still so unwell. He was quite literally starving. I was googling "private tongue-tie practitioners" from my hospital bed, frantic with worry. No one had the availability to see a bottle-fed baby. I phoned breastfeeding groups which offered tongue-tie division and was told I wasn't welcome. It was horrible. I felt like I was being punished for using formula - and, worse, that my baby was being punished. We got it sorted in the end, but this all contributed significantly to my subsequent mental breakdown, for which we were hospitalised when he was six weeks old. I'm sure that this isn't what even the most hard-line breastfeeding activist would want, but I'm aware that I carry those memories and those feelings into every conversation on the topic. Although I agree wholeheartedly that breastfeeding is a great thing, that it has health benefits, that women's bodies are amazing, that formula companies should be held accountable, that women should breastfeed wherever the hell they want, that the fight for better breastfeeding support is an important one, nontheless much of the breastfeeding promotion that I've seen - on social media and posters in the hospital and GP surgery - has made me feel like utter crap. The implication is that I let Arthur down, that his health has suffered because of my inadequacies. Is it possible to promote breastfeeding without making mothers feel this way? Perhaps not, although I still feel that some sensitivity in the wording wouldn't go amiss. It's about the audience: what you put in front of the government or NHS commissioners isn't what you give to a sleep-deprived mum with a screaming baby in her arms. Personally, I think that if we want breastfeeding rates to go up, we should stop trying to persuade, frighten, or guilt women into it, and better support those who are trying to do so. The NCT actually does a fantastic job with this. They run an infant feeding support helpline, facilitate groups, and train breastfeeding peer supporters. Although my NCT antenatal classes were pretty dire, my experiences of the organisation since have been incredibly positive. I was on the advisory group for Parents in Mind, a pilot project which designed and delivered safe, nurturing, sustainable perinatal mental health peer support, and I attended the reception in Parliament for the #HiddenHalf campaign, for better six-week postnatal check-ups to provide mums with an opportunity to talk about how they're feeling. The NCT has a new emphasis on perinatal mental health, sure - but how is that not a good thing? Perinatal mental health and birth and infant feeding are not separate issues: they are connected, interrelating facets of the wellbeing of young families. Any approach which is not holistic is doomed to fail. And the NCT exists for everybody: parents should be supported regardless of how they feed their babies. But I'm aware that I'm hardly objective on this one. I think what breaks my heart about the furore is that both sides essentially want the same thing. We all want healthy babies, who have the best possible start in life. We want healthy mothers, who feel confident in their ability to make the right decisions. We want good mental health for mums and dads, and strong parent-infant attachment, whether that's the result of a positive breastfeeding experience or an informed decision to formula feed. I hope we can keep this in mind, the next time someone on either side says or writes or posts something which is like a punch to the gut. I'll try if you will.

Many of you will have been following the recent controversy around the NCT and infant feeding. The NCT president, Seana Talbot, resigned a couple of weeks ago, stating that she felt the charity was moving away from its original emphasis on breastfeeding and birth towards more generic parent support and perinatal mental health. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/23/breast-best-lobby-women-unworthy-national-childbirth-trust">Zoe Williams responded in the Guardian</a>, citing the harm done by militant promotion of breastfeeding, and there were numerous letters in response. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/commentisfree/2019/may/04/breastfeeding-v-bottle-motherhood-hadley-freeman">Hadley Freeman followed up thoughtfully</a> in her column this weekend. This is all just the latest manifestation of an ongoing row around 'breast is best', and it's unfortunate, although not surprising, that the NCT finds itself right in the centre of it. I can't help feeling that what gets lost in all this are the mums and babies themselves.

The issue is so emotionally charged for so many of us, because it's rooted in our own experience at the most vulnerable time of our lives. During pregnancy, I was advised by my psychiatrist not to breastfeed because I was on antipsychotic medication. I feel, now, that this was bad advice but back then I didn't question it. It became irrelevant because I had that absolute clusterfuck of a birth and in my son's early weeks I was too sick to attempt it anyway. Arthur had a tongue-tie, which is when the strip of skin connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth is too short, restricting movement of the tongue and often causing feeding difficulties. It's fairly common, although Arthur was a severe case. He could barely feed at all: it would take an hour to get 10ml of formula into him. He'd keep falling asleep and the midwives had me tickling his feet, tickling his chin, every trick in the book. One midwife even ran her hands under the cold tap and put them on his belly to keep him awake while I was trying to feed him.

None of it worked. He was losing too much weight. He became jaundiced. The tongue-tie was the obvious cause but, because I wasn't breastfeeding, I was told we were "not a priority". They said I should wait until we got out of hospital, then take him to the GP and join a nine month waiting list for tongue-tie division (a procedure which takes seconds). But we couldn't get out of hospital while he was being treated for jaundice and I was still so unwell. He was quite literally starving. I was googling "private tongue-tie practitioners" from my hospital bed, frantic with worry. No one had the availability to see a bottle-fed baby. I phoned breastfeeding groups which offered tongue-tie division and was told I wasn't welcome. It was horrible. I felt like I was being punished for using formula - and, worse, that my baby was being punished. We got it sorted in the end, but this all contributed significantly to my subsequent mental breakdown, for which we were hospitalised when he was six weeks old.


 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="/images/11277/preview/medium" width="474">


I'm sure that this isn't what even the most hard-line breastfeeding activist would want, but I'm aware that I carry those memories and those feelings into every conversation on the topic. Although I agree wholeheartedly that breastfeeding is a great thing, that it has health benefits, that women's bodies are amazing, that formula companies should be held accountable, that women should breastfeed wherever the hell they want, that the fight for better breastfeeding support is an important one, nontheless much of the breastfeeding promotion that I've seen - on social media and posters in the hospital and GP surgery - has made me feel like utter crap. The implication is that I let Arthur down, that his health has suffered because of my inadequacies. Is it possible to promote breastfeeding without making mothers feel this way? Perhaps not, although I still feel that some sensitivity in the wording wouldn't go amiss. It's about the audience: what you put in front of the government or NHS commissioners isn't what you give to a sleep-deprived mum with a screaming baby in her arms. Personally, I think that if we want breastfeeding rates to go up, we should stop trying to persuade, frighten, or guilt women into it, and better support those who are trying to do so. 

The NCT actually does a fantastic job with this. They run an infant feeding support helpline, facilitate groups, and train breastfeeding peer supporters. Although my NCT antenatal classes were pretty dire, my experiences of the organisation since have been incredibly positive. I was on the advisory group for <a href="https://www.nct.org.uk/about-us/professional/parents-mind-perinatal-mental-health-peer-support-0">Parents in Mind</a>, a pilot project which designed and delivered safe, nurturing, sustainable perinatal mental health peer support, and I attended the reception in Parliament for the <a href="https://www.nct.org.uk/get-involved/campaigns/hidden-half-campaign">#HiddenHalf</a> campaign, for better six-week postnatal check-ups to provide mums with an opportunity to talk about how they're feeling. The NCT has a new emphasis on perinatal mental health, sure - but how is that not a good thing? Perinatal mental health and birth and infant feeding are not separate issues: they are connected, interrelating facets of the wellbeing of young families. Any approach which is not holistic is doomed to fail. And the NCT exists for everybody: parents should be supported regardless of how they feed their babies. 

But I'm aware that I'm hardly objective on this one. I think what breaks my heart about the furore is that both sides essentially want the same thing. We all want healthy babies, who have the best possible start in life. We want healthy mothers, who feel confident in their ability to make the right decisions. We want good mental health for mums and dads, and strong parent-infant attachment, whether that's the result of a positive breastfeeding experience or an informed decision to formula feed. I hope we can keep this in mind, the next time someone on either side says or writes or posts something which is like a punch to the gut. I'll try if you will.

Breastfeeding, formula-feeding, and the NCT

Dear everyone, It's been a little while since my last update so I thought I would let you know how things are ticking along. Firstly we are now 72% funded - nearly 73%, in fact - so almost three-quarters of the way through this epic crowdfunding campaign. A warm welcome to the new supporters, particularly those who have arrived over the last few days after hearing me speak at the perinatal mental health course. You were so kind and enthusiastic and open-hearted on that Zoom call. I couldn't even see you and yet I felt very held and supported. Thanks for coming here and pledging for the book. And thanks also to those who pledged a while ago and have been patiently waiting! There have been a few bumps in the road since I signed my book contract with Unbound: the break-up of my marriage and the subsequent scramble for financial independence while adjusting to single mum life; the pandemic and my being ill with covid and now with long covid... My whole life has been a bit eventful like this so in a sense I'm used to that but it has slowed the book down rather! I'm just so grateful that you have stuck with me through it all and, in a sense, come along for the ride. If I'd signed with a conventional publisher and not had you all there - an invisible cheering crowd, or at least several hundred people who actually believe in my ability to do this and think it's worth stumping up cash for - I think I would have given up by now. In fact, I'm doing the opposite. I'm writing loads. Most days, in fact. I'm a bit astonished at myself, as I'm still working really long hours and until last week have had to homeschool alongside. I think it's batshit that we have been expected to educate our children for 3-5 hours a day and still produce the same quantity, and quality, of work as before we were doing that. Like many people of my generation, I'm chasing the elusive Permanent Job while holding down several short term and freelance contracts, which is shit, but I do at least enjoy the work. The latest is that, since last month, I've been on a six month contract as senior research and involvement officer at Bliss, the neonatal charity: three days a week doing a project to understand the unique challenges that young parents face when their baby is born premature or sick. I feel very lucky to be able to do that. Although I am essentially, at this point, just that rabbit on Peppa Pig that does all the jobs. But, yes, the book is really coming together and has taken me in some quite unexpected directions. I feel like it's a surprise that I have for you all - a good surprise, hopefully! Even if you've heard me do the biannual Big Talk about my perinatal experiences, or if we've been friends for a long time, there will be some surprises in there. It's surprised me, and I lived it. I think it's very normal for writers to oscillate between "this is brilliant, this is shit, this brilliant" over and over, sometimes multiple times a day, and there are definitely still problems to solve and bits to write and rewrite and then rewrite again... but I have to admit to a nervous optimism that it's actually going to be quite good, eventually. I hope you are all OK - or as OK as any of us are at the moment. Better days ahead. One day we will be at a book launch eating crisps out of large bowls and I will hug all of you (or all of you who are comfortable with that). I'm getting my first dose of the vaccine on Wednesday and the second of June and when that's soaked in nicely, I hope to go on a hug tour of Britain. Until then, Laura xx

Dear everyone,

It's been a little while since my last update so I thought I would let you know how things are ticking along.

Firstly we are now 72% funded - nearly 73%, in fact - so almost three-quarters of the way through this epic crowdfunding campaign. A warm welcome to the new supporters, particularly those who have arrived over the last few days after hearing me speak at the perinatal mental health course. You were so kind and enthusiastic and open-hearted on that Zoom call. I couldn't even see you and yet I felt very held and supported. Thanks for coming here and pledging for the book.

And thanks also to those who pledged a while ago and have been patiently waiting! There have been a few bumps in the road since I signed my book contract with Unbound: the break-up of my marriage and the subsequent scramble for financial independence while adjusting to single mum life; the pandemic and my being ill with covid and now with long covid... My whole life has been a bit eventful like this so in a sense I'm used to that but it has slowed the book down rather! I'm just so grateful that you have stuck with me through it all and, in a sense, come along for the ride. If I'd signed with a conventional publisher and not had you all there - an invisible cheering crowd, or at least several hundred people who actually believe in my ability to do this and think it's worth stumping up cash for - I think I would have given up by now. 

In fact, I'm doing the opposite. I'm writing loads. Most days, in fact. I'm a bit astonished at myself, as I'm still working really long hours and until last week have had to homeschool alongside. I think it's batshit that we have been expected to educate our children for 3-5 hours a day and still produce the same quantity, and quality, of work as before we were doing that. Like many people of my generation, I'm chasing the elusive Permanent Job while holding down several short term and freelance contracts, which is shit, but I do at least enjoy the work. The latest is that, since last month, I've been on a six month contract as senior research and involvement officer at Bliss, the neonatal charity: three days a week doing a project to understand the unique challenges that young parents face when their baby is born premature or sick. I feel very lucky to be able to do that. Although I am essentially, at this point, just that rabbit on Peppa Pig that does all the jobs.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/download_a1dc2696-208d-4af6-ba9f-ae8bc0b6e2e5.jpg?v=1690912218" width="300" height="168">


But, yes, the book is really coming together and has taken me in some quite unexpected directions. I feel like it's a surprise that I have for you all - a good surprise, hopefully! Even if you've heard me do the biannual Big Talk about my perinatal experiences, or if we've been friends for a long time, there will be some surprises in there. It's surprised me, and I lived it. I think it's very normal for writers to oscillate between "this is brilliant, this is shit, this brilliant" over and over, sometimes multiple times a day, and there are definitely still problems to solve and bits to write and rewrite and then rewrite again... but I have to admit to a nervous optimism that it's actually going to be quite good, eventually.

I hope you are all OK - or as OK as any of us are at the moment. Better days ahead. One day we will be at a book launch eating crisps out of large bowls and I will hug all of you (or all of you who are comfortable with that). I'm getting my first dose of the vaccine on Wednesday and the second of June and when that's soaked in nicely, I hope to go on a hug tour of Britain. 

Until then,

Laura xx

Checking in

Dear everybody, First of all, I've been meaning to write the last couple of weeks and tell you - in case you haven't seen already - that the perinatal peer support principles are here and ready to use. We launched them at Peerfest in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago, and I also published this blog post about co-creating the principles. The Peerfest team had originally capped the number of participants per workshop at 30, and our perinatal peer support one filled up straight away. People had travelled especially and were being turned away and were understandably quite cross, so the Peerfest team very kindly let us be the exception and let everyone in. We had 67 people in our workshop! It was a brilliant day - once again, we were totally floored by everyone's enthusiasm and support for the principles. I feel so lucky to have been able to lead on this. It's such a lovely feeling, handing out principles booklets to people who are really eager for them. I imagine it's what being an ice cream man must feel like. Last week I showed this booklet proudly to my friend, Margaret, and she said, "I see you've put a ginger person in the middle there. Bit of representation for you." I love the design work - wish I had done it! The other thing I wanted to tell you was that today I am slacking off. I'm not writing the book that you're waiting for, sorry. Arthur's had an ear infection this week so we're both very short of sleep. We were afraid that he was going to miss the school Christmas concert that he's been rehearsing for weeks. I've heard all about "Mary and Jopiff" and endless renditions of a rather novel carol that goes, "And the sheep go baa-baa-bananas for the boy!" He assured me repeatedly that this concert will "blow your socks off - but, don't worry, your socks won't actually blow anywhere. It's just a phrase that means you'll be very impressed." Thankfully we made it this morning. I was very impressed. I watched him scan the audience for my face and then wave madly. He was the first person to stand up on stage and he said, "Welcome to Year 1's special Christmas performance," in such a beautiful loud clear voice that I cheered. One of the mums next to me had a newborn baby girl and she was just the most utterly perfect thing. I felt a sudden gut-punch of sadness that I don't remember Arthur like that, that I didn't enjoy him, that the time is gone and I can never get it back, that I'm unlikely to have any more children... Then I looked up at Arthur again, yawning adorably through the songs in a cardboard star-hat. I'm still absurdly busy - running two careers in parallel, single-mothering, writing and funding this book - and it does take its toll. I have these crashy days, especially after something like Peerfest when I've been peopling hard. Today is a crashy day. I came home from the school at about 10am, feeling all hell with lack of sleep and big confused feelings, thought about everything that I have to do today, and then thought: Nope. So I spent this morning lying on the sofa, drinking the Christmas tea which one of my Twitter friends wholly unexpectedly sent me in the post, and reading a children's fantasy novel in which absolutely everything is enchanting and lovely. I took the occasional break to watch the sparrows and blue-tits have an impromptu disco around my bird-feeder. At one point I ate a mince pie. Meanwhile my phone buzzed as work emails flooded in. I haven't looked at them yet because they will be full of people wanting me to do things. Sometimes I think that I do too many things. I'm sure that many people feel like they live their lives in jobs-mode, but PTSD robbed me of my ability to rest in a very specific way. So I'm trying to learn it, or re-learn it, in the way that one learns any skill: practice, and experimentation. Self-care is a concept that's been bastardised as a way to sell candles and bath-bombs (which are really bad for your vagina, by the way: those Lush shops that you can smell half a mile away really ought to give out free canestan with every purchase). But I believe that self-care - true self-care - is a radical concept. It says: I am not a vending machine. My productivity bears no relation whatsoever to my worth as a human being. I look after myself not because it makes me more useful, but because - to quote my nan's framed Desiderata - "You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars - you have a right to be here." Perhaps all of life's true meaning can be found in tat from the 1970s. Self-care can't be bought, nor can you take a cookie-cutter approach to it. A lot of the traditional stuff doesn't work for me. Mindfulness makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon. Colouring-in is boring; I find it infantilising and think it’s interesting that no one tells men to do it. Hand cream is, well, handy, as in it’s useful, but that’s all. Chocolate is delicious but my research confirms that too much of it makes me fat. Give me some smelly old creepy dolls to repair, though, and I'm in my element. The things which uplift us, restore us, keep us going, remind us what we’re about - they are unique to us as individuals. We find them, and learn how best to implement them, by trial and error, and by learning to ask ourselves: "What do I need right now?" If you like mindfulness and colouring-in, go for it. If you need to take three-day baths and play the banjo in the nude, knock yourself out. I keep a bullet journal, write a lot, stomp about with headphones on, wear brooches, swear like a sailor, go to gigs, seek out the people who really know me and like me anyway... I try not to see these things as a hack to get more out of myself in the long-term, but to do them because I matter and it's nice not to be miserable. In fact, I'm going to have some more of that tea now. Merry Christmas, if I don't speak to you before. Thank you for your patience with me while I write this strange book in this strange way. Much love, Laura x

Dear everybody,

First of all, I've been meaning to write the last couple of weeks and tell you - in case you haven't seen already - that the <a href="https://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/psp/">perinatal peer support principles</a> are here and ready to use. We launched them at <a href="https://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/peerfest/">Peerfest</a> in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago, and I also published <a href="https://mcpin.org/principles-tell-us-what-good-peer-support-for-new-mums-looks-like/">this blog post</a> about co-creating the principles. The Peerfest team had originally capped the number of participants per workshop at 30, and our perinatal peer support one filled up straight away. People had travelled especially and were being turned away and were understandably quite cross, so the Peerfest team very kindly let us be the exception and let everyone in. We had 67 people in our workshop! It was a brilliant day - once again, we were totally floored by everyone's enthusiasm and support for the principles. I feel so lucky to have been able to lead on this. It's such a lovely feeling, handing out principles booklets to people who are really eager for them. I imagine it's what being an ice cream man must feel like.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/EK3MaqmW4AA8dWl2.jpg?v=1690912222" width="500" height="234">



 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2019-12-07_14.21.12.jpg?v=1690912223" width="375" height="500">


Last week I showed this booklet proudly to my friend, Margaret, and she said, "I see you've put a ginger person in the middle there. Bit of representation for you." I love the design work - wish I had done it!

The other thing I wanted to tell you was that today I am slacking off. I'm not writing the book that you're waiting for, sorry. Arthur's had an ear infection this week so we're both very short of sleep. We were afraid that he was going to miss the school Christmas concert that he's been rehearsing for weeks. I've heard all about "Mary and Jopiff" and endless renditions of a rather novel carol that goes, "And the sheep go baa-baa-bananas for the boy!" He assured me repeatedly that this concert will "blow your socks off - but, don't worry, your socks won't actually blow anywhere. It's just a phrase that means you'll be very impressed." Thankfully we made it this morning. I was very impressed. I watched him scan the audience for my face and then wave madly. He was the first person to stand up on stage and he said, "Welcome to Year 1's special Christmas performance," in such a beautiful loud clear voice that I cheered. One of the mums next to me had a newborn baby girl and she was just the most utterly perfect thing. I felt a sudden gut-punch of sadness that I don't remember Arthur like that, that I didn't enjoy him, that the time is gone and I can never get it back, that I'm unlikely to have any more children... Then I looked up at Arthur again, yawning adorably through the songs in a cardboard star-hat. 

I'm still absurdly busy - running two careers in parallel, single-mothering, writing and funding this book - and it does take its toll. I have these crashy days, especially after something like Peerfest when I've been peopling hard. Today is a crashy day. I came home from the school at about 10am, feeling all hell with lack of sleep and big confused feelings, thought about everything that I have to do today, and then thought: Nope. So I spent this morning lying on the sofa, drinking the Christmas tea which one of my Twitter friends wholly unexpectedly sent me in the post, and reading a children's fantasy novel in which absolutely everything is enchanting and lovely. I took the occasional break to watch the sparrows and blue-tits have an impromptu disco around my bird-feeder. At one point I ate a mince pie. Meanwhile my phone buzzed as work emails flooded in. I haven't looked at them yet because they will be full of people wanting me to do things. Sometimes I think that I do too many things.

I'm sure that many people feel like they live their lives in jobs-mode, but PTSD robbed me of my ability to rest in a very specific way. So I'm trying to learn it, or re-learn it, in the way that one learns any skill: practice, and experimentation. Self-care is a concept that's been bastardised as a way to sell candles and bath-bombs (which are really bad for your vagina, by the way: those Lush shops that you can smell half a mile away really ought to give out free canestan with every purchase). But I believe that self-care - true self-care - is a radical concept. It says: I am not a vending machine. My productivity bears no relation whatsoever to my worth as a human being. I look after myself not because it makes me more useful, but because - to quote my nan's framed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata">Desiderata</a> - "You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars - you have a right to be here." Perhaps all of life's true meaning can be found in tat from the 1970s.

Self-care can't be bought, nor can you take a cookie-cutter approach to it. A lot of the traditional stuff doesn't work for me. Mindfulness makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon. Colouring-in is boring; I find it infantilising and think it’s interesting that no one tells men to do it. Hand cream is, well, handy, as in it’s useful, but that’s all. Chocolate is delicious but my research confirms that too much of it makes me fat. Give me some smelly old creepy dolls to repair, though, and I'm in my element. The things which uplift us, restore us, keep us going, remind us what we’re about - they are unique to us as individuals. We find them, and learn how best to implement them, by trial and error, and by learning to ask ourselves: "What do I need right now?" If you like mindfulness and colouring-in, go for it. If you need to take three-day baths and play the banjo in the nude, knock yourself out. I keep a bullet journal, write a lot, stomp about with headphones on, wear brooches, swear like a sailor, go to gigs, seek out the people who really know me and like me anyway...  I try not to see these things as a hack to get more out of myself in the long-term, but to do them because I matter and it's nice not to be miserable.

In fact, I'm going to have some more of that tea now. Merry Christmas, if I don't speak to you before. Thank you for your patience with me while I write this strange book in this strange way.

Much love,

Laura x

Christmas sheep and self-care

Some friends and I decided a while ago that co-production is like teenage sex: hardly anyone is doing it - most don't even know how to do it - but everyone thinks that everyone else is doing it, and so everyone pretends that they're doing it. This is still mostly the case, but there are glimpses of progress. Maternity services are embracing 'co-creation' as service user led MVPs (maternity voice partnerships) are being rolled out all over the country, and in mental health, too, particularly in the new perinatal mental health services, the radical idea that people might have some say in the services designed to meet their needs is gaining traction. Co-production, for the initiated, is defined by an equal, reciprocal relationship between staff and people with lived experience in design and delivery of activities, projects, or services. This means that a diverse range of people with lived experience are involved at every stage and that their influence in decision-making carries equal weight to that of anyone else. It's the egalitarian ideal. It differs from co-design, in which people with lived experience participate equally in design but not in delivery; from consultation, in which people with lived experience provide input via surveys, questionnaires, interviews, discussion groups, events, social media, etc; and from other manifestations of user involvement such as advisory groups, which are valuable means for people with lived experience to contribute but deny them any real power. So how is this relevant to the book? Well, partly I'm just sharing this with you as more of a life-update. Tomorrow I'm going to be at Mind's office in Stratford, exploring the challenges – and the benefits – of co-production with their staff. It's co-production week so all the co-production things are happening. Everything seems to have a week these days, but nonetheless co-production matters. Without it, we run the risk of creating support which doesn't reflect and meet the needs of the people who are intended to benefit, but, instead, is shaped around what others imagine those needs to be. That’s a tragic waste of resources and potential, and it can result in preventable suffering when people are misrepresented and misunderstood by those who are supposed to be there to help. (I'm sure many of us who have been under mental health services of one kind or another can relate to that one.) So I'm really excited to be part of the co-production movement within Mind: it is, after all, the biggest mental health charity in the country. This is also more directly relevant because my lived experience work has been such an essential part of my "recovery" (for want of a better term). I can't change what happened to me but I might be able to change what happens to others in future. It forges meaning. The book is both about that, and a part of that. There's a new film of me talking about all this in more depth on Mind's YouTube channel: I'm not going to watch it, because I can't stand my own face or voice, so let me know if it's any good! Those of you who contributed to the maternal mental health peer support quality assurance principles might also like to read this case study I wrote up the co-design process there and its impact on me personally. It can be pretty transformative, when your confidence has seriously been knocked by poor mental health, to be a valued and effective member of a team and to feel that you're making a difference. Co-production requires extra thought and care, but, done well, it benefits everyone. It helps us to identify and overcome our own unconscious prejudice toward others whose backgrounds and experiences differ from our own. It develops the skills of everyone involved as teams expand, horizons broaden, different views and voices are heard. People become more flexible, better at listening and communicating. Co-production is a metaphor for life! I may be getting carried away now... But if you work for any kind of service in the NHS or third sector, do check out Mind's influence and participation toolkit for some ideas around how you might share some the power you hold. Have a good rest of week!

Some friends and I decided a while ago that co-production is like teenage sex: hardly anyone is doing it - most don't even know how to do it - but everyone thinks that everyone else is doing it, and so everyone pretends that they're doing it. This is still mostly the case, but there are glimpses of progress. Maternity services are embracing 'co-creation' as service user led MVPs (maternity voice partnerships) are being rolled out all over the country, and in mental health, too, particularly in the new perinatal mental health services, the radical idea that people might have some say in the services designed to meet their needs is gaining traction.

Co-production, for the initiated, is defined by an equal, reciprocal relationship between staff and people with lived experience in design and delivery of activities, projects, or services. This means that a diverse range of people with lived experience are involved at every stage and that their influence in decision-making carries equal weight to that of anyone else. It's the egalitarian ideal. It differs from co-design, in which people with lived experience participate equally in design but not in delivery; from consultation, in which people with lived experience provide input via surveys, questionnaires, interviews, discussion groups, events, social media, etc; and from other manifestations of user involvement such as advisory groups, which are valuable means for people with lived experience to contribute but deny them any real power.

So how is this relevant to the book? Well, partly I'm just sharing this with you as more of a life-update. Tomorrow I'm going to be at Mind's office in Stratford, exploring the challenges – and the benefits – of co-production with their staff. It's <a href="https://www.scie.org.uk/co-production/week">co-production week</a> so all the co-production things are happening. Everything seems to have a week these days, but nonetheless co-production matters. Without it, we run the risk of creating support which doesn't reflect and meet the needs of the people who are intended to benefit, but, instead, is shaped around what others imagine those needs to be. That’s a tragic waste of resources and potential, and it can result in preventable suffering when people are misrepresented and misunderstood by those who are supposed to be there to help. (I'm sure many of us who have been under mental health services of one kind or another can relate to that one.) So I'm really excited to be part of the co-production movement within Mind: it is, after all, the biggest mental health charity in the country. 

This is also more directly relevant because my lived experience work has been such an essential part of my "recovery" (for want of a better term). I can't change what happened to me but I might be able to change what happens to others in future. It forges meaning. The book is both about that, and a part of that. There's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhAwU2OmySI&amp;feature=youtu.be">a new film of me talking about all this in more depth</a> on Mind's YouTube channel: I'm not going to watch it, because I can't stand my own face or voice, so let me know if it's any good! Those of you who contributed to the maternal mental health peer support quality assurance principles might also like to read <a href="https://coproductionweek2017.blogspot.com/2019/07/laura-ive-got-some-good-news.html">this case study I wrote up the co-design process there and its impact on me</a><a href="http://coproductionweek2017.blogspot.com/2019/07/laura-ive-got-some-good-news.html"> personally</a>.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_4792.jpg?v=1690912226" width="500" height="375">


It can be pretty transformative, when your confidence has seriously been knocked by poor mental health, to be a valued and effective member of a team and to feel that you're making a difference. Co-production requires extra thought and care, but, done well, it benefits everyone. It helps us to identify and overcome our own unconscious prejudice toward others whose backgrounds and experiences differ from our own. It develops the skills of everyone involved as teams expand, horizons broaden, different views and voices are heard. People become more flexible, better at listening and communicating. Co-production is a metaphor for life! I may be getting carried away now... But if you work for any kind of service in the NHS or third sector, do check out <a href="https://www.mind.org.uk/workplace/influence-and-participation-toolkit/">Mind's influence and participation toolkit</a> for some ideas around how you might share some the power you hold. Have a good rest of week!

Co-production, everyone!

If you’ve ever been referred to a psychiatrist, chances are you’ll have received a letter after every appointment. This letter is not addressed to you: it’s from the psychiatrist to the GP - about you. You are copied in. These clinic letters are one-sided and they are subjective, and subsequently they have the potential to be all sorts of upsetting. They can include observations about your appearance, judgements about your behaviour, and/or misrepresentations of your situation and of you as an individual. I was under various psychiatrists for about fifteen years and so I have received a lot of these letters. They always seemed to come when I was having a good day. I’d pop downstairs, or I’d come in from being out – and there, on the doormat, in a specific shape of envelope, the letter would be waiting. It induced a specific pit-of-the-stomach feeling of dread. I could have put it straight in the bin, of course, but then I risked missing something important. There were times, reading these letters, that I wondered if the psychiatrist had got names muddled and I was, in fact, reading an account of another person’s appointment. They could be so far from the conversation I remembered, from what I had said. I felt profoundly unheard and misunderstood and somehow lost: if the real Laura is invisible and everyone sees this other Laura in her place, does the real Laura even exist? It turns out I wasn't the only one to resent these letters, as this conversation shows. People have begun comparing the rudest and most ridiculous statements from mental health professionals, commenting on everything from freckles to ‘hair is grey at the roots’. This has prompted a wave of ‘Dear GP’ letters: missives penned from the patient to the GP about the psychiatrist, mimicking the style of a clinical letter as people recall their worst and silliest appointments. The letters are hilarious and heartbreaking and extraordinarily powerful. I think this one from @RoseAnnieFlo is my favourite. Here is my attempt: Dear GP, I reviewed Dr S. on 07/11/2002 at the Child and Family Guidance Service. The reasons for his referral to this service are unclear, as is the nature and purpose of the service itself: it is presumably some branch of social services but seems to function, to all intents and purposes, like CAMHS. It may be commissioned to address attachment difficulties amongst mental health nursing staff, as they seldom remain in post for more than a few weeks at a time. Dr S. joined my caseload shortly after the departure of zealous Christian Steve – ‘I’m a registered mental nurse and it sounds like I’m a nurse and I’m mental, har har’ – and the arrival of his replacement, Sue. Dr S. did not seem to fully understand why he was there: when asked, his explanation was that Sue had ‘invited’ him – as if this were her disappointing fifty-fifth birthday party. He did not bring alcohol to the appointment. There are significant, ongoing concerns about Dr S.’s ability to care for himself and to observe basic hygiene. His body odour is a heady combination of perspiration, curry, and milk left out of the fridge. Furthermore, during this appointment, he broke wind audibly no fewer than four times, and subsequently avoided my gaze by staring intently at the notes he was making. This – coupled with his physique, which resembles a hairy binbag filled with blancmange, spilling out between the buttons of his shirt – leads me to conclude that his diet is poor. He would benefit from occupational therapy input and perhaps a garden hose. During the appointment, Dr S demonstrated confused thinking, lack of insight, and a tenuous grip on reality. Although I am quite clearly a fourteen-year-old girl, he has prescribed enough antipsychotic medication to tranquilise a woolly mammoth. When I expressed reluctance to continue the risperidone and quetiapine due to both their complete ineffectiveness and their disabling side effects (narcolepsy, lactation, restless leg syndrome, unstoppable nosebleeds), he suggested, instead, that the dose should be increased. Over the course of two appointments he has diagnosed me with the following: bipolar disorder, psychotic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, and schizo-affective disorder. When I suggested that it seems unlikely that I would have all of these at once, he waved his hands vaguely and broke wind again. I gave brief replies to his enquiries as I was trying to hold my breath. As we concluded the appointment, he informed me that I am to be admitted to an adolescent psychiatric unit, saying, “You will like it there.” In light of the upcoming admission, it is not known whether I will have further opportunity to monitor Dr S. I remain concerned about his mental state and the likelihood that he will inflict harm upon others. When I started writing All My Worldly Joy, it was supposed to be a book about pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood. But I rapidly found that none of it made sense without context, and that context was, in fact, the larger story. Traumatic events are not isolated: they are part of our life narrative, and trauma reawakens trauma. And, what’s more, everything that happened when I became a mother was so much more significant because it led me toward the resolution of twenty-five years’ worth of confusion and distress. This is the story I’m telling, and shitty clinical letters are a part of it. (If you would like to read my book and are not signed up already, the ‘pledge’ button is on this page. If you are signed up already, thank you!) If ‘Dear GP’ resonates with you, you may wish to write your own letter and you can even contribute it to a zine. Thanks for being here. With love, Laura x

If you’ve ever been referred to a psychiatrist, chances are you’ll have received a letter after every appointment. This letter is not addressed to you: it’s from the psychiatrist to the GP - about you. You are copied in. These clinic letters are one-sided and they are subjective, and subsequently they have the potential to be all sorts of upsetting. They can include observations about your appearance, judgements about your behaviour, and/or misrepresentations of your situation and of you as an individual.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="400" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_20190407_191152.jpg?v=1690912229" width="400">


I was under various psychiatrists for about fifteen years and so I have received a lot of these letters. They always seemed to come when I was having a good day. I’d pop downstairs, or I’d come in from being out – and there, on the doormat, in a specific shape of envelope, the letter would be waiting. It induced a specific pit-of-the-stomach feeling of dread. I could have put it straight in the bin, of course, but then I risked missing something important. There were times, reading these letters, that I wondered if the psychiatrist had got names muddled and I was, in fact, reading an account of another person’s appointment. They could be so far from the conversation I remembered, from what I had said. I felt profoundly unheard and misunderstood and somehow lost: if the real Laura is invisible and everyone sees this other Laura in her place, does the real Laura even exist?

It turns out I wasn't the only one to resent these letters, as <a href="https://twitter.com/GoodNewsFromBad/status/1113450187916181505">this conversation</a> shows. People have begun comparing the rudest and most ridiculous statements from mental health professionals, commenting on everything from freckles to ‘hair is grey at the roots’. This has prompted a wave of ‘Dear GP’ letters: missives penned from the patient to the GP about the psychiatrist, mimicking the style of a clinical letter as people recall their worst and silliest appointments. The letters are hilarious and heartbreaking and extraordinarily powerful. I think <a href="http://animatedandexcitable.blogspot.com/2019/04/letters-from-psych-clinic-patients.html">this one from @RoseAnnieFlo</a> is my favourite.

Here is my attempt:

 


 Dear GP,



 I reviewed Dr S. on 07/11/2002 at the Child and Family Guidance Service. The reasons for his referral to this service are unclear, as is the nature and purpose of the service itself: it is presumably some branch of social services but seems to function, to all intents and purposes, like CAMHS. It may be commissioned to address attachment difficulties amongst mental health nursing staff, as they seldom remain in post for more than a few weeks at a time. Dr S. joined my caseload shortly after the departure of zealous Christian Steve – ‘I’m a registered mental nurse and it sounds like I’m a nurse and I’m mental, har har’ – and the arrival of his replacement, Sue. Dr S. did not seem to fully understand why he was there: when asked, his explanation was that Sue had ‘invited’ him – as if this were her disappointing fifty-fifth birthday party. He did not bring alcohol to the appointment.



 There are significant, ongoing concerns about Dr S.’s ability to care for himself and to observe basic hygiene. His body odour is a heady combination of perspiration, curry, and milk left out of the fridge. Furthermore, during this appointment, he broke wind audibly no fewer than four times, and subsequently avoided my gaze by staring intently at the notes he was making. This – coupled with his physique, which resembles a hairy binbag filled with blancmange, spilling out between the buttons of his shirt – leads me to conclude that his diet is poor. He would benefit from occupational therapy input and perhaps a garden hose.



 During the appointment, Dr S demonstrated confused thinking, lack of insight, and a tenuous grip on reality. Although I am quite clearly a fourteen-year-old girl, he has prescribed enough antipsychotic medication to tranquilise a woolly mammoth. When I expressed reluctance to continue the risperidone and quetiapine due to both their complete ineffectiveness and their disabling side effects (narcolepsy, lactation, restless leg syndrome, unstoppable nosebleeds), he suggested, instead, that the dose should be increased. Over the course of two appointments he has diagnosed me with the following: bipolar disorder, psychotic depression, paranoid schizophrenia, and schizo-affective disorder. When I suggested that it seems unlikely that I would have all of these at once, he waved his hands vaguely and broke wind again. I gave brief replies to his enquiries as I was trying to hold my breath. As we concluded the appointment, he informed me that I am to be admitted to an adolescent psychiatric unit, saying, “You will like it there.”



 In light of the upcoming admission, it is not known whether I will have further opportunity to monitor Dr S. I remain concerned about his mental state and the likelihood that he will inflict harm upon others.


 

When I started writing All My Worldly Joy, it was supposed to be a book about pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood. But I rapidly found that none of it made sense without context, and that context was, in fact, the larger story. Traumatic events are not isolated: they are part of our life narrative, and trauma reawakens trauma. And, what’s more, everything that happened when I became a mother was so much more significant because it led me toward the resolution of twenty-five years’ worth of confusion and distress. This is the story I’m telling, and shitty clinical letters are a part of it. (If you would like to read my book and are not signed up already, the ‘pledge’ button is on this page. If you are signed up already, thank you!)

If ‘Dear GP’ resonates with you, you may wish to write your own letter and you can even contribute it to a zine.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/IMG_20190407_191105.jpg?v=1690912230" width="349">


Thanks for being here.

With love,

Laura x

Dear GP

Hi everyone - - and welcome and thank you so much to all the new supporters. The eagle-eyed might notice we’ve had a bit of a jump in the funding since last month and are rapidly approaching 79%! The writing is coming along too: assuming I hit my target for the end of the month, I will have 13 whole chapters down and a prologue. (I’ll cut some stuff out, I promise...) It’s starting to feel like we’re on the home straight and I hope you’ll all have your copies by the time the next Christmas update comes around. Some of you have been waiting literally years and I am so thankful for your patience and your being alongside me during this process. It has been so strange, and difficult at times. I still find it difficult to even describe this book. On one level, it's a story about a traumatic birth and postnatal PTSD. But, at least in its current form, it's also about a dozen other things. It's about surviving the psychiatric system. Its about the decision to have a child after you’ve been diagnosed with a lifelong mental illness. It's about falling in love with your baby when you were afraid that you wouldn’t, and finding your feet as a mum. It's about learning to trust yourself. It's about the ways in which trauma shapes us and directs us. It's about navigating the world when you’re neurodivergent and just a bit weird and different. It's about coming to terms to with loss. There's always such a lot going on, isn't there? And this isn't a novel or a film. I want this book to be true. My intention is that it will also be readable! I'm constantly trying to place it at the right point on the spectrum between three-act Hollywood, where everything is glossy and oversimplified, and real life in all its messy, untangled, completely incomprehensible glory. I will leave it there, loves: due to a combination of the end of the school term, a narrowly-diverted disaster with a handwritten veggie parcel recipe (photocopied by a kind teacher at the last minute), and a not-diverted diaster with meeting a friend in the park (his mum had frozen chips in her bag and had to get home), I am rapidly running out of day. I'm mindful that many of us are feeling less-than-merry this Yuletide, with the apocalypse kicking off again, the short days and long nights, and a general sense of depletion and apprehension. But I want to wish you all a happy Christmas anyway, and a rest. With love, Laura

Hi everyone -

- and welcome and thank you so much to all the new supporters. The eagle-eyed might notice we’ve had a bit of a jump in the funding since last month and are rapidly approaching 79%! The writing is coming along too: assuming I hit my target for the end of the month, I will have 13 whole chapters down and a prologue. (I’ll cut some stuff out, I promise...) It’s starting to feel like we’re on the home straight and I hope you’ll all have your copies by the time the next Christmas update comes around. Some of you have been waiting literally years and I am so thankful for your patience and your being alongside me during this process. It has been so strange, and difficult at times.

I still find it difficult to even describe this book. On one level, it's a story about a traumatic birth and postnatal PTSD. But, at least in its current form, it's also about a dozen other things. It's about surviving the psychiatric system. Its about the decision to have a child after you’ve been diagnosed with a lifelong mental illness. It's about falling in love with your baby when you were afraid that you wouldn’t, and finding your feet as a mum. It's about learning to trust yourself. It's about the ways in which trauma shapes us and directs us. It's about navigating the world when you’re neurodivergent and just a bit weird and different. It's about coming to terms to with loss. There's always such a lot going on, isn't there? And this isn't a novel or a film. I want this book to be true. My intention is that it will also be readable! I'm constantly trying to place it at the right point on the spectrum between three-act Hollywood, where everything is glossy and oversimplified, and real life in all its messy, untangled, completely incomprehensible glory.

I will leave it there, loves: due to a combination of the end of the school term, a narrowly-diverted disaster with a handwritten veggie parcel recipe (photocopied by a kind teacher at the last minute), and a not-diverted diaster with meeting a friend in the park (his mum had frozen chips in her bag and had to get home), I am rapidly running out of day. I'm mindful that many of us are feeling less-than-merry this Yuletide, with the apocalypse kicking off again, the short days and long nights, and a general sense of depletion and apprehension. But I want to wish you all a happy Christmas anyway, and a rest.

With love,

Laura

December update: what's this book about again?

Dear everyone, Hope you all had merry Christmases and happy new years. I’ve not been particularly in the mood for festivities this year, if I’m honest, but I’m looking hopefully to 2019. I am just picking up the crowdfunding again – we've just reached both 35% and 200 supporters. That’s more than a third of the way there. Yay. Writing has really taken off this past month or so. I finally followed the advice of several people cleverer than myself and downloaded Scrivener, which has been a complete game changer. I’m watching this book take shape before my eyes and it feels like a bit of a miracle. I think it’s fairly typical of a larger project that you fall in and out of love with it, and in and out of love again – certainly the PhD thesis was like that – but now I’m beginning to glimpse what this book will be. I’m excited. I hope you are too. I’m so looking forward to fulfilling these pledges – not just having the postie bring you this book, all finito, with all your names in the back, but also meeting up with some of you in London for Real Talk, and picking out which of my favourite books to send others. We’ll have a book launch. There’ll be cake. It’s worth mentioning that if you’re anything like me and once you get paid you must spend that shit immediately, and if you want more good book-themed stuff, you can log in on here and upgrade your pledge at any time. One side effect of crowdfunding this book is basically exposure therapy for my fear of rejection. I am definitely feeling it. It helps to look forward to being done! And it helps immeasurably that this book feels ever more significant, important, needed. Most of all, it helps that so many of you have signed up and are here, having embraced me and my book with open arms. I’m leaning into you as I write up the grim bits whilst muttering, “Argh, this is grim. Grim grim grim.” I came across this quotation from Wendy Ice: “By my definition, a patron is anyone who supports another in the authentic unfolding of self. Since writing this is for me a vulnerable act of self-expression, if you choose to give up your time to read it, you are supporting me. You are my patron. And if I manage to write something that affects you, I will become yours. Patronage, in its truest form, is always symbiotic. When we encourage another in their authenticity, we cannot help but affirm the importance of our own.” So thanks, once again, for being here. Onwards and upwards. Much love, Laura x

Dear everyone,

Hope you all had merry Christmases and happy new years. I’ve not been particularly in the mood for festivities this year, if I’m honest, but I’m looking hopefully to 2019.  I am just picking up the crowdfunding again – we've just reached both 35% and 200 supporters. That’s more than a third of the way there. Yay. Writing has really taken off this past month or so. I finally followed the advice of several people cleverer than myself and downloaded <a href="https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview">Scrivener</a>, which has been a complete game changer. I’m watching this book take shape before my eyes and it feels like a bit of a miracle. I think it’s fairly typical of a larger project that you fall in and out of love with it, and in and out of love again – certainly the PhD thesis was like that – but now I’m beginning to glimpse what this book will be. I’m excited. I hope you are too.

I’m so looking forward to fulfilling these pledges – not just having the postie bring you this book, all finito, with all your names in the back, but also meeting up with some of you in London for Real Talk, and picking out which of my favourite books to send others. We’ll have a book launch. There’ll be cake. It’s worth mentioning that if you’re anything like me and once you get paid you must spend that shit immediately, and if you want more good book-themed stuff, you can log in on here and upgrade your pledge at any time.

One side effect of crowdfunding this book is basically exposure therapy for my fear of rejection. I am definitely feeling it. It helps to look forward to being done! And it helps immeasurably that this book feels ever more significant, important, needed. Most of all, it helps that so many of you have signed up and are here, having embraced me and my book with open arms. I’m leaning into you as I write up the grim bits whilst muttering, “Argh, this is grim. Grim grim grim.”


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2019-01-03_21.39.26.jpg?v=1690912233" width="500" height="399">


I came across this quotation from Wendy Ice:


 “By my definition, a patron is anyone who supports another in the authentic unfolding of self. Since writing this is for me a vulnerable act of self-expression, if you choose to give up your time to read it, you are supporting me. You are my patron. And if I manage to write something that affects you, I will become yours. Patronage, in its truest form, is always symbiotic. When we encourage another in their authenticity, we cannot help but affirm the importance of our own.”


So thanks, once again, for being here. Onwards and upwards.

Much love,

Laura x

Exciting times.

Hello everyone, It feels odd to say happy new year, since it's been January for about five months now, but nonetheless I hope you all managed to catch a break over Christmas and have lots of nice things planned for the year ahead. I have some bits and bobs to share: A sneak peek at the book manuscript is on the horizon! I've compiled a series of short extracts for the clever folk at Unbound to create social media graphics that will help to promote the book and nail that final 7% of funding. I've decided to choose a couple of pages' worth of those extracts which don't become graphics and release them exclusively to you as supporters. Some of you have waited so long and I am endlessly thankful for your patience as I wrangle with this manuscript alongside mothering and my many jobs. I hope this document will give you a sense of what it is you're helping to make happen and generate a bit of excitement too. I'm excited! I'm hugging this manuscript like a secret as I continue to edit and polish it. There's a new pledge level! £60 for a signed hardback, ebook, and one-to-one video call with me where we can talk about whatever you like. If you wanted to share any of your own experiences that relate to the book, or ask me any questions, I'm all yours for half an hour. So do feel free to upgrade your pledge if you fancy it. I have a new article out in The Lancet Psychiatry about lived experience involvement in mental health research. Do check it out if you'd like. Finally, as some of you will know, the team at Mind are currently wrapping up their work around the perinatal peer support principles that I helped create a few years ago. Hearts and Minds Partnership have a new 'Honest Conversations' podcast out in which Nisba and I talk about about how and why the principles were developed, how to implement them and tailor them to your own needs, and the legacy and next steps of the project. You can listen by registering with Smart Space here. I'll also be at the Hearts and Minds national meet up in Birmingham on Monday, so if you're there, do come and find me. Whew! I think that's all for now, loves, but thank you so much again for being here and I'll be in touch again soon. Laura x

Hello everyone, 
 
It feels odd to say happy new year, since it's been January for about five months now, but nonetheless I hope you all managed to catch a break over Christmas and have lots of nice things planned for the year ahead. I have some bits and bobs to share:

 

<ul>
	<li>A sneak peek at the book manuscript is on the horizon! I've compiled a series of short extracts for the clever folk at Unbound to create social media graphics that will help to promote the book and nail that final 7% of funding. I've decided to choose a couple of pages' worth of those extracts which don't become graphics and release them exclusively to you as supporters. Some of you have waited so long and I am endlessly thankful for your patience as I wrangle with this manuscript alongside mothering and my many jobs. I hope this document will give you a sense of what it is you're helping to make happen and generate a bit of excitement too. I'm excited! I'm hugging this manuscript like a secret as I continue to edit and polish it.</li>
</ul>

 

<ul>
	<li>There's a new pledge level! £60 for a signed hardback, ebook, and one-to-one video call with me where we can talk about whatever you like. If you wanted to share any of your own experiences that relate to the book, or ask me any questions, I'm all yours for half an hour. So do feel free to <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/">upgrade your pledge</a> if you fancy it.</li>
</ul>

 

<ul>
	<li>I have a new article out in The Lancet Psychiatry about lived experience involvement in mental health research. Do <a href="https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1gTHV7tf1d1E1K">check it out</a> if you'd like.</li>
</ul>

 

<ul>
	<li>Finally, as some of you will know, the team at Mind are currently wrapping up their work around the <a href="https://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/psp/">perinatal peer support principles</a> that I helped create a few years ago. <a href="https://heartsandmindspartnership.org">Hearts and Minds Partnership</a> have a new 'Honest Conversations' podcast out in which Nisba and I talk about about how and why the principles were developed, how to implement them and tailor them to your own needs, and the legacy and next steps of the project. You can listen by registering with Smart Space <a href="https://heartsandmindspartnership.org/vcs/training-and-support">here</a>. I'll also be at the Hearts and Minds national meet up in Birmingham on Monday, so if you're there, do come and find me.</li>
</ul>


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/unnamed-5.jpg?v=1690912237" width="500">


 
Whew! I think that's all for now, loves, but thank you so much again for being here and I'll be in touch again soon. 
 
Laura x

Extracts, research, and video calls (oh my)

Dear everyone, This is a little off-topic but bear with me. I suspect the maternal mental health / feminist parenting overlap is a significant one. And I want to talk to you about vulvas. It’s been niggling at me for a while that, whilst little boys almost universally have a ‘willy’, there is no equivalent for little girls: there’s no child-friendly word for vulva in common enough usage to be readily recognised. What it’s called – by young families, in their homes – tends to be unique and specific to that family. This can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and cross-purposes: recently I spent a good twenty minutes figuring out what a ‘minnie’ was. (It was not the mouse, dear reader. It was not the mouse.) My nan called it a ‘dilly’, and I also knew it as a ‘widgy’ or a ‘tuppence’. Whilst bored on Saturday night, I took to Twitter, asking: what did you call your vulva when you were little? There were almost as many names for vulvas as there were respondents. Floral names were popular – flower, daisy, lily – as were girls’ names – Mary, Little Mary, Lucy. Some names came right out of the blue, like ‘All-Around-the-World’, as in “Make sure you wash all around the world.” Another surprise was ‘fanackapan’ – a word which can apparently mean all sorts of things. ‘Nunny’ or ‘noony’ came up a few times, as did ‘foof’ (the latter is almost certainly a derivative of the French ‘foufoune’). I’m sorry to say that several families called it a ‘front bottom’ which is just not what it is. There was a lot of baby-talk: ‘noo-noo’, ‘woo-woo’, ‘hoo-hoo’, ‘hoo-ha’, ‘foo-foo’… I don’t know what that’s about. There were some fascinating responses from people of mixed heritage who had borrowed words from other languages: ‘punani’ – which is Jamaican, I believe - and ‘nungoo’, a derivative of the Hindi word for ‘naked'. (Thank you so much to everyone who responded! How would I be a loser, home alone on a Saturday night and collecting vulva words, without you all.) There was also, of course, ‘fanny’ – which is probably where ‘fanackapan’ came in. For me, that was a word for when you were slightly older and being rude with your friends in the school playground: Did you know that’s what Americans call a bum? They call a bum bag a ‘FANNY PACK’. Omg. Some people in the past were actually NAMED Fanny. Omg, you’d have to kill yourself. Fanny Craddock, Fanny Burney, omg, etc etc. But we’re not in the playground any longer. Many of us have our own small children, who have noticed what they have and would like to know what it’s called, please. Some of my friends now try to use anatomically correct language with their children: this is supposed to help protect against sexual abuse, and if, god forbid, anything of that nature did happen, the child would have the correct language to report it accurately and without ambiguity. And a vulva is nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. With this in mind, I have taught my son ‘vulva/vagina’, and I’ve tried to conceal my discomfort in using those words in his presence. It’s not so much that I’m uncomfortable saying them out loud – I am, but I’ve been practising – it’s more that they sound... just not very child-friendly. And, while I have mentioned that the correct name for a willy is a penis – he calls it a willy because he’s five and it’s a willy, for goodness’ sakes. So, in trying to do the good feminist thing, I have created a new double standard. And, since starting up this conversation on Twitter, I have heard similar things from parents over and over: “We call it a… but I don’t like it. We just couldn’t think of anything better.” I learned yesterday that they had the same problem in Sweden, and they just went ahead and solved it. A social worker, Anna Kosztovics, picked a word – ‘snippa’ – to be the feminine equivalent of ‘snopp’ (willy); she started promoting it in nursery schools, and now it’s in the dictionary and on children’s television. There's Snoppen och Snippan, a cartoon of dancing genitalia. It's nuts (forgive me) but, as Anna Kosztovics said: “If there isn’t a word you can easily use, there’s a very big risk that you don’t use any word at all, and that’s a problem… If there’s one, and only one, part of your body that hasn’t got a name, then people experience that as a taboo.” What’s to stop us introducing our own ‘snippa’? I mean, probably not ‘snippa’ – it sounds a bit scissorsy. What would be an English equivalent, the female version of 'willy'? If we took a shortlist from the Twitter responses, removing the girls’ names, the babytalk, and the really left-field ones (alas, I love 'fanackapan'), favouring the words mentioned by more than one person, we might be left with: flower, minnie, foof, nunny/noony, and penny/tuppence. (I am vetoing ‘front bottom’. Just no.) Someone suggested introducing ‘penna’ as it sounds like a feminised version of penis and also like ‘penny’. Someone else felt that ‘penna’ just sounds like ‘penne’ and there would be pasta confusion. Someone made the important point that words with established alternate meanings, like ‘flower’ and ‘penny’, are difficult to communicate to literal thinkers (ie. people with autism). Personally, I’m not sure about ‘minnie’ because of the mouse. We may be about to conduct a poll! I’m not entirely sure where this is going, if anywhere. Should we be launching a campaign for our own 'snippa'? What do you think is a good child-friendly name for a vulva? If you have thoughts, hit me up: there’s a ‘comments’ section below and I’m @cooksferryqueen on Twitter. And pledge for a copy of my book if you haven’t already: I can’t promise there will be vulvas in it – I’ll try - but there will be lots of feminism and childbirth and parenting. You’ll like it. 10% off all this week for International Women's Day with the code: IWD19. Cheers, Laura x

Dear everyone,

This is a little off-topic but bear with me. I suspect the maternal mental health / feminist parenting overlap is a significant one. And I want to talk to you about vulvas.

It’s been niggling at me for a while that, whilst little boys almost universally have a ‘willy’, there is no equivalent for little girls: there’s no child-friendly word for vulva in common enough usage to be readily recognised. What it’s called – by young families, in their homes – tends to be unique and specific to that family. This can lead to all sorts of misunderstandings and cross-purposes: recently I spent a good twenty minutes figuring out what a ‘minnie’ was. (It was not the mouse, dear reader. It was not the mouse.) My nan called it a ‘dilly’, and I also knew it as a ‘widgy’ or a ‘tuppence’.

Whilst bored on Saturday night, I took to Twitter, asking: what did you call your vulva when you were little? There were almost as many names for vulvas as there were respondents. Floral names were popular – flower, daisy, lily – as were girls’ names – Mary, Little Mary, Lucy. Some names came right out of the blue, like ‘All-Around-the-World’, as in “Make sure you wash all around the world.” Another surprise was ‘fanackapan’ – <a href="https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/wordoriginsorg/fanackapan-t9661.html">a word which can apparently mean all sorts of things</a>. ‘Nunny’ or ‘noony’ came up a few times, as did ‘foof’ (the latter is almost certainly a derivative of the French ‘foufoune’). I’m sorry to say that several families called it a ‘front bottom’ which is just not what it is. There was a lot of baby-talk: ‘noo-noo’, ‘woo-woo’, ‘hoo-hoo’, ‘hoo-ha’, ‘foo-foo’… I don’t know what that’s about. There were some fascinating responses from people of mixed heritage who had borrowed words from other languages: ‘punani’ – which is Jamaican, I believe - and ‘nungoo’, a derivative of the Hindi word for ‘naked'.

(Thank you so much to everyone who responded! How would I be a loser, home alone on a Saturday night and collecting vulva words, without you all.)

There was also, of course, ‘fanny’ – which is probably where ‘fanackapan’ came in. For me, that was a word for when you were slightly older and being rude with your friends in the school playground: Did you know that’s what Americans call a bum? They call a bum bag a ‘FANNY PACK’. Omg. Some people in the past were actually NAMED Fanny. Omg, you’d have to kill yourself. Fanny Craddock, Fanny Burney, omg, etc etc.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Leather_Fanny_Pack.jpg?v=1690912241" width="500"> 


But we’re not in the playground any longer. Many of us have our own small children, who have noticed what they have and would like to know what it’s called, please. Some of my friends now try to use anatomically correct language with their children: this is supposed to help protect against sexual abuse, and if, god forbid, anything of that nature did happen, the child would have the correct language to report it accurately and without ambiguity. And a vulva is nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. With this in mind, I have taught my son ‘vulva/vagina’, and I’ve tried to conceal my discomfort in using those words in his presence. It’s not so much that I’m uncomfortable saying them out loud – I am, but I’ve been practising – it’s more that they sound... just not very child-friendly. And, while I have mentioned that the correct name for a willy is a penis – he calls it a willy because he’s five and it’s a willy, for goodness’ sakes. So, in trying to do the good feminist thing, I have created a new double standard.

And, since starting up this conversation on Twitter, I have heard similar things from parents over and over: “We call it a… but I don’t like it. We just couldn’t think of anything better.”

I learned yesterday that they had the same problem in Sweden, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/01/sweden-girls-genitals-feminist-invention-snippa-vagina">and they just went ahead and solved it</a>. A social worker, Anna Kosztovics, picked a word – ‘snippa’ – to be the feminine equivalent of ‘snopp’ (willy); she started promoting it in nursery schools, and now it’s in the dictionary and on children’s television. There's Snoppen och Snippan, a cartoon of dancing genitalia. It's nuts (forgive me) but, as Anna Kosztovics said: “If there isn’t a word you can easily use, there’s a very big risk that you don’t use any word at all, and that’s a problem… If there’s one, and only one, part of your body that hasn’t got a name, then people experience that as a taboo.”


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="300" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Snoppen--Snippan-007.jpg?v=1690912241" width="500">


What’s to stop us introducing our own ‘snippa’? I mean, probably not ‘snippa’ – it sounds a bit scissorsy. What would be an English equivalent, the female version of 'willy'? If we took a shortlist from the Twitter responses, removing the girls’ names, the babytalk, and the really left-field ones (alas, I love 'fanackapan'), favouring the words mentioned by more than one person, we might be left with: flower, minnie, foof, nunny/noony, and penny/tuppence. (I am vetoing ‘front bottom’. Just no.) Someone suggested introducing ‘penna’ as it sounds like a feminised version of penis and also like ‘penny’. Someone else felt that ‘penna’ just sounds like ‘penne’ and there would be pasta confusion. Someone made the important point that words with established alternate meanings, like ‘flower’ and ‘penny’, are difficult to communicate to literal thinkers (ie. people with autism). Personally, I’m not sure about ‘minnie’ because of the mouse. We may be about to conduct a poll!

I’m not entirely sure where this is going, if anywhere. Should we be launching a campaign for our own 'snippa'? What do you think is a good child-friendly name for a vulva? If you have thoughts, hit me up: there’s a ‘comments’ section below and I’m @cooksferryqueen on Twitter. And pledge for a copy of my book if you haven’t already: I can’t promise there will be vulvas in it – I’ll try - but there will be lots of feminism and childbirth and parenting. You’ll like it. 10% off all this week for International Women's Day with the code: IWD19. 

Cheers,

Laura x

Fanny Fanackapan

Hi everyone, I just wanted to touch base with you all, as it's been a little while, and to share a couple of bits of news and an invitation. We passed 300 supporters (yay!) and are now 56% funded. Things have slowed a bit lately, partly because it's been summer and partly because I'm writing the damn book, plus working and singlemothering and it is a lot, so I don't have much time to be in people's faces. The hustling element of all this doesn't come terribly naturally to me! Fortunately the writing bit does, and the book itself is coming along. Currently it's an odd mix of vivid, immediate, confessional memoir stuff and more reflective, universal stuff that comes as much out of the work I do now as out of what happened then. It's a book that's forever shifting and changing shape and all I can do, really, is go with that and see what where we end up. Problems and tensions arise and resolve. It's a funny process. Unbound have read my extract now and thankfully they liked it. We had a chat this week about how might give the funding a nudge and ideally attract some bulk orders or higher tier pledges. I've got a few ideas to follow up, but it's worth reminding you all that I'm available for podcasts, etc and if you can help me to tap into larger networks, please do! I'm so glad you're here. It's like having an invisible cheering crowd for whenever I'm anxious or discouraged. How people write books without that, I can't imagine. The other bit of news is about the maternal mental health peer support quality assurance principles I've been working on with Mind, the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, and the McPin Foundation. Last year we held consultation events, focus groups, and interviews to ask anyone with relevant experience what good peer support for mums should look like. Some of you were there, in fact. The principles have been developed and tested, and are almost ready to launch! I'm very excited, and I'm now leading the team 'disseminating' - which means making sure that all the wonderful knowledge which people so generously and so enthuasiastically shared gets out to where it will be useful. The principles will be launched at Peerfest, Mind's annual celebration of peer support, in Birmingham on 3rd December. Would you like to come? We'll be doing a presentation and holding a workshop with some activities and discussion so that we can all get stuck in. I would so love it if you could be there so I can thank you in person. Entry is free and you can sign up here. If you can't get to Birmingham but still want to use the principles, never fear: they'll be online and we'll also be bringing them to other events and workshops during 2020. I feel very lucky that I get to write about all this, and do the more hands-on, practical stuff as well. The two compete for my time but they also enhance one another. Thank you, again, for your faith in me. Don't be a stranger. Laura x

Hi everyone, 
 
I just wanted to touch base with you all, as it's been a little while, and to share a couple of bits of news and an invitation.

We passed 300 supporters (yay!) and are now 56% funded. Things have slowed a bit lately, partly because it's been summer and partly because I'm writing the damn book, plus working and singlemothering and it is a lot, so I don't have much time to be in people's faces. The hustling element of all this doesn't come terribly naturally to me! Fortunately the writing bit does, and the book itself is coming along. Currently it's an odd mix of vivid, immediate, confessional memoir stuff and more reflective, universal stuff that comes as much out of the work I do now as out of what happened then. It's a book that's forever shifting and changing shape and all I can do, really, is go with that and see what where we end up. Problems and tensions arise and resolve. It's a funny process. Unbound have read my extract now and thankfully they liked it. We had a chat this week about how might give the funding a nudge and ideally attract some bulk orders or higher tier pledges. I've got a few ideas to follow up, but it's worth reminding you all that I'm available for podcasts, etc and if you can help me to tap into larger networks, please do! I'm so glad you're here. It's like having an invisible cheering crowd for whenever I'm anxious or discouraged. How people write books without that, I can't imagine. 

The other bit of news is about the maternal mental health peer support quality assurance principles I've been working on with Mind, the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, and the McPin Foundation. Last year we held consultation events, focus groups, and interviews to ask anyone with relevant experience what good peer support for mums should look like. Some of you were there, in fact. The principles have been developed and tested, and are almost ready to launch! I'm very excited, and I'm now leading the team 'disseminating' - which means making sure that all the wonderful knowledge which people so generously and so enthuasiastically shared gets out to where it will be useful. The principles will be launched at <a href="https://www.mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/peerfest/">Peerfest</a>, Mind's annual celebration of peer support, in Birmingham on 3rd December. Would you like to come? We'll be doing a presentation and holding a workshop with some activities and discussion so that we can all get stuck in. I would so love it if you could be there so I can thank you in person. Entry is free and <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/peerfest19-a-celebration-of-peer-support-registration-74621158895?ctaId=/news-campaigns/peerfest/slices/peerfest19-booking-info-2/">you can sign up here</a>. If you can't get to Birmingham but still want to use the principles, never fear: they'll be online and we'll also be bringing them to other events and workshops during 2020.

I feel very lucky that I get to write about all this, and do the more hands-on, practical stuff as well. The two compete for my time but they also enhance one another. Thank you, again, for your faith in me. Don't be a stranger.

Laura x

Get your diaries out!

Friends, Yesterday two rather brilliant book-things happened: we smashed 20% - and 21%, in fact – and I finished the first draft of the first chapter. This chapter has been a bit of a tricky one: basically what happens in it is I get pregnant. (Spoiler alert!) But there’s also some necessary background info about my decidedly colourful mental health history and I need to present that without going on massive tangents about Other Things That Happened At Other Times. But, then, if you try to dash through it too much, it’s a bit like, “Hold up, what happened there? Someone tried to murder you on a psych ward?” Anyway, I think I’ve now done an OK job of setting up what needed to be set up, ie. some of the conflicts and tensions around Growing Up Mental which then get resolved later in the book. This involved revisiting some of the 950 notebooks and diaries (an approximation) which I’ve been keeping since the age of six, particularly this one: It’s completely full and covers 17th February to 10th April 2001. I was thirteen. It was during those weeks that my self-harming habit was found out and I started on a conveyor belt of mental health ‘treatment’ that would continue until I called time in 2016. It’s going to be important to emphasise that just because my care was mostly (not entirely) shit, and just because meds, etc didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean that’s true for everyone. I think the key thing is finding what works for you, and being supported in that. Anyway, this notebook is simultaneously the most tragic, the funniest, and the most embarrassing thing I have ever encountered. I would burn it in a heartbeat before letting you read it. It seems that I’m writing a coming-of-age story as well as a becoming-a-mother story: the two go hand-in-hand. It strikes me, now, just what an absolute bloody idiot I was at twenty-five. Impulsively getting pregnant, having so recently been such a state, was a poor decision - and it was a poor decision which went on to impact others enormously, possibly including Arthur. I’m finding it hard to forgive myself for that - but you have to forgive yourself, really, because you’re stuck with yourself. Chapter two was going to be the birth story, but now I’ve effectively divided chapter one into two chapters, so chapter two will be the pregnancy. This means getting out my hospital notes again, as well as my own diaries. Wish me luck! Chapter one needs more editing, but I might publish an extract exclusively for those of you who have pledged. It seems like the least I can do, as I’m keeping you waiting for the book itself. Would you like that, or would you rather save it for when the book comes out? You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve cheered up a bit, although not completely, since the last time I wrote one of these. My mood improved when my period arrived after a staggering THIRTY NINE DAYS. I mean, thirty nine days. What is that. But it has been a helpful reminder of just how much my mood – which I grew up believing to be unfathomable and unpredictable, a bit like the weather – is linked to the annual cycle of the seasons and the monthly cycle of my body. It’s something I can, at least partly, understand, predict, accommodate, plan for, and influence. So much of my ‘recovery’ - if you want to call it that - has been about reconnecting with my body, so that I can actually notice this stuff. I wrote about that more in a blog post in the spring, in which I quoted Stephen Cope (no idea who he is, by the way): “As we begin to re-experience a visceral reconnection with the needs of our bodies, there is a brand new capacity to warmly love the self. We experience a new quality of authenticity in our caring, which redirects our attention to our health, our diets, our energy, our time management. This enhanced care for the self arises spontaneously and naturally, not as a response to a “should”. We are able to experience an immediate and intrinsic pleasure in self-care.” Another way of saying this might be: everything is worse when you’re hungry. The ability to notice that and have a sandwich is just absolutely grand. I’m mentally cooking a blog post about PTSD triggers. The obvious ones are straightforward, although not easy, to avoid. I spent a few years dodging environments where the conversation might ‘get a bit birthy.’ Unfortunately this meant forgoing the gatherings of mums and babies which might have relieved some of the isolation I felt, because I learned quickly that mums with babies have a habit of talking about their birth experiences in graphic detail. Sometimes I would attempt to change the subject in a panicked and ridiculous fashion: “Don’t you love potatoes? They’re so versatile.” I do think that avoidance gets a bad press – it’s a Symptom and you should Not Do It – when actually some avoidance, especially in the early months, is necessary for survival. Further down the line, though, I did things like joining the Hampshire Maternity Services Liason Committee as a sort of exposure therapy. And I’m much better now, although things do still set me off sometimes. The triggers that are a lot more difficult, for me, are the stupid ones. The ones that aren’t obvious, so you can’t predict them or prepare yourself at all. For example, last week I went to Newcastle on an aeroplane. Going to Newcastle on an aeroplane is not an obvious trigger for birth trauma, or indeed for anything that has happened in my life. The journeys there and back were both unexpectedly triggering and therefore horrible. But it’s interesting to retrospectively analyse what sets us off and why. Is this something you’d like to read about? I shall probably offer it to one of the fifteen people I currently owe blog posts. Any takers? This is getting a bit long, so I will sign off. But, once again, thank you – thank you a thousand times over for holding my hand through this. Let me know your thoughts on the questions above in the comments or on social media. If you’re so inclined, you can catch up on previous updates here, here and here; you can follow me on Twitter; and you can even watch me repeatedly fail to properly get the hang of Instagram. Please share this post and the book link with your friends, your mum, your nemesis, your next door neighbour, the Amazon delivery guy… The more people pledge, the sooner I can send you the damn book that you’ve paid for. And, of course, if you haven’t already, you can join me in this weird and sort-of-wonderful book adventure by pledging for your very own copy. You’ll get your name in the back, and a nicer version of the book than the one which will eventually be in the shops, and my undying love and gratitude. One more thank you, and big love, Laura x

Friends,

Yesterday two rather brilliant book-things happened: we smashed 20% - and 21%, in fact – and I finished the first draft of the first chapter.

This chapter has been a bit of a tricky one: basically what happens in it is I get pregnant. (Spoiler alert!) But there’s also some necessary background info about my decidedly colourful mental health history and I need to present that without going on massive tangents about Other Things That Happened At Other Times. But, then, if you try to dash through it too much, it’s a bit like, “Hold up, what happened there? Someone tried to murder you on a psych ward?” Anyway, I think I’ve now done an OK job of setting up what needed to be set up, ie. some of the conflicts and tensions around Growing Up Mental which then get resolved later in the book. This involved revisiting some of the 950 notebooks and diaries (an approximation) which I’ve been keeping since the age of six, particularly this one:


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-09-18_08.44.08.jpg?v=1690912245" width="375">


It’s completely full and covers 17th February to 10th April 2001. I was thirteen. It was during those weeks that my self-harming habit was found out and I started on a conveyor belt of mental health ‘treatment’ that would continue until I called time in 2016. It’s going to be important to emphasise that just because my care was mostly (not entirely) shit, and just because meds, etc didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean that’s true for everyone. I think the key thing is finding what works for you, and being supported in that. Anyway, this notebook is simultaneously the most tragic, the funniest, and the most embarrassing thing I have ever encountered. I would burn it in a heartbeat before letting you read it.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-09-18_11.13.17.jpg?v=1690912245" width="500">


It seems that I’m writing a coming-of-age story as well as a becoming-a-mother story: the two go hand-in-hand. It strikes me, now, just what an absolute bloody idiot I was at twenty-five. Impulsively getting pregnant, having so recently been such a state, was a poor decision - and it was a poor decision which went on to impact others enormously, possibly including Arthur. I’m finding it hard to forgive myself for that - but you have to forgive yourself, really, because you’re stuck with yourself.

Chapter two was going to be the birth story, but now I’ve effectively divided chapter one into two chapters, so chapter two will be the pregnancy. This means getting out my hospital notes again, as well as my own diaries. Wish me luck! Chapter one needs more editing, but I might publish an extract exclusively for those of you who have pledged. It seems like the least I can do, as I’m keeping you waiting for the book itself. Would you like that, or would you rather save it for when the book comes out?

You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve cheered up a bit, although not completely, since <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/the-fraud-police">the last time I wrote one of these</a>. My mood improved when my period arrived after a staggering THIRTY NINE DAYS. I mean, thirty nine days. What is that. But it has been a helpful reminder of just how much my mood – which I grew up believing to be unfathomable and unpredictable, a bit like the weather – is linked to the annual cycle of the seasons and the monthly cycle of my body. It’s something I can, at least partly, understand, predict, accommodate, plan for, and influence. So much of my ‘recovery’ - if you want to call it that - has been about reconnecting with my body, so that I can actually notice this stuff. I wrote about that more in <a href="http://www.mentalhealthchallenge.org.uk/adventures-self-care/">a blog post</a> in the spring, in which I quoted Stephen Cope (no idea who he is, by the way):

<blockquote>
 
“As we begin to re-experience a visceral reconnection with the needs of our bodies, there is a brand new capacity to warmly love the self. We experience a new quality of authenticity in our caring, which redirects our attention to our health, our diets, our energy, our time management. This enhanced care for the self arises spontaneously and naturally, not as a response to a “should”. We are able to experience an immediate and intrinsic pleasure in self-care.”
</blockquote>

Another way of saying this might be: everything is worse when you’re hungry. The ability to notice that and have a sandwich is just absolutely grand.

I’m mentally cooking a blog post about PTSD triggers. The obvious ones are straightforward, although not easy, to avoid. I spent a few years dodging environments where the conversation might ‘get a bit birthy.’ Unfortunately this meant forgoing the gatherings of mums and babies which might have relieved some of the isolation I felt, because I learned quickly that mums with babies have a habit of talking about their birth experiences in graphic detail. Sometimes I would attempt to change the subject in a panicked and ridiculous fashion: “Don’t you love potatoes? They’re so versatile.” I do think that avoidance gets a bad press – it’s a Symptom and you should Not Do It – when actually some avoidance, especially in the early months, is necessary for survival. Further down the line, though, I did things like joining the Hampshire Maternity Services Liason Committee as a sort of exposure therapy. And I’m much better now, although things do still set me off sometimes. The triggers that are a lot more difficult, for me, are the stupid ones. The ones that aren’t obvious, so you can’t predict them or prepare yourself at all. For example, last week I went to Newcastle on an aeroplane. Going to Newcastle on an aeroplane is not an obvious trigger for birth trauma, or indeed for anything that has happened in my life. The journeys there and back were both unexpectedly triggering and therefore horrible. But it’s interesting to retrospectively analyse what sets us off and why. Is this something you’d like to read about? I shall probably offer it to one of the fifteen people I currently owe blog posts. Any takers?


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-09-20_16.25.46.jpg?v=1690912246" width="375">


This is getting a bit long, so I will sign off. But, once again, thank you – thank you a thousand times over for holding my hand through this. Let me know your thoughts on the questions above in the comments or on social media. If you’re so inclined, you can catch up on previous updates <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/ten">here</a>, <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/school-daze">here</a> and <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/the-fraud-police">here</a>; you can <a href="https://twitter.com/cooksferryqueen">follow me on Twitter</a>; and you can even <a href="https://www.instagram.com/cooksferryqueen/">watch me repeatedly fail to properly get the hang of Instagram</a>. Please share this post and the book link with your friends, your mum, your nemesis, your next door neighbour, the Amazon delivery guy… The more people pledge, the sooner I can send you the damn book that you’ve paid for. And, of course, if you haven’t already, you can join me in this weird and sort-of-wonderful book adventure by pledging for your very own copy. You’ll get your name in the back, and a nicer version of the book than the one which will eventually be in the shops, and my undying love and gratitude.

One more thank you, and big love,

Laura x

Growing Up Mental

Dear everyone, Birthdays after birth trauma are funny things. They’re times of joy and celebration of a much-loved child, and yet they’re also ‘crappiversaries’ – a concise if rather twee name for the anniversary of a traumatic event. I’m not sure why crappiversaries have to be a Thing, and yet somehow they are. You can ignore them, but they insist. In a way, it’s like the events of a year ago, or however many years ago, are still happening, in parallel, and they’re trying to pull you back. And then there’s the guilt. Arthur will be five in a few days, and his birthday is his birthday, not my birth trauma anniversary. I feel that struggling with it makes me self-obsessed and insufficiently thankful for the fact that we are both alive and well. I also know that this is crap. I tried so hard to look forward to Arthur’s first birthday. Things were looking up by then: I was more sane and more present, generally, than I had been for a year before. I was beginning to enjoy things again, to see beauty around me. It was like reawakening after a long sleep. The birth was still was a series of patchy, muddled memories – moments more than a narrative. I had cobbled together a story of sorts, but it was incomplete and most days it felt like it had happened to someone else. When I looked back on the previous year, it was with some shock – how dark and odd it was, how little I had understood of where I was and how I felt. With twinges of sadness, I was also saying goodbye to my baby and hello to my toddler. I loved watching him learn something new every day: a new word – “More!” –; or the ability to sing a recognisable tune; or the discovery that if he pulled his Percy train backward, it would then scoot forward. I did a wardrobe changeover and found that all the clothes in a bag marked “HUGE” for the dim and distant future now fit. I held them up in astonishment against the clothes which went into the wardrobe a few months before. Wonder and loss all bound up together. I was determined that Arthur’s first birthday would be this wonderful celebration of the little boy I loved late but loved utterly, and so - with dread in the pit of my stomach - I planned a big party. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t remember it. I filled the house with excellent people. My friend Emma made a stupendous Gruffalo cake. This was going to be fun, damn it. It wasn’t fun. Not really. The flashbacks, the nightmares, the vague but all-consuming sense of panic – everything which had been gently receding – started to flood back in as Arthur’s birthday drew closer. I was OK until February 16th, the day I went into labour. That afternoon, I had a sort of flashback marathon – a series of them, one after the other, in rapid succession. Some of the memories were new: I’d had no idea of those events until that day. I was overwhelmed. Somehow we got through it. I tried so hard to ignore Arthur’s second birthday. I didn’t plan a party this time, just invited close family over for tea and cake. Every time a thought popped up - “This time two years ago…” - I would mentally slam the door on it. That year the nightmares started on February 10th, along with a perpetual gnawing unease. I am usually a fairly anxious person but was in overdrive from then on, my body a siren: “EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY!” all the time. I would behave as if ridiculous things, trivial things, were emergencies because at least it made sense, then, that my muscles were tense and I felt sick and I could hear my heart banging away. I was ridiculous, and, understandably, irritated everyone around me. Their irritation became the new emergency. I didn’t recall feeling afraid or anxious during the labour, or the birth. In fact, I still don’t really remember any emotions at all. It’s just snapshots, static frames, like a series of paintings along a wall. On the 12th, I was on a bus, not thinking about anything much, when suddenly there was an intense stabbing pain in the back of my left hand. I looked down and there was a cannula in my hand. I was on the bus and it was there. It hadn’t been there before, but I could see it and I could feel it. I froze and stared at it in horror. My hand was horribly bruised. The cannula was there for about fifteen minutes, as the bus crawled through the traffic on the high street, and then I blinked and it was gone. I had the same hallucination again that evening, as I was getting Arthur off to sleep, and then just the pain in my hand a few times after that. It was freaky as hell. The birthday came and went. Then a photo of me came up on Facebook – “two years ago today!” – I looked grey, swollen, and completely dead behind the eyes, with a tiny jaundiced baby held up to my chest. The second birthday had been harder than the first, and that scared me to death: it was supposed to get easier, wasn’t it? Time’s a healer and all that. What if it just got worse and worse every year? It didn’t. It hasn’t. After the second birthday, each one has been easier than the last. If this resonates with you, I want you to know that it will get easier. It will. And there’s support available: please go and check out The Birth Trauma Association. Their Facebook group was a lifesaver for me. And I’m not any kind of expert but do contact me if you would like to. You can also use the #pndchat hashtag on Twitter or join #PNDHour on Wednesdays 8pm. Don’t carry this alone. It's completely understandable to find the time around your child's birthday difficult. It doesn't mean you don't adore and celebrate them. It's not making their day all about you. Be kind to yourself for their sake and yours. Five years on, I’m OK. I do keep thinking “This time five years ago…” but I’m trying to strike a balance in allowing those thoughts to drift around whilst not fixating on them. Last week I was speaking on a perinatal mental health course for medical professionals, one I do twice a year, and talking about Complex PTSD: in many ways, this particular talk feels like one of the most important things I do, but it also completely fucks me sideways every damn time. It’s totally worth it but the emotional hangover is grim, and the timing, on this occasion, not great. But I’m over the worst of the tiredness and general fragility now, and I’m trying to work out how I’m going to make a Splatoon 2 cake... The book, by the way, is 44% funded – thank you so much and welcome to all the new supporters. If you haven’t pledged yet, you can do so via the big blue ‘Pledge’ button on this site and you will get a fancy copy of the book with your name in a list of patrons at the back. You’ll also be helping to make this book a reality. Please do share the link and/or this post around, especially with anyone you think might benefit from some Real Talk around birth trauma and maternal mental health. Cheers, dears, Laura x

Dear everyone,

Birthdays after birth trauma are funny things. They’re times of joy and celebration of a much-loved child, and yet they’re also ‘crappiversaries’ – a concise if rather twee name for the anniversary of a traumatic event. I’m not sure why crappiversaries have to be a Thing, and yet somehow they are. You can ignore them, but they insist. In a way, it’s like the events of a year ago, or however many years ago, are still happening, in parallel, and they’re trying to pull you back.

And then there’s the guilt. Arthur will be five in a few days, and his birthday is his birthday, not my birth trauma anniversary. I feel that struggling with it makes me self-obsessed and insufficiently thankful for the fact that we are both alive and well. I also know that this is crap.

 

I tried so hard to look forward to Arthur’s first birthday. Things were looking up by then: I was more sane and more present, generally, than I had been for a year before. I was beginning to enjoy things again, to see beauty around me. It was like reawakening after a long sleep. The birth was still was a series of patchy, muddled memories – moments more than a narrative. I had cobbled together a story of sorts, but it was incomplete and most days it felt like it had happened to someone else. When I looked back on the previous year, it was with some shock – how dark and odd it was, how little I had understood of where I was and how I felt.

With twinges of sadness, I was also saying goodbye to my baby and hello to my toddler. I loved watching him learn something new every day: a new word – “More!” –; or the ability to sing a recognisable tune; or the discovery that if he pulled his Percy train backward, it would then scoot forward. I did a wardrobe changeover and found that all the clothes in a bag marked “HUGE” for the dim and distant future now fit. I held them up in astonishment against the clothes which went into the wardrobe a few months before. Wonder and loss all bound up together.

I was determined that Arthur’s first birthday would be this wonderful celebration of the little boy I loved late but loved utterly, and so - with dread in the pit of my stomach - I planned a big party. It didn’t matter that he wouldn’t remember it. I filled the house with excellent people. My friend <a href="https://www.topnotchbakes.co.uk/">Emma made a stupendous Gruffalo cake</a>. This was going to be fun, damn it.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2015-02-21_20.35.53.jpg?v=1690912249" width="375">


It wasn’t fun. Not really.

The flashbacks, the nightmares, the vague but all-consuming sense of panic – everything which had been gently receding – started to flood back in as Arthur’s birthday drew closer. I was OK until February 16th, the day I went into labour. That afternoon, I had a sort of flashback marathon – a series of them, one after the other, in rapid succession. Some of the memories were new: I’d had no idea of those events until that day. I was overwhelmed. Somehow we got through it.

 

I tried so hard to ignore Arthur’s second birthday. I didn’t plan a party this time, just invited close family over for tea and cake. Every time a thought popped up - “This time two years ago…” - I would mentally slam the door on it.

That year the nightmares started on February 10th, along with a perpetual gnawing unease. I am usually a fairly anxious person but was in overdrive from then on, my body a siren: “EMERGENCY! EMERGENCY!” all the time. I would behave as if ridiculous things, trivial things, were emergencies because at least it made sense, then, that my muscles were tense and I felt sick and I could hear my heart banging away. I was ridiculous, and, understandably, irritated everyone around me. Their irritation became the new emergency. I didn’t recall feeling afraid or anxious during the labour, or the birth. In fact, I still don’t really remember any emotions at all. It’s just snapshots, static frames, like a series of paintings along a wall.

On the 12th, I was on a bus, not thinking about anything much, when suddenly there was an intense stabbing pain in the back of my left hand. I looked down and there was a cannula in my hand. I was on the bus and it was there. It hadn’t been there before, but I could see it and I could feel it. I froze and stared at it in horror. My hand was horribly bruised. The cannula was there for about fifteen minutes, as the bus crawled through the traffic on the high street, and then I blinked and it was gone.

I had the same hallucination again that evening, as I was getting Arthur off to sleep, and then just the pain in my hand a few times after that. It was freaky as hell.

The birthday came and went. Then a photo of me came up on Facebook – “two years ago today!” – I looked grey, swollen, and completely dead behind the eyes, with a tiny jaundiced baby held up to my chest. The second birthday had been harder than the first, and that scared me to death: it was supposed to get easier, wasn’t it? Time’s a healer and all that. What if it just got worse and worse every year?

 

It didn’t. It hasn’t. After the second birthday, each one has been easier than the last.

If this resonates with you, I want you to know that it will get easier. It will. And there’s support available: please go and check out <a href="https://www.birthtraumaassociation.org.uk/#">The Birth Trauma Association</a>. Their <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheBTA">Facebook group</a> was a lifesaver for me. And I’m not any kind of expert but do contact me if you would like to. You can also use the #pndchat hashtag on Twitter or join #PNDHour on Wednesdays 8pm. Don’t carry this alone.

It's completely understandable to find the time around your child's birthday difficult. It doesn't mean you don't adore and celebrate them. It's not making their day all about you. Be kind to yourself for their sake and yours.

 

Five years on, I’m OK. I do keep thinking “This time five years ago…” but I’m trying to strike a balance in allowing those thoughts to drift around whilst not fixating on them. Last week I was speaking on a perinatal mental health course for medical professionals, one I do twice a year, and talking about Complex PTSD: in many ways, this particular talk feels like one of the most important things I do, but it also completely fucks me sideways every damn time. It’s totally worth it but the emotional hangover is grim, and the timing, on this occasion, not great. But I’m over the worst of the tiredness and general fragility now, and I’m trying to work out how I’m going to make a Splatoon 2 cake...

The book, by the way, is 44% funded – thank you so much and welcome to all the new supporters. If you haven’t pledged yet, you can do so via the big blue ‘Pledge’ button on this site and you will get a fancy copy of the book with your name in a list of patrons at the back. You’ll also be helping to make this book a reality. Please do share the link and/or this post around, especially with anyone you think might benefit from some Real Talk around birth trauma and maternal mental health.

Cheers, dears,

Laura x

Happyish birthdays

Hello dears, Long time, no update - and I actually have some progress news to impart. The crowdfunder is at 80% and the actual book-writing more like 90%. The webpages here now feel horribly out-of-date so I've written some new content and Unbound have very kindly agreed to do a refresh. Once that's done, I'm going to give the funding a concerted 'push'. Lately I've been feeling a bit uninspired in terms of that side of things, just like I've exhausted every avenue and can't bear to bang on about it anymore. "There goes Laura pushing her book again, ugh," I imagine everybody thinking and rolling their eyes - not you, I mean, but people who haven't pledged! Anyway, I've done some brainstorming and found a few more tricks up my sleeve and I would be so grateful if you would help by telling your friends when the time comes. The actual manuscript itself is really coming together and I'm so excited to share it with you. I hope you love it. It's still hard to believe that this is actually going to happen. We are really nearly there - not super nearly there, but quite nearly there! I'm so grateful to all of you for opting in, for showing up for me, and then for sticking around for so long. In all honesty this has been much harder than I thought it would be, but luckily I like doing hard things. We had covid again. It was grim, but not a patch on last time: only put my brains in the blender and took me away from the book for a few weeks. (Hallelujah vaccines.) And actually, it was beautifully timed, in that it created just enough distance for me to identify what wasn't working and shake a few things up. I've done a bit of restructuring and switched writing tactics for the moment: rather than ploughing through chronologically, for the ending I'm picking out bits as I feel inclined and then making a patchwork quilt of it. It will need smoothing out, or at least making the disjointedness a feature rather than a bug, but that's editing for you. More from me when the new crowdfunding page is up, and then probably more from me generally for a while! I have plans to share. With love, Laura x

Hello dears,

Long time, no update - and I actually have some progress news to impart. The crowdfunder is at 80% and the actual book-writing more like 90%. The webpages here now feel horribly out-of-date so I've written some new content and Unbound have very kindly agreed to do a refresh. Once that's done, I'm going to give the funding a concerted 'push'. Lately I've been feeling a bit uninspired in terms of that side of things, just like I've exhausted every avenue and can't bear to bang on about it anymore. "There goes Laura pushing her book again, ugh," I imagine everybody thinking and rolling their eyes - not you, I mean, but people who haven't pledged! Anyway, I've done some brainstorming and found a few more tricks up my sleeve and I would be so grateful if you would help by telling your friends when the time comes. 

The actual manuscript itself is really coming together and I'm so excited to share it with you. I hope you love it. It's still hard to believe that this is actually going to happen. We are really nearly there - not super nearly there, but quite nearly there! I'm so grateful to all of you for opting in, for showing up for me, and then for sticking around for so long. In all honesty this has been much harder than I thought it would be, but luckily I like doing hard things.

We had covid again. It was grim, but not a patch on last time: only put my brains in the blender and took me away from the book for a few weeks. (Hallelujah vaccines.) And actually, it was beautifully timed, in that it created just enough distance for me to identify what wasn't working and shake a few things up. I've done a bit of restructuring and switched writing tactics for the moment: rather than ploughing through chronologically, for the ending I'm picking out bits as I feel inclined and then making a patchwork quilt of it. It will need smoothing out, or at least making the disjointedness a feature rather than a bug, but that's editing for you.

More from me when the new crowdfunding page is up, and then probably more from me generally for a while! I have plans to share.

With love,

Laura x

Hello from me on a sunny Sunday afternoon

Hi everyone, I've been thinking of you all a lot lately and wanted to check in. I couldn't really write this book without thinking of you - the people who will read it, and the people who are helping me to make it happen. I'm currently turning the first draft (60,000 words of absolute chaos haemorrhaged on to a page at various points over the last five years) into the second draft (an actual book with a structure and some coherence). I set a timer and write for 45 minutes every day and that gets me through a chapter a month. I'm currently on chapter eleven, which is set in the mother and baby psychiatric unit during the spring of 2014. It's giving me feelings which are both vague and unnameable, and at times huge and profoundly uncomfortable. I don't know why. This is one of the nicest bits. People were kind to me there. It was the turning point at which things started to get better. I have cheerfully ploughed through a lot of awful stuff up to now and it hasn't affected me that much, I think partly because it feels like it happened to someone else. That might be a dissociative thing, but everything was so different then. I was so different then. It's a long way removed from me, now, typing away in my slippers whilst my enormous son is at school. Another lifetime. Yet there are moments when the past is all too present. This book-writing process has been so immersive all year. It's never far from my thoughts. And it's process that I have to walk through alone: no one knows the material except me, no one can solve the problems that come up except me. I'm finding my way and working out what the story is, what to share and what to hold back. I'm telling this story, in full, for the first and last time, and then I feel I'll be able to leave it behind a bit and move on with my life. I want to use what has happened to reach other people, to speak with them, and to forge a meaningful contribution. You're enabling me to do that and I really can't thank you enough. This week, though, I'm so exhausted. I'm trying to trace the origins of this bone-deep tiredness, this constantly fantasising about burying my face in a duvet while instead I must keep flaying myself onward. It's part trauma-mining, part trauma-processing, part long covid... and partly it's the fact that my work life is currently completely unsustainable. This wasn't supposed to happen but people kept extending my contracts, and now I work for Women's Health and Family Services on Mondays, the University of Manchester across Tuesdays and Wednesdays, back at WHFS on Thursdays, and Bliss on Fridays, and then there's freelance work to pack in around all of that. But my time at Bliss will expire next month (by the way, have you seen the young parents' research...?) and things should settle a bit over Christmas. I hope this hasn't read like a moan-essay... I am feeling rather done in but that's not what I wrote to tell you about! I just wanted to say hi and thank you again and I hope you love this book. I am excited about it: right now its contents are a little secret that I'm hugging to myself and getting ready to share with you. In a sense, it's a book about me but really what I'm trying to do is to use the first person to write about things that are a lot bigger than me. I hope that they will resonate, and maybe you will see yourself in parts of this book. Maybe that's how we see each other. Love, Laura x

Hi everyone, 
 
I've been thinking of you all a lot lately and wanted to check in. I couldn't really write this book without thinking of you - the people who will read it, and the people who are helping me to make it happen. I'm currently turning the first draft (60,000 words of absolute chaos haemorrhaged on to a page at various points over the last five years) into the second draft (an actual book with a structure and some coherence). I set a timer and write for 45 minutes every day and that gets me through a chapter a month. 
 
I'm currently on chapter eleven, which is set in the mother and baby psychiatric unit during the spring of 2014. It's giving me feelings which are both vague and unnameable, and at times huge and profoundly uncomfortable. I don't know why. This is one of the nicest bits. People were kind to me there. It was the turning point at which things started to get better. I have cheerfully ploughed through a lot of awful stuff up to now and it hasn't affected me that much, I think partly because it feels like it happened to someone else. That might be a dissociative thing, but everything was so different then. I was so different then. It's a long way removed from me, now, typing away in my slippers whilst my enormous son is at school. Another lifetime. 
 
Yet there are moments when the past is all too present. This book-writing process has been so immersive all year. It's never far from my thoughts. And it's process that I have to walk through alone: no one knows the material except me, no one can solve the problems that come up except me. I'm finding my way and working out what the story is, what to share and what to hold back. I'm telling this story, in full, for the first and last time, and then I feel I'll be able to leave it behind a bit and move on with my life. I want to use what has happened to reach other people, to speak with them, and to forge a meaningful contribution. You're enabling me to do that and I really can't thank you enough. 
 
This week, though, I'm so exhausted. I'm trying to trace the origins of this bone-deep tiredness, this constantly fantasising about burying my face in a duvet while instead I must keep flaying myself onward. It's part trauma-mining, part trauma-processing, part long covid... and partly it's the fact that my work life is currently completely unsustainable. This wasn't supposed to happen but people kept extending my contracts, and now I work for <a href="https://whfs.org.uk/">Women's Health and Family Services</a> on Mondays, the University of Manchester across Tuesdays and Wednesdays, back at WHFS on Thursdays, and <a href="https://www.bliss.org.uk/">Bliss</a> on Fridays, and then there's freelance work to pack in around all of that. But my time at Bliss will expire next month (by the way, have you seen the <a href="https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/files.bliss.org.uk/images/Report_final-1.pdf">young parents' research</a>...?) and things should settle a bit over Christmas. 
 
I hope this hasn't read like a moan-essay... I am feeling rather done in but that's not what I wrote to tell you about! I just wanted to say hi and thank you again and I hope you love this book. I am excited about it: right now its contents are a little secret that I'm hugging to myself and getting ready to share with you. In a sense, it's a book about me but really what I'm trying to do is to use the first person to write about things that are a lot bigger than me. I hope that they will resonate, and maybe you will see yourself in parts of this book. Maybe that's how we see each other.  
 
Love, 
 
Laura x

Hello, it's November

I'm sorry for the radio silence; everything has happened. I've been thinking of you all often and wondering how you are. Do get in touch, if you'd like, and let me know how you're doing amidst all this. I would love to hear from you. I came down with the virus five weeks ago and have been really quite poorly. I had throat and chest infections subsequently but managed to dodge hospital, thanks largely to the GP surgery's being wonderful and monitoring me closely at home. I'm much better now but am having to work (and parent) around lingering residual symptoms and post-viral fatigue. I've had to hit the pause button on many things, including the book, but am recovering well, if slowly, and gradually picking things up again. I don't know what I thought living and parenting through a pandemic would be like, but probably not like this. Before lockdown was such a weird combination of normalcy and emergency. The bracing ourselves. The collective intake of breath. I was terrified, to be honest. Arthur had a lot of questions, the same questions we were all asking. I tried to balance preparing him for scenarios that were looking increasingly likely and getting him to take it seriously enough to wash his hands thoroughly (I've never heard anyone sing all of happy birthday that quickly; it was sort of impressive), whilst at the same time not frightening or upsetting him. That seemed to go OK, although mainly because he trusts me to keep him safe and is still too little to realise that my capacity to do so is limited by factors beyond our control. I'm dreading the day that dawns on him. There have been lots of conversations, usually in that twilight space before he goes to sleep which seems to be when he opens up about what's on his mind. He's been very sensible about everything and understands as much as any of us do. Honestly, I've been winging it since the moment I realised I was pregnant. This is just more in that vein. Lockdown with a six-year-old is challenging, but we are lucky in so many ways. We have a garden with a slide and an apple tree which has been particularly gorgeous in blossom this year. I'm glad I bought a trampoline with our Nectar points at Christmas - and, no, I haven't been on it: partly because I’m heavier than I look - very dense, me - and partly because I’m not at all convinced my pelvic floor is up to it. A global pandemic is bad enough without pissing yourself on a child’s trampoline. There's also a field near our house where everyone walks their dogs and where I'd take Arthur for a kickabout before I was ill. We didn't have a football - they aren't known for their longevity - so we improvised with a spacehopper, except the wind kept blowing it off course. Cue me pelting after a spacehopper. pursued by half a dozen excited dogs. Definitely not part of my mental image of pandemic. The virus, in case you were wondering, is absolutely foul. Thankfully Arthur was only mildly ill - two nights of low grade fever; a bit of a cough and breathlessness for a week - but I was knocked horizontal for what seemed like forever, listening to the whirring of the air ambulances overhead, footballs thudding into fences. All my lovely homeschool plans flew straight into the bin and Arthur has largely been raised by YouTubers. I'm just now settling us back into a routine of exercise and education in the mornings, work for me in the afternoons, but with adjusted expectations all round. I keep overdoing it and landing myself back in bed, feeling as if someone is sitting on my chest with a sensation like an ice burn... I can't recall ever being wiped out for so long. Meanwhile, life (sort of) goes on. The book was ticking along until I became ill, and we're 60% funded now. Thank you and welcome to all new supporters. I have lots of perinatal mental health news but I shall put that in a separate update soon. Be kind to yourselves, and keep in touch. Much love, Laura x

I'm sorry for the radio silence; everything has happened. I've been thinking of you all often and wondering how you are. Do get in touch, if you'd like, and let me know how you're doing amidst all this. I would love to hear from you. 
 
I came down with the virus five weeks ago and have been really quite poorly. I had throat and chest infections subsequently but managed to dodge hospital, thanks largely to the GP surgery's being wonderful and monitoring me closely at home. I'm much better now but am having to work (and parent) around lingering residual symptoms and post-viral fatigue. I've had to hit the pause button on many things, including the book, but am recovering well, if slowly, and gradually picking things up again. 
 
I don't know what I thought living and parenting through a pandemic would be like, but probably not like this. Before lockdown was such a weird combination of normalcy and emergency. The bracing ourselves. The collective intake of breath. I was terrified, to be honest. Arthur had a lot of questions, the same questions we were all asking. I tried to balance preparing him for scenarios that were looking increasingly likely and getting him to take it seriously enough to wash his hands thoroughly (I've never heard anyone sing all of happy birthday that quickly; it was sort of impressive), whilst at the same time not frightening or upsetting him. That seemed to go OK, although mainly because he trusts me to keep him safe and is still too little to realise that my capacity to do so is limited by factors beyond our control. I'm dreading the day that dawns on him. There have been lots of conversations, usually in that twilight space before he goes to sleep which seems to be when he opens up about what's on his mind. He's been very sensible about everything and understands as much as any of us do. 
 
Honestly, I've been winging it since the moment I realised I was pregnant. This is just more in that vein.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2020-04-14_12.17.58.jpg?v=1690912254" width="375"> 
 
Lockdown with a six-year-old is challenging, but we are lucky in so many ways. We have a garden with a slide and an apple tree which has been particularly gorgeous in blossom this year. I'm glad I bought a trampoline with our Nectar points at Christmas - and, no, I haven't been on it: partly because I’m heavier than I look - very dense, me - and partly because I’m not at all convinced my pelvic floor is up to it. A global pandemic is bad enough without pissing yourself on a child’s trampoline. There's also a field near our house where everyone walks their dogs and where I'd take Arthur for a kickabout before I was ill. We didn't have a football - they aren't known for their longevity - so we improvised with a spacehopper, except the wind kept blowing it off course. Cue me pelting after a spacehopper. pursued by half a dozen excited dogs. Definitely not part of my mental image of pandemic. 
 
The virus, in case you were wondering, is absolutely foul. Thankfully Arthur was only mildly ill - two nights of low grade fever; a bit of a cough and breathlessness for a week - but I was knocked horizontal for what seemed like forever, listening to the whirring of the air ambulances overhead, footballs thudding into fences. All my lovely homeschool plans flew straight into the bin and Arthur has largely been raised by YouTubers. I'm just now settling us back into a routine of exercise and education in the mornings, work for me in the afternoons, but with adjusted expectations all round. I keep overdoing it and landing myself back in bed, feeling as if someone is sitting on my chest with a sensation like an ice burn... I can't recall ever being wiped out for so long. 
 
Meanwhile, life (sort of) goes on. The book was ticking along until I became ill, and we're 60% funded now. Thank you and welcome to all new supporters. I have lots of perinatal mental health news but I shall put that in a separate update soon. Be kind to yourselves, and keep in touch. 
 
Much love, 
 
Laura x

Hello, strangers.

Dearest everybody, Last week was quite a big one for AMWJ. We surpassed both 150 supporters and 25% funding, and, at the time of writing, we’re currently cruising a cool 28%… I was also interviewed by the NCT about the book, which was grand. Welcome on board to all the new supporters, and thank you – it means everything that you’re here. If you’d like to, you can catch up on the journey so far. I’m currently writing chapter two, which is all about the pregnancy. This has meant revisiting my medical notes (although, in truth, I am holding these rather at arm’s length – they are indecipherable anyway) and my pregnancy journal. It’s odd how we misremember things: I had thought I’d had quite a happy, glowy sort of pregnancy, and yet the journal is endless repetition of “feeling very tired” “feeling rather low” “feeling very worried” “feeling so stressed" etc etc ad nauseam (I promise the chapter will be more interesting than that, by the way.) I found reading it emotionally tough in quite a vague way, a sort of sad and ‘yucky’ feeling that has been difficult to shake. I wouldn’t like to go back to who I was then. I have cheered myself up by writing about my NCT antenatal classes. I hope this bit is funny. I’ve been cackling anyway, alone… It includes the grand entrance of my friend Hayley, who will be one of the heroes of this book. By the time you’ve read it, I hope you’ll love her almost as much as I do. She’s extraordinary. Meeting Hayley was my first experience of maternal peer support – a rather bland term for the specific kind of magic that happens when mothers champion mothers. Unequivocal, judgement-free, in it together. Everyone needs someone they can text when the baby just shat in the bath and they aren’t sure what to do next, you know? Hayley and I laughed together, until we couldn’t breathe, we sobbed together, we stared into the middle distance together in a sleep-deprived fashion, we figured it out together. I don’t know how I would have got through it all without her. And later there would be other mothers, particularly through #PNDHour, who came alongside me when I was so exhausted and so broken and I felt that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I guess everybody needs peer support of some kind, just for the business of being human, but there is something about motherhood and something about mental health and something about the collision of those two things... Peer support becomes essential to survival. And a lot of the maternal mental health work I do now is around that, with the quality assurance principles, Parents in Mind, Hampshire Lanterns, etc. October was supposed to be a quieter month after I spent September buzzing about like a blue-arsed fly, but that has not, alas, been the case. I've been giving talks, teaching maternity support workers and health visitors, recording a podcast (down with the kids), presenting to an awards panel, attending many many meetings, and doing history bits and bobs too... until I screeched to a halt (or croaked to a halt) with tonsilitis last week. (But not until I had surpassed myself by sending a particularly disastrous accidental Reply All.) I then spent the best part of a week doing not much and reminding myself that I am allowed to exist, even if I do not much. A big highlight, though, of recent weeks has been seeing Hollie McNish in Winchester with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Lorna. Hollie's poems have been a big influence on AMWJ and I highly recommend her anthology Nobody Told Me, which covers pregnancy through to her daughter's third birthday. Here's me and Lorna fangirling. Hollie was so nice. Eeeeeeeeeeee. Writing this book is taking longer than I expected, for a number of different, not entirely interesting, reasons. I keep fretting about it, just because I realise that I'm going to keep you all waiting for your copies and it feels like taking the piss. But I was worrying out loud to someone about this last week and he said, "It takes as long as it takes." And I thought: yes. You don't want a rushed and rubbish book, I'm sure, and really this is just another facet of what writing and crowdfunding this book is all about: trust. I have to trust you to be patient. I'm already trusting you with a lot of very personal information - I do feel horribly exposed, even before the book is finished and published - and I find myself leaning on everyone's kindness: the pledges, of course, but also all the tweets and Facebook comments. The Big Bank of Book Encouragement is alive and well. And crowdfunding is another exercise in trust. On the Unbound page, I refer to Amanda Palmer’s TED talk, in which she compares crowdfunding to crowdsurfing. (It’s all about not being ashamed to ask for help; definitely worth a listen.) She also talks about asking as being like saying, "I trust you this much. Should I? Show me." Putting up this page and asking you all to join me and support me on this funny book journey feels just like that. And I also have to trust you to wait. I trust you. We can do the thing. Even if it takes ages. Please help your girl out by sharing the hell out of this post and/or the book link. Talk to me in the comments or on Facebook/Twitter/email. And, of course, if you haven’t already, you can pledge for your very own copy of this marvellous book-that-will-be, and get an extra shiny copy with your name in the back. Big love, Laura x

Dearest everybody,

Last week was quite a big one for AMWJ. We surpassed both 150 supporters and 25% funding, and, at the time of writing, we’re currently cruising a cool 28%… I was also <a href="http://org.peek.link/2vj">interviewed by the NCT</a> about the book, which was grand. Welcome on board to all the new supporters, and thank you – it means everything that you’re here. If you’d like to, you can catch up on <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/ten">the</a> <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/school-daze">journey</a> <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/the-fraud-police">so</a> <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/growing-up-mental">far</a>.

I’m currently writing chapter two, which is all about the pregnancy. This has meant revisiting my medical notes (although, in truth, I am holding these rather at arm’s length – they are indecipherable anyway) and my pregnancy journal. It’s odd how we misremember things: I had thought I’d had quite a happy, glowy sort of pregnancy, and yet the journal is endless repetition of “feeling very tired” “feeling rather low” “feeling very worried” “feeling so stressed" etc etc ad nauseam (I promise the chapter will be more interesting than that, by the way.) I found reading it emotionally tough in quite a vague way, a sort of sad and ‘yucky’ feeling that has been difficult to shake. I wouldn’t like to go back to who I was then.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-10-05_16.16.18.jpg?v=1690912257" width="500">


I have cheered myself up by writing about my NCT antenatal classes. I hope this bit is funny. I’ve been cackling anyway, alone… It includes the grand entrance of my friend Hayley, who will be one of the heroes of this book. By the time you’ve read it, I hope you’ll love her almost as much as I do. She’s extraordinary. Meeting Hayley was my first experience of maternal peer support – a rather bland term for the specific kind of magic that happens when mothers champion mothers. Unequivocal, judgement-free, in it together. Everyone needs someone they can text when the baby just shat in the bath and they aren’t sure what to do next, you know? Hayley and I laughed together, until we couldn’t breathe, we sobbed together, we stared into the middle distance together in a sleep-deprived fashion, we figured it out together. I don’t know how I would have got through it all without her.

And later there would be other mothers, particularly through <a href="http://pndandme.intonet-technology.co.uk/what-is-pndhour/">#PNDHour</a>, who came alongside me when I was so exhausted and so broken and I felt that I just couldn’t do it anymore. I guess everybody needs peer support of some kind, just for the business of being human, but there is something about motherhood and something about mental health and something about the collision of those two things... Peer support becomes essential to survival. And a lot of the maternal mental health work I do now is around that, with the <a href="http://mcpin.org/maternal-mental-health-peer-support/">quality assurance principles</a>, <a href="https://www.nct.org.uk/about-us/professional/research/parents-mind-perinatal-mental-health-peer-support">Parents in Mind</a>, <a href="https://hampshirelanterns.com/">Hampshire Lanterns</a>, etc.

October was supposed to be a quieter month after I spent September <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/the-fraud-police">buzzing about like a blue-arsed fly</a>, but that has not, alas, been the case. I've been giving talks, teaching maternity support workers and health visitors, recording a podcast (down with the kids), presenting to an awards panel, attending many many meetings, and doing history bits and bobs too... until I screeched to a halt (or croaked to a halt) with tonsilitis last week. (But not until I had surpassed myself by sending a particularly disastrous accidental Reply All.) I then spent the best part of a week doing not much and reminding myself that I am allowed to exist, even if I do not much.

A big highlight, though, of recent weeks has been seeing Hollie McNish in Winchester with one of my oldest and dearest friends, Lorna. Hollie's poems have been a big influence on AMWJ and I highly recommend her anthology <a href="https://www.waterstones.com/book/nobody-told-me/hollie-mcnish/9780349134512">Nobody Told Me</a>, which covers pregnancy through to her daughter's third birthday. Here's me and Lorna fangirling. Hollie was so nice. Eeeeeeeeeeee.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/WhatsApp_Image_2018-10-07_at_20.41.13.jpg?v=1690912257" width="500">



 <img alt="" class="doksoft_image_img" src="/images/9543/preview/medium" width="375" height="500">


Writing this book is taking longer than I expected, for a number of different, not entirely interesting, reasons. I keep fretting about it, just because I realise that I'm going to keep you all waiting for your copies and it feels like taking the piss. But I was worrying out loud to someone about this last week and he said, "It takes as long as it takes." And I thought: yes. You don't want a rushed and rubbish book, I'm sure, and really this is just another facet of what writing and crowdfunding this book is all about: trust. I have to trust you to be patient. I'm already trusting you with a lot of very personal information - I do feel horribly exposed, even before the book is finished and published - and I find myself leaning on everyone's kindness: the pledges, of course, but also all the tweets and Facebook comments. <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/ten">The Big Bank of Book Encouragement</a> is alive and well. And crowdfunding is another exercise in trust. On the Unbound page, I refer to Amanda Palmer’s TED talk, in which she compares crowdfunding to crowdsurfing. (It’s all about not being ashamed to ask for help; definitely <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking?language=en">worth a listen</a>.) She also talks about asking as being like saying, "I trust you this much. Should I? Show me." Putting up this page and asking you all to join me and support me on this funny book journey feels just like that. And I also have to trust you to wait.

I trust you. We can do the thing. Even if it takes ages.

Please help your girl out by sharing the hell out of this post and/or the book link. Talk to me in the comments or on Facebook/<a href="https://twitter.com/cooksferryqueen">Twitter</a>/email. And, of course, if you haven’t already, you can pledge for your very own copy of this marvellous book-that-will-be, and get an extra shiny copy with your name in the back.

Big love,

Laura x

I trust you this much.

Hi everyone, I just wanted to let you all know about UK Maternal Mental Health Matters Awareness Week, which is happening right now! It's run by the Perinatal Mental Health Partnership, and AnotherMother has created this really rather gorgeous overview of the week. There are lots of opportunities to get involved, and discussions on topics such as breastfeeding and medication, post-adoption depression, peer support and groups for BAME families. Do go and check it out. I have been a bit sceptical about awareness days/weeks in the past, thinking that awareness is a bit futile if nothing actually changes, you know? But I've come to realise that the former leads to the latter. And I think it's particularly important for maternal mental health: it's one of those things that people think they know about until it happens. When I was pregnant, I considered myself to be pretty clued-up about mental health. I had a bipolar diagnosis. I'd been under mental health services for nearly fifteen years. I'd been in hospital. I had been there, done that, got the t-shirt. I knew about postnatal depression, and I knew there was something alarming called postpartum psychosis which I was trying not to think about. But when I developed PTSD, after the birth, I was having flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, horrifying intrusive thoughts... and I had no idea what was happening to me. I knew I wasn't depressed because I'd been depressed before and I knew what that felt like. This felt different. But it didn't occur to me that I might have PTSD, because that was something that veterans got, or people who'd been in natural disasters, genocide survivors. Childbirth is a normal human event. And that not knowing what was happening to me made everything so much more frightening. The midwives didn't know about birth trauma, nor did the GP, nor the health visitor. This is why we need to raise awareness. It took so much longer for me to get the right help than it needed to have done, and that was why things escalated, and why I ended up having to be hospitalised. I very nearly killed myself and it makes me shudder, now, to think how close we were to an entirely different outcome. My son could be growing up without a mum. It was Rosey - a mum who runs #PNDHour on Twitter - who very gently explained to me about birth trauma, or postnatal PTSD, and from there I began to understand what I was experiencing, and so I could pursue the help that I needed. From there I got the bed at the mother and baby unit which saved my life. This is the impact that talking about this stuff openly, that tweeting, that awareness-raising can have. That photo was taken in the mother and baby unit in Winchester, in April 2014. I think it says it all really. This is why I'm writing this book. I don't want any mum to be left in the dark the way I was. Please do support it by pledging, if you haven't already, and tell your friends. Happy maternal mental health awareness week! With love, Laura x

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to let you all know about UK Maternal Mental Health Matters Awareness Week, which is happening right now! It's run by the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/PerinatalMHPartnershipUK/">Perinatal Mental Health Partnership</a>, and <a href="https://anothermotheradmin.wordpress.com/">AnotherMother</a> has created <a href="https://mailchi.mp/e6c45750c99d/uk-maternal-mental-health-awareness-week-starts-tomorrow">this really rather gorgeous overview of the week</a>. There are lots of opportunities to get involved, and discussions on topics such as breastfeeding and medication, post-adoption depression, peer support and groups for BAME families. Do go and check it out.

I have been a bit sceptical about awareness days/weeks in the past, thinking that awareness is a bit futile if nothing actually changes, you know? But I've come to realise that the former leads to the latter. And I think it's particularly important for maternal mental health: it's one of those things that people think they know about until it happens.

When I was pregnant, I considered myself to be pretty clued-up about mental health. I had a bipolar diagnosis. I'd been under mental health services for nearly fifteen years. I'd been in hospital. I had been there, done that, got the t-shirt. I knew about postnatal depression, and I knew there was something alarming called postpartum psychosis which I was trying not to think about. But when I developed PTSD, after the birth, I was having flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks, horrifying intrusive thoughts... and I had no idea what was happening to me. I knew I wasn't depressed because I'd been depressed before and I knew what that felt like. This felt different. But it didn't occur to me that I might have PTSD, because that was something that veterans got, or people who'd been in natural disasters, genocide survivors. Childbirth is a normal human event. And that not knowing what was happening to me made everything so much more frightening. 

The midwives didn't know about birth trauma, nor did the GP, nor the health visitor. This is why we need to raise awareness. It took so much longer for me to get the right help than it needed to have done, and that was why things escalated, and why I ended up having to be hospitalised. I very nearly killed myself and it makes me shudder, now, to think how close we were to an entirely different outcome. My son could be growing up without a mum. 

It was Rosey - a mum who runs #PNDHour on Twitter - who very gently explained to me about birth trauma, or postnatal PTSD, and from there I began to understand what I was experiencing, and so I could pursue the help that I needed. From there I got the bed at the mother and baby unit which saved my life. This is the impact that talking about this stuff openly, that tweeting, that awareness-raising can have. 


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="320" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2014-04-10_15.21.48.jpg?v=1690912261" width="240">


That photo was taken in the mother and baby unit in Winchester, in April 2014. I think it says it all really.

This is why I'm writing this book. I don't want any mum to be left in the dark the way I was. Please do support it by pledging, if you haven't already, and tell your friends. Happy maternal mental health awareness week!

With love,

Laura x

It's maternal mental health awareness week!

Hello everyone, After confidently asserting in my last update that I was on the mend after CoViD and picking things up again, I've had a bit of a setback. This seems to be how it goes. Snakes and ladders. Greetings from my bed. We've had a flurry of book pledges after one of my tweets went semi-viral last weekend, so now just a smidge off 63%. Getting there! I must remember to promote the book whenever I have a popular tweet in future. It does happen occasionally. Twitter is strange: sometimes you tweet thinking "this content is gold, the people will love this" and the entire internet rolls their eyes and scrolls on by; and other times you fire off something stupid without much thought and then your phone pings constantly for three days. I've been very thankful for the prolonged CoViD peer support on Twitter recently. This is happening to a lot of people, so much for your 'mild, flu-like illness'. Anyway, thank you and welcome to all the new supporters. Lockdown parenting solidarity. This is such a weird time to be a parent, and I'm especially thinking of those who are expectant and new parents right now: the increased isolation, reduced support, health anxiety, so much uncertainty and fear around... We've just come to the end of Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week, which always does a wonderful job of promoting support available to mums but has felt more needed than ever this year. I'm currently embarking on a project with Mind, rooted in the perinatal peer support principles. We'll be supporting people to get remote perinatal peer support delivery off the ground, whether that's brand new initiatives or transforming pre-existing peer support to be accessible remotely. Watch this space. [illustration for the peer support principles by Carys Tate] In general, though, I feel a huge amount of frustration. There is so much to do and so much need - not just parents, but people struggling with their mental health and with all sorts of impossible situations. MadCovid, for example, are doing incredible work, and I want to join in! People are approaching me all the time and asking me to contribute to this or that or the other, and I really want to help, but at the same time I'm in the throes of this endless, draining, unpredictable disease, and I'm in lockdown with a six-year-old whom I'm somehow supposed to be educating while also working full time. I'm constantly pushing myself to get the basics done with varying degrees of success, and I feel like I'm letting everyone down at once. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Not very much writing happening at the moment. Anyway, one other thing I'm hoping to be able to share with you soon is a piece of work - Health Education England call it a 'thought piece' but it's essentially research with added reflection - about peer support in NHS perinatal mental health services. At the moment, mums using these services don't have equal access to peer support and there's enormous variation across the country in terms of how peer workers are established and supported, so we've made some recommendations based on conversations with peer workers and clinical staff. I'll share the link with you once it's up on HEE's website. You might also be interested in reading my blog post about evaluating MumsAid, a charity who offer counselling to new mums in Greenwich. It was such an emotional experience. It really brought home the importance of specialist perinatal support rather than generic mental health IAPT-type stuff and how peer-to-peer research is always the best research. MumsAid do fantastic work and have just celebrated their 8th birthday. We're currently working together on some research looking at improving access to support for mums across the borough. And finally, just to reiterate - if your kids are not doing much schoolwork, watching a lot of YouTube, eating freezer tapas, and/or driving you absolutely batshit, that's OK. We are surviving a crisis. If you feel guilty right now, I bet you're actually doing brilliantly in an impossible situation. Love, Laura x

Hello everyone,

After confidently asserting in my last update that I was on the mend after CoViD and picking things up again, I've had a bit of a setback. This seems to be how it goes. Snakes and ladders. Greetings from my bed.

We've had a flurry of book pledges after one of my tweets went semi-viral last weekend, so now just a smidge off 63%. Getting there! I must remember to promote the book whenever I have a popular tweet in future. It does happen occasionally. Twitter is strange: sometimes you tweet thinking "this content is gold, the people will love this" and the entire internet rolls their eyes and scrolls on by; and other times you fire off something stupid without much thought and then your phone pings constantly for three days. I've been very thankful for the prolonged CoViD peer support on Twitter recently. This is happening to a lot of people, so much for your 'mild, flu-like illness'. Anyway, thank you and welcome to all the new supporters. Lockdown parenting solidarity.

This is such a weird time to be a parent, and I'm especially thinking of those who are expectant and new parents right now: the increased isolation, reduced support, health anxiety, so much uncertainty and fear around... We've just come to the end of <a href="https://ihv.org.uk/news-and-views/news/uk-maternal-mental-health-awareness-week-4-10-may-2020/">Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week</a>, which always does a wonderful job of promoting support available to mums but has felt more needed than ever this year. I'm currently embarking on a project with Mind, rooted in the <a href="https://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/psp/">perinatal peer support principles</a>. We'll be supporting people to get remote perinatal peer support delivery off the ground, whether that's brand new initiatives or transforming pre-existing peer support to be accessible remotely. Watch this space.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="250" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2.Inclusive_1024x512_01746c33-4ae8-4f3e-974c-708173b517df.png?v=1690912265" width="500">


[illustration for the peer support principles by <a href="https://www.carys-ink.com/">Carys Tate</a>]

In general, though, I feel a huge amount of frustration. There is so much to do and so much need - not just parents, but people struggling with their mental health and with all sorts of impossible situations. <a href="https://madcovid.com/">MadCovid</a>, for example, are doing incredible work, and I want to join in! People are approaching me all the time and asking me to contribute to this or that or the other, and I really want to help, but at the same time I'm in the throes of this endless, draining, unpredictable disease, and I'm in lockdown with a six-year-old whom I'm somehow supposed to be educating while also working full time. I'm constantly pushing myself to get the basics done with varying degrees of success, and I feel like I'm letting everyone down at once. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Not very much writing happening at the moment.

Anyway, one other thing I'm hoping to be able to share with you soon is a piece of work - Health Education England call it a 'thought piece' but it's essentially research with added reflection - about peer support in NHS perinatal mental health services. At the moment, mums using these services don't have equal access to peer support and there's enormous variation across the country in terms of how peer workers are established and supported, so we've made some recommendations based on conversations with peer workers and clinical staff. I'll share the link with you once it's up on HEE's website. 

You might also be interested in reading <a href="http://mcpin.org/evaluation-of-mumsaid/">my blog post about evaluating </a><a href="https://mcpin.org/evaluation-of-mumsaid/">MumsAid</a>, a charity who offer counselling to new mums in Greenwich. It was such an emotional experience. It really brought home the importance of specialist perinatal support rather than generic mental health IAPT-type stuff and how peer-to-peer research is always the best research. MumsAid do fantastic work and have just celebrated their 8th birthday. We're currently working together on some research looking at improving access to support for mums across the borough.

And finally, just to reiterate - if your kids are not doing much schoolwork, watching a lot of YouTube, eating freezer tapas, and/or driving you absolutely batshit, that's OK. We are surviving a crisis. If you feel guilty right now, I bet you're actually doing brilliantly in an impossible situation.

Love,

Laura x

Locked down mothering.

Dear everyone, Since the crowdfunder campaign was relaunched about three weeks ago, we've jumped up almost ten per cent. This is incredible, especially if you consider how long it took to get the previous 82% in the bank. Right now, we are one hardback copy away from 92%! I had hoped for 90% by Christmas so that extra almost-2% is very much the icing and marzipan on my festive fruitcake. I can only thank you again for all your generosity and support with shouting this book from the rooftops. I have a poorly boy at the moment and have had, it seems, forever. This winter has just been a succession of viral illnesses with no let up in between, briefly rather frightening at the weekend with his temperature soaring, not being able to keep fluids down, and a rash on his face. I was afraid of scarlet fever, but I think it's parvovirus. The fever is down now but sickness and snottiness dragging on. He's being an absolute trooper about it, and has accepted the cancellation or postponement of everything he was looking forward to with such good grace. Nonetheless we are both rather worn down. Still, I've kept up my 45 minutes of book-writing every single day of December (so far). It's encouraging that the end is in sight, and even more so that a staggering 520 people believe in this book, and believe in my ability to write it. Thank you again for being here, and I wish you all a restful and restorative Christmas break. More from me in the new year. Take care and keep well. With love, Laura x

Dear everyone,

Since the crowdfunder campaign was relaunched about three weeks ago, we've jumped up almost ten per cent. This is incredible, especially if you consider how long it took to get the previous 82% in the bank. Right now, we are one hardback copy away from 92%! I had hoped for 90% by Christmas so that extra almost-2% is very much the icing and marzipan on my festive fruitcake. I can only thank you again for all your generosity and support with shouting this book from the rooftops.

I have a poorly boy at the moment and have had, it seems, forever. This winter has just been a succession of viral illnesses with no let up in between, briefly rather frightening at the weekend with his temperature soaring, not being able to keep fluids down, and a rash on his face. I was afraid of scarlet fever, but I think it's parvovirus. The fever is down now but sickness and snottiness dragging on. He's being an absolute trooper about it, and has accepted the cancellation or postponement of everything he was looking forward to with such good grace. Nonetheless we are both rather worn down.

Still, I've kept up my 45 minutes of book-writing every single day of December (so far). It's encouraging that the end is in sight, and even more so that a staggering 520 people believe in this book, and believe in my ability to write it. Thank you again for being here, and I wish you all a restful and restorative Christmas break. More from me in the new year.

Take care and keep well.

With love,

Laura x

Merry Christmas and some good news

Hi everyone, just a quickie from me - as it's currently late on Sunday night and I need to be on a train to London early tomorrow morning for 'I is for Insult - Questioning "Borderline Personality Disorder"' - I wanted to recommend to you a documentary called My Baby, Psychosis and Me. It's filmed in the psychiatric mother and baby unit where I was a patient in 2014, and not long after I left. This is the unit as I remember it, and it's really the pivotal point of my book. You'll meet Dr Alain Gregoire who is also an important part of the story: he was the first psychiatrist (of the many, many I've seen over the years) to shift the focus from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" He diagnosed me with Complex PTSD, which was the start of making sense of the difficulties I'd had for most of my life. That conversation marked the beginning of a new phase for me and profoundly changed the course I was on. And much of the documentary is about a woman called Hannah who is in my room on the unit! It was a surprise to see that on the television, I tell you. The documentary first aired in 2016, shortly before I gave my first ever talk about my experience to a room full of various kinds of health professionals, and it really gave me the courage to speak publicly about the importance of compassionate, trauma-informed mental health provision for mothers and babies. (Even if I was so nervous I had to go and be sick beforehand.) The documentary was just so emotional to watch, as you can imagine. I haven't seen it since, but I'm going to rewatch it this week. It's only on BBC iPlayer until the wee hours of Saturday morning, so you'll need to catch it this week too! It's quite different to the Louis Theroux one that was on recently. Link again here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07187xv/my-baby-psychosis-and-me Thanks and love to all of you - have a good week! x

Hi everyone, just a quickie from me - as it's currently late on Sunday night and I need to be on a train to London early tomorrow morning for <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/i-is-for-insult-questioning-borderline-personality-disorder-tickets-56349270184">'I is for Insult - Questioning "Borderline Personality Disorder</a>"' - I wanted to recommend to you a documentary called <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07187xv/my-baby-psychosis-and-me">My Baby, Psychosis and Me</a>. It's filmed in the psychiatric mother and baby unit where I was a patient in 2014, and not long after I left. This is the unit as I remember it, and it's really the pivotal point of my book. You'll meet Dr Alain Gregoire who is also an important part of the story: he was the first psychiatrist (of the many, many I've seen over the years) to shift the focus from "What's wrong with you?" to "What happened to you?" He diagnosed me with Complex PTSD, which was the start of making sense of the difficulties I'd had for most of my life. That conversation marked the beginning of a new phase for me and profoundly changed the course I was on.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="347" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/screen_shot_2016-02-22_at_11.50.32.png?v=1690912269" width="500">


And much of the documentary is about a woman called Hannah who is in my room on the unit! It was a surprise to see that on the television, I tell you. The documentary first aired in 2016, shortly before I gave my first ever talk about my experience to a room full of various kinds of health professionals, and it really gave me the courage to speak publicly about the importance of compassionate, trauma-informed mental health provision for mothers and babies. (Even if I was so nervous I had to go and be sick beforehand.) The documentary was just so emotional to watch, as you can imagine. I haven't seen it since, but I'm going to rewatch it this week. It's only on BBC iPlayer until the wee hours of Saturday morning, so you'll need to catch it this week too! It's quite different to the Louis Theroux one that was on recently. Link again here: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07187xv/my-baby-psychosis-and-me">https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07187xv/my-baby-psychosis-and-me</a> 

Thanks and love to all of you - have a good week! x

My Baby, Psychosis and Me

Dear everyone, I wanted to share with you this shiny new video from Netmums, who interviewed me over Skype about birth trauma and maternal mental health. I explain about postnatal PTSD, talk about my own experience very briefly, and signpost to some support available. (I tell you this from memory: I have a policy of not watching or listening to myself at all as I know I will only dissolve into agonies of self-consciousness and nothing productive can come from that. I haven't seen the promo video on the Unbound page either. I did a lot of talking beside a canal and I trust that the lovely cameraman has edited out the bit where a pigeon flew into me mid-sentence.) Netmums, by the way, are great - and not to be confused with Mumsnet, who brought us the great penis beaker debacle of 2013 (if you are new to this, it's quality content and especially worth reading on to page two of the comments). Netmums - aka Not The Penis Beaker Ones - run a parent supporter service which has been going for more than a decade now and doesn't get enough recognition. I only heard of it for the first time last year when they invited me to the tenth birthday party and I went to eat cake and learn things, as these are two of my favourite activities. It's an amazing service and worth keeping in mind if you or a mum you know is in need of advice or support. This video is handy if you're new to the topic of birth trauma and/or postnatal PTSD, or if you're someone who's beginning to think about the impact of a birth experience and is considering seeking further information/support. It's also short and punchy and accessible. Please share it far and wide, or share this post if that's easier, as I'd like it to reach as many mums as possible - you never know, it might be just the topic someone needs to talk about - and obviously I'd like to attract pledges for the book too. It's ticking along, a bit slower than I'd like, but I am trying to be realistic about the fact that I have a lot on my plate, life happens, only human, etc etc etc. Trusting myself and trusting the process. It'll get done. I'm so thankful you're all here. Laura x

Dear everyone,

I wanted to share with you <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Netmums/videos/795406257499573/">this shiny new video</a> from Netmums, who interviewed me over Skype about birth trauma and maternal mental health. I explain about postnatal PTSD, talk about my own experience very briefly, and signpost to some support available. (I tell you this from memory: I have a policy of not watching or listening to myself at all as I know I will only dissolve into agonies of self-consciousness and nothing productive can come from that. I haven't seen the promo video on the Unbound page either. I did a lot of talking beside a canal and I trust that the lovely cameraman has edited out the bit where a pigeon flew into me mid-sentence.)

<a href="https://www.netmums.com">Netmums</a>, by the way, are great - and not to be confused with Mumsnet, who brought us <a href="https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/mumsnet_classics/1875847-Do-you-dunk-your-penis">the great penis beaker debacle of 2013</a> (if you are new to this, it's quality content and especially worth reading on to page two of the comments). Netmums - aka Not The Penis Beaker Ones - run <a href="https://www.netmums.com/support/netmums-parent-supporters">a parent supporter service</a> which has been going for more than a decade now and doesn't get enough recognition. I only heard of it for the first time last year when they invited me to the tenth birthday party and I went to eat cake and learn things, as these are two of my favourite activities. It's an amazing service and worth keeping in mind if you or a mum you know is in need of advice or support.

This video is handy if you're new to the topic of birth trauma and/or postnatal PTSD, or if you're someone who's beginning to think about the impact of a birth experience and is considering seeking further information/support. It's also short and punchy and accessible. Please share it far and wide, or share this post if that's easier, as I'd like it to reach as many mums as possible - you never know, it might be just the topic someone needs to talk about - and obviously I'd like to attract pledges for the book too. It's ticking along, a bit slower than I'd like, but I am trying to be realistic about the fact that I have a lot on my plate, life happens, only human, etc etc etc. Trusting myself and trusting the process. It'll get done.

I'm so thankful you're all here.

Laura x

Netmums video

Well, folks, I'm excited and staggered and thrilled and more than a little bit daunted to announce that All My Worldly Joy is 99% funded! It doesn't get much closer than that. I'd like to say a huge thank you, once again, to those of you who came on board early and have been waiting so patiently and graciously, and of course I'd also like to thank the newest supporters who have nudged us that bit further along. One person in particular and you know who you are. I've been pretty stressed out about it all recently - just the fact that it takes so much longer to write a book than I'd realised. Or, rather, my aspiration has gone from "write down what happened in a way that's at least semi-coherent" to "produce an account that's powerful, moving, funny, challenging, and really high-quality writing". So, of course it's taking longer than anticipated. It's not just finding the time to write - it's more the cognitive and emotional energy that's required as my standards creep up and up. It's maddening that a full manuscript feels so close that I'm almost brushing it with my fingernails, and at the same time it's so impossibly distant and far off that I could howl. And of course it's a little embarrassing to have a crowdfunder running for nearly five actual years. There's been a fair bit of handwringing about all that lately. But - hitting 99% is exhilarating and re-instils that sense of purpose. I'm going to check in with my contact at Unbound this week and come up with a plan for when we're fully funded. A plan and - dare I whisper the word - a deadline. Essentially what remains is to finish this round of edits; send passages to be reviewed by people who are in the book and make any changes they would like; re-write the first two chapters; and write the ending. And then some buffing and polishing. Simple! Not simple. But I promise I will hurl myself body and soul at this over the next few months and then... I don't really know what comes after that, but when I do, I'll let you know. I will keep in touch. Thank you again for your faith in me. It means everything. And we are nearly there! With love, Laura x

Well, folks, I'm excited and staggered and thrilled and more than a little bit daunted to announce that All My Worldly Joy is 99% funded! It doesn't get much closer than that. I'd like to say a huge thank you, once again, to those of you who came on board early and have been waiting so patiently and graciously, and of course I'd also like to thank the newest supporters who have nudged us that bit further along. One person in particular and you know who you are. 
 
I've been pretty stressed out about it all recently - just the fact that it takes so much longer to write a book than I'd realised. Or, rather, my aspiration has gone from "write down what happened in a way that's at least semi-coherent" to "produce an account that's powerful, moving, funny, challenging, and really high-quality writing". So, of course it's taking longer than anticipated. It's not just finding the time to write - it's more the cognitive and emotional energy that's required as my standards creep up and up. 
 
It's maddening that a full manuscript feels so close that I'm almost brushing it with my fingernails, and at the same time it's so impossibly distant and far off that I could howl. And of course it's a little embarrassing to have a crowdfunder running for nearly five actual years. There's been a fair bit of handwringing about all that lately. But - hitting 99% is exhilarating and re-instils that sense of purpose. I'm going to check in with my contact at Unbound this week and come up with a plan for when we're fully funded. A plan and - dare I whisper the word - a deadline. 

Essentially what remains is to finish this round of edits; send passages to be reviewed by people who are in the book and make any changes they would like; re-write the first two chapters; and write the ending. And then some buffing and polishing. Simple! Not simple. But I promise I will hurl myself body and soul at this over the next few months and then... I don't really know what comes after that, but when I do, I'll let you know. I will keep in touch.

Thank you again for your faith in me. It means everything. And we are nearly there!

With love,

Laura x

Ninety-nine percent!

Bit of a random one - and I don't even know if the good people at Unbound HQ will be able to approve this and get it out to you in time - but just in case: I'm expecting to be on at 5pm or a bit after, and, if you dare, you can tune in via on Sky HD 512 / SD 518 or Freeview HD 113 / SD 234 or live on the producers' website http://rt.com/on-air/. I say 'if you dare' - this is all very strange. I'm not being brought in as an authority on maternal mental health or medieval vowesses or any of the rather niche things that I actually know about... I've always been a big Wollstonecraft fangirl. Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and philosopher of the late 18th century, often known as the 'mother of feminism'. She wrote 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', asserting the radical notion that women are, in fact, human beings, and outlining ideas that would later become central to feminist thought. She died from an infection after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Coincidentally I had a similar sort of infection after giving birth to Arthur and was rehospitalised and put on an antibiotic drip for several days. Very thankful to have been born when I was. I was involved with the Feminism Society whilst at university (predictable) and once gave a talk about Mary Wollstonecraft there... She really was tremendous and you should read the book, which feels bizarrely contemporary whenever you read it. There's been a ten year campaign for a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, which was unveiled yesterday. Unfortunately it's not a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, as we were all expecting, but a small, generic female nude, which does feel a bit like the sculptor was trolling us. I fired off a flippant tweet yesterday morning: "How many of our important male writers are depicted naked in their statues? You never see Charles Dickens with his balls out, do you?" It only went viral and got picked up by the media. Last time I checked Twitter there was a guy threatening to print "You never see Charles Dickens with his balls out" on a t-shirt. I can't help but laugh. This is what I will ultimately be known for, tweeting about Charles Dickens' balls. So, yes, hence the telly invite to come on and talk about the statue. I would like to make it clear that I'm very grateful for the work that people have put in to see Mary Wollstonecraft commemmorated and I don't want to be nasty about it, but I stand by the view that it's not a great statue. I've never been on telly before and have no idea what to expect. It might be awful, but you only, as they say, live once. I'm going to try not to mention anyone's balls. More - and more book relevance - from me next time, but this seemed like a good opportunity to check in with you all and do feel free to tune in and mock my plight later this afternoon. Laura xx

Bit of a random one - and I don't even know if the good people at Unbound HQ will be able to approve this and get it out to you in time - but just in case:

I'm expecting to be on at 5pm or a bit after, and, if you dare, you can tune in via on Sky HD 512 / SD 518 or Freeview HD 113 / SD 234 or live on the producers' website http://rt.com/on-air/.

I say 'if you dare' - this is all very strange. I'm not being brought in as an authority on maternal mental health or medieval vowesses or any of the rather niche things that I actually know about... I've always been a big Wollstonecraft fangirl. Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and philosopher of the late 18th century, often known as the 'mother of feminism'. She wrote 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', asserting the radical notion that women are, in fact, human beings, and outlining ideas that would later become central to feminist thought. She died from an infection after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Coincidentally I had a similar sort of infection after giving birth to Arthur and was rehospitalised and put on an antibiotic drip for several days. Very thankful to have been born when I was. I was involved with the Feminism Society whilst at university (predictable) and once gave a talk about Mary Wollstonecraft there... She really was tremendous and you should read the book, which feels bizarrely contemporary whenever you read it.

There's been a ten year campaign for a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, which was unveiled yesterday. Unfortunately it's not a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, as we were all expecting, but a small, generic female nude, which does feel a bit like the sculptor was trolling us. I fired off a flippant tweet yesterday morning: "How many of our important male writers are depicted naked in their statues? You never see Charles Dickens with his balls out, do you?" It only went viral and got picked up by the media. Last time I checked Twitter there was a guy threatening to print "You never see Charles Dickens with his balls out" on a t-shirt. I can't help but laugh. This is what I will ultimately be known for, tweeting about Charles Dickens' balls.

So, yes, hence the telly invite to come on and talk about the statue. I would like to make it clear that I'm very grateful for the work that people have put in to see Mary Wollstonecraft commemmorated and I don't want to be nasty about it, but I stand by the view that it's not a great statue. I've never been on telly before and have no idea what to expect. It might be awful, but you only, as they say, live once. I'm going to try not to mention anyone's balls. 
 
More - and more book relevance - from me next time, but this seemed like a good opportunity to check in with you all and do feel free to tune in and mock my plight later this afternoon.

Laura xx

On telly - this afternoon!

Dear everyone, It feels like ages since I last wrote - apologies. I'm still not well, after having covid in March. Good days and bad, really. It's been a tough year, as I know it has for most of us. I think of you all often, and I also wanted to send a really warm welcome and thank you to the newer supporters. There are 389 of you now, and the book is 68% funded! Thanks for being so patient with this great endeavour. I do have two things to share with you. The first is the first twenty-minute episode of a podcast series I recorded back in July, with an amazing grassroots mental health collective called MadCovid. I talk about the impact of this beast called 'Long Covid' on me personally and my mental health, but also share an outline of the narrative of this book that you've bought! It's leading in to a discussion of experiences of 'personality disorder' diagnosis, of which those of you who know me will know I'm rather critical. The book is a real blend of talking about my own experiences and considering more broadly the ways in which women's trauma responses are both minimalised and pathologised, especially within the 'personality disorder' construct. So this series is a bit of a 'sneak preview' of the book, but arguably better in that you get to hear from Ellie and Bethan too. I enjoy hearing Bethan say 'fuck' in a Welsh accent. And, in an entirely different genre, you can now read the 'thought piece' that I wrote for Health Education England on peer support in NHS perinatal mental health services. Since we launched the perinatal peer support principles in December, peer support provision in NHS perinatal services has exploded. Katy, Nisba and I talked to people working in these services - both peer supporters and clinical staff - to find out what's going well, what's not going so well, and what could be done to make things better. We believe that every mum should have access to safe and therapeutic peer support for her mental health. You can download the piece from Mind's website here. Thank you, once again, for being here. I hope you're as OK as possible in this relentless pandemic situation. If you ever have time, I'd love to hear from you. With love, Laura x

Dear everyone, 
 
It feels like ages since I last wrote - apologies. I'm still not well, <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/the-thing-that-wouldn-t-go-away">after having covid in March</a>. Good days and bad, really. It's been a tough year, as I know it has for most of us. I think of you all often, and I also wanted to send a really warm welcome and thank you to the newer supporters. There are 389 of you now, and the book is 68% funded! Thanks for being so patient with this great endeavour. 
 
I do have two things to share with you. The first is <a href="https://madcovid.sounder.fm/episode/bpd1">the first twenty-minute episode of a podcast series</a> I recorded back in July, with an amazing grassroots mental health collective called MadCovid. I talk about the impact of this beast called 'Long Covid' on me personally and my mental health, but also share an outline of the narrative of this book that you've bought! It's leading in to a discussion of experiences of 'personality disorder' diagnosis, of which those of you who know me will know I'm rather critical. The book is a real blend of talking about my own experiences and considering more broadly the ways in which women's trauma responses are both minimalised and pathologised, especially within the 'personality disorder' construct. So this series is a bit of a 'sneak preview' of the book, but arguably better in that you get to hear from Ellie and Bethan too. I enjoy hearing Bethan say 'fuck' in a Welsh accent. 

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/4.png?v=1690912273" width="500"> 
 
And, in an entirely different genre, you can now read the 'thought piece' that I wrote for Health Education England on peer support in NHS perinatal mental health services. Since we launched the <a href="http://ttps://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/psp/">perinatal peer support principles</a> in December, peer support provision in NHS perinatal services has exploded. Katy, Nisba and I talked to people working in these services - both peer supporters and clinical staff - to find out what's going well, what's not going so well, and what could be done to make things better. We believe that every mum should have access to safe and therapeutic peer support for her mental health. You can download the piece from Mind's website <a href="https://www.mind.org.uk/about-us/our-policy-work/side-by-side/perinatal-peer-support/">here</a>.

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/3.Complementary.png?v=1690912273" width="500"> 
 
Thank you, once again, for being here. I hope you're as OK as possible in this relentless pandemic situation. If you ever have time, I'd love to hear from you. 
 
With love, 
 
Laura x

Post-covid, podcast, preview, peer support, & more!

Dear everyone, Today marks one year since everything shifted - both for my life and for this book. That evening, my husband packed his bags and got into a taxi and then the house was quiet and I was a single mum. I was a few months into the crowdfunding campaign for All My Worldly Joy and realised I suddenly had much less time and money that I had been counting on to get this done. I wrote this blog post to you all and was completely floored by the outpouring of love and support. It convinced me that I mustn't ditch the book. People were counting on it. There isn't a book like it - that I know of anyway - which deals honestly and unflinchingly with motherhood and trauma, that combines the personal and intimate with reflecting more universally on these issues within their wider context. And is funny. I hope it's funny. I keep sending bits to friends: "Is this funny?" I'm having a grand time making myself laugh, anyway. I think it was Patricia Lockwood who taught me that it's possible to write about very dark things in a very funny way. I've always used humour as a way of facing down stuff that's properly awful, and I've noticed that's true for most of my friends who have been through a major bout of the mentals - gallows humour and all that. Permission to write in that way is incredibly liberating. I'm having semi-regular hand-wringing sessions about how long this is all taking, now that other priorities are competing so much more urgently for my time and attention. We're at 56% funding and probably a similar amount through the actual writing - and, while I can absolutely see the writing coming together, I'm less confident about where the other 44% funding is coming from. I mean, it's coming, in dribs and drabs, but we do need some chunkier pledges to nudge us over the finish line. My spreadsheet of ideas is dwindling a bit, but I'm bloody well not going to pack it in. If I write each idea on a post-it note and chuck them at the wall, one or two have to stick, right? It's your encouragement that's keeping me going. Yesterday one of you tweeted to me: "Slow & steady wins the race - can't wait to read it - no pressure!" I had a long email from another supporter last week which read: "I think your book project is extremely important and promising, and I am very much looking forward to reading the end-product at some stage. But I am also full of admiration for how you keep tackling so many challenges simultaneously - I can absolutely understand that the book would make faster progress if life’s road was a little less bumpy. So please don’t feel guilty or do more than you can manage to fit into a day while keeping sane and healthy!" I read that and had a small cry. I mean, thank you. Just thank you. Thanks for being here for the long haul. It's been a year of gritting teeth and ploughing on, really. Just as I wrote to you a year ago - snowdrops and witch hazel; everything hurts but I'm still here. Amidst all the uncertainty, all the wreckage and the aching, I'm still here - and, even better, so are you. It's also been a wonderful year of connecting and reconnecting with the people around me, learning to lean on the kindness of others, learning to ask for help. Being unpartnered for the first time since my teens is the most extraordinary experience of coming home to myself. I have concluded that we definitely don't celebrate singledom enough. There has been the odd lonely moment, sure. Some evenings I get Arthur to bed, do various chores that need doing, sit down and notice that everything is rather horribly silent and still. When I really can't hack it, I reach for the phone, but that's happening less and less. I've discovered that I enjoy my own company immensely. I've been unpicking the lessons from my marriage and reminding myself who I am, whilst watching whatever the hell I like on TV, learning vegetarian cooking, enjoying my unfettered eccentricity (have you met my collection of creepy dolls?), and cultivating deeper intimacy in my friendships. I still have very little idea where I'm going, but I feel that I've grown as a human being. I'm thankful this has happened, all of it. I'm thankful for Arthur, who is only five and already the best person I've ever met. And I'm thankful for the people who support me to carry on, including all of you, Much love, Laura x

Dear everyone,

Today marks one year since everything shifted - both for my life and for this book. That evening, my husband packed his bags and got into a taxi and then the house was quiet and I was a single mum.

I was a few months into the crowdfunding campaign for All My Worldly Joy and realised I suddenly had much less time and money that I had been counting on to get this done. I wrote <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/snowdrops-and-witch-hazel">this blog post</a> to you all and was completely floored by the outpouring of love and support. It convinced me that I mustn't ditch the book. People were counting on it. There isn't a book like it - that I know of anyway - which deals honestly and unflinchingly with motherhood and trauma, that combines the personal and intimate with reflecting more universally on these issues within their wider context. And is funny.

I hope it's funny. I keep sending bits to friends: "Is this funny?" I'm having a grand time making myself laugh, anyway. I think it was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Lockwood">Patricia Lockwood</a> who taught me that it's possible to write about very dark things in a very funny way. I've always used humour as a way of facing down stuff that's properly awful, and I've noticed that's true for most of my friends who have been through a major bout of the mentals - gallows humour and all that. Permission to write in that way is incredibly liberating.

I'm having semi-regular hand-wringing sessions about how long this is all taking, now that other priorities are competing so much more urgently for my time and attention. We're at 56% funding and probably a similar amount through the actual writing - and, while I can absolutely see the writing coming together, I'm less confident about where the other 44% funding is coming from. I mean, it's coming, in dribs and drabs, but we do need some chunkier pledges to nudge us over the finish line. My spreadsheet of ideas is dwindling a bit, but I'm bloody well not going to pack it in. If I write each idea on a post-it note and chuck them at the wall, one or two have to stick, right? 

It's your encouragement that's keeping me going. Yesterday one of you tweeted to me: "Slow &amp; steady wins the race - can't wait to read it - no pressure!" I had a long email from another supporter last week which read: "I think your book project is extremely important and promising, and I am very much looking forward to reading the end-product at some stage. But I am also full of admiration for how you keep tackling so many challenges simultaneously - I can absolutely understand that the book would make faster progress if life’s road was a little less bumpy. So please don’t feel guilty or do more than you can manage to fit into a day while keeping sane and healthy!" I read that and had a small cry.  I mean, thank you. Just thank you. Thanks for being here for the long haul.

It's been a year of gritting teeth and ploughing on, really. Just as I wrote to you a year ago - snowdrops and witch hazel; everything hurts but I'm still here. Amidst all the uncertainty, all the wreckage and the aching, I'm still here - and, even better, so are you. It's also been a wonderful year of connecting and reconnecting with the people around me, learning to lean on the kindness of others, learning to ask for help. Being unpartnered for the first time since my teens is the most extraordinary experience of coming home to myself. I have concluded that we definitely don't celebrate singledom enough. There has been the odd lonely moment, sure. Some evenings I get Arthur to bed, do various chores that need doing, sit down and notice that everything is rather horribly silent and still. When I really can't hack it, I reach for the phone, but that's happening less and less. I've discovered that I enjoy my own company immensely. I've been unpicking the lessons from my marriage and reminding myself who I am, whilst watching whatever the hell I like on TV, learning vegetarian cooking, enjoying my unfettered eccentricity (have you met my collection of creepy dolls?), and cultivating deeper intimacy in my friendships. I still have very little idea where I'm going, but I feel that I've grown as a human being. I'm thankful this has happened, all of it. I'm thankful for Arthur, who is only five and already the best person I've ever met. And I'm thankful for the people who support me to carry on, including all of you, 

Much love,

Laura x

Pretty Good Year

Hello dears, Just wanted to check in as it's been a week since the crowdfunder relaunch, and what a week! We've jumped up from 82% to 87% (two hardbacks off 88%... not that I'm obsessively refreshing the website or anything...). That's more momentous than it sounds as each % is quite chunky, since there are a lot of costs attached to printing and marketing a book, and it's more than I'd ever dared to hope for in a week. Loads of you have been sharing the link all over the internet, telling your friends, some people upping their pledges as well... I've tried to thank everyone individually but I'm certain I will have missed some, so please accept this note in lieu of a personal thank you. It really means the world. Also, welcome to all the new supporters who've joined us over the past week. It's fantastic to have you on board. If you're wondering who the hell I am, me too, but also you can take a look at my linktree for some of my other writing and projects, or follow me on Twitter for as long as it exists. Do give me a wave via your preferred method of electronic communication. I don't bite (at least not without enthusiastic consent) and am generally pretty friendly. Everyone seems to be ill at the moment. I guess it's just the time of year... I've had my son off school all week and have finally succumbed myself. So I'm going to say one more thank you and leave it there! With love, Laura x

Hello dears,

Just wanted to check in as it's been a week since the crowdfunder relaunch, and what a week! We've jumped up from 82% to 87% (two hardbacks off 88%... not that I'm obsessively refreshing the website or anything...). That's more momentous than it sounds as each % is quite chunky, since there are a lot of costs attached to printing and marketing a book, and it's more than I'd ever dared to hope for in a week. Loads of you have been sharing the link all over the internet, telling your friends, some people upping their pledges as well... I've tried to thank everyone individually but I'm certain I will have missed some, so please accept this note in lieu of a personal thank you. It really means the world.

Also, welcome to all the new supporters who've joined us over the past week. It's fantastic to have you on board. If you're wondering who the hell I am, me too, but also you can take a look at <a href="https://linktr.ee/cooksferryqueen">my linktree</a> for some of my other writing and projects, or <a href="https://twitter.com/cooksferryqueen">follow me on Twitter</a> for as long as it exists. Do give me a wave via your preferred method of electronic communication. I don't bite (at least not without enthusiastic consent) and am generally pretty friendly.

Everyone seems to be ill at the moment. I guess it's just the time of year... I've had my son off school all week and have finally succumbed myself. So I'm going to say one more thank you and leave it there!

With love,

Laura x

Quick little update and a thank you

Hello, it's me again! Thanks so much for all the comments and messages about the cover.... I'm thrilled that you all seem to love it as much as I do. The eagle-eyed amongst you might have spotted that it's up on the webpage now, along with some new text which, I feel, more accurately reflects where the book has come to over the process of writing it. If you'd like to see, you can just go here and click the heading that says "about the book". I shared the cover on Twitter this morning, and so many of you have retweeted and said encouraging things. Again, thank you! Getting the word out beyond my followers is essential for hitting that funding target, and every tweet or Facebook/Instagram post counts. It's also been a really lovely antidote, as I got piled-on by trolls yesterday - and not the cute ones from the '80s and '90s with their vertical rainbow hair. I was a bit taken aback by the inexplicable viciousness of it, from total strangers, but that's been more than obscured by the care and support from the people who matter. I also gave a talk earlier today at Alain Gregoire's perinatal mental health course. It runs a few times a year, and some people call it "the Winchester course" as before the pandemic it was held in Winchester, but health professionals attend from all over the country and even beyond. I love doing that course as it's always such a warm and lovely crowd. I know some of you have pledged for the book as a result of seeing me there, and welcome especially to those who are brand new. This marks the beginning of a bit of a run, as next week I've got two slots on the Complex-PTSD course and I'm running some training for staff at Nottingham's mother and baby unit. It's such a privilege to be able to directly influence clinical practice, and how mums and families actually experience care. I'm really grateful for the platform that I have and conscious of trying to use it for good! I will, of course, mention the book and I hope that more people working in maternity and perinatal mental health services will pledge and join our little corner of the internet in the coming week, as well as a more general audience. My aim is that AMWJ will be both useful to clinicians and also interesting and relatable to anyone who has ever struggled with their mental health, or become a parent, or just felt out of place and out of their depth. Finally, I hate to ask as I know how busy many of you are, and how overwhelming the world is, and what a wonderful support you've been already - but if you were able to help me spread the word, either with a social media post or a direct recommendation to a friend or someone else you think might benefit from reading the book when it's out, or any groups or communities or mailing lists you might belong to, I would be so thankful. Direct recommendations seem to work better than more general online link-sharing, in my experience, but everything counts. We currently have 488 backers and we need... maybe another hundred or so? So if each of you were able to bring along the head and shoulders of another person, or maybe a pair of feet? - we would smash this straight away and I could get on with submitting the manuscript. Thank you again, and eternally. I'm excited for this last stage of getting the funding sorted, and then for actually being able to send you the books that you've paid for and waited for so patiently and graciously... It's going to be mad to hold it in my own hands as well. Can't entirely believe it. I'll let you know how we're getting on. Love, Laura x

Hello, it's me again! Thanks so much for all the comments and messages about the cover.... I'm thrilled that you all seem to love it as much as I do. The eagle-eyed amongst you might have spotted that it's up on the webpage now, along with some new text which, I feel, more accurately reflects where the book has come to over the process of writing it. If you'd like to see, you can just go <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/">here</a> and click the heading that says "about the book". 

I shared the cover on Twitter this morning, and so many of you have retweeted and said encouraging things. Again, thank you! Getting the word out beyond my followers is essential for hitting that funding target, and every tweet or Facebook/Instagram post counts. It's also been a really lovely antidote, as I got piled-on by trolls yesterday - and not the cute ones from the '80s and '90s with their vertical rainbow hair. I was a bit taken aback by the inexplicable viciousness of it, from total strangers, but that's been more than obscured by the care and support from the people who matter. 

I also gave a talk earlier today at Alain Gregoire's perinatal mental health course. It runs a few times a year, and some people call it "the Winchester course" as before the pandemic it was held in Winchester, but health professionals attend from all over the country and even beyond. I love doing that course as it's always such a warm and lovely crowd. I know some of you have pledged for the book as a result of seeing me there, and welcome especially to those who are brand new. This marks the beginning of a bit of a run, as next week I've got two slots on the Complex-PTSD course and I'm running some training for staff at Nottingham's mother and baby unit.

It's such a privilege to be able to directly influence clinical practice, and how mums and families actually experience care. I'm really grateful for the platform that I have and conscious of trying to use it for good! I will, of course, mention the book and I hope that more people working in maternity and perinatal mental health services will pledge and join our little corner of the internet in the coming week, as well as a more general audience. My aim is that AMWJ will be both useful to clinicians and also interesting and relatable to anyone who has ever struggled with their mental health, or become a parent, or just felt out of place and out of their depth.

Finally, I hate to ask as I know how busy many of you are, and how overwhelming the world is, and what a wonderful support you've been already - but if you were able to help me spread the word, either with a social media post or a direct recommendation to a friend or someone else you think might benefit from reading the book when it's out, or any groups or communities or mailing lists you might belong to, I would be so thankful. Direct recommendations seem to work better than more general online link-sharing, in my experience, but everything counts. We currently have 488 backers and we need... maybe another hundred or so? So if each of you were able to bring along the head and shoulders of another person, or maybe a pair of feet? - we would smash this straight away and I could get on with submitting the manuscript.

Thank you again, and eternally. I'm excited for this last stage of getting the funding sorted, and then for actually being able to send you the books that you've paid for and waited for so patiently and graciously... It's going to be mad to hold it in my own hands as well. Can't entirely believe it. I'll let you know how we're getting on.

Love,

Laura x


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/1_49e0aabd-5d18-4d75-90c8-673c45724993.png?v=1690912277" width="500" height="500">

Ready for take off

Dearest everybody, So today we reached 15% and we are rapidly approaching 100 supporters. Tremendous. The Positive Birth Movement also very kindly featured me on their blog. Thank you and welcome on board to everyone who has pledged recently. If you fancy, you can catch up on the previous update here. And do let’s be pals on Twitter, if you are of a tweeting persuasion. I am @cooksferryqueen. Yesterday I was at the Maternal Mental Health Alliance annual conference, which was a bit of a whirlwind of catching up with dear ones. I find just being around people who ‘get it’ and are working so hard and so passionately to improve things incredibly emotive. The theme this year was diversity and there were a range of talks by and about migrant mothers, mothers in prison, mothers facing multiple and complex disadvantages. I decided to practise self-care by sitting out many of these as I was already utterly overwhelmed (and had been awake since 4am), although I now feel a nagging sense of guilt that I should have taken the opportunity to learn as I am not looking enough beyond my privileged bubble. On the other hand, I’m not sure my sobbing in the loos would really have helped anyone, so... We had a meeting for the Everyone’s Business campaign in the tea break and I was also presenting our poster and womanning the stall for the peer support quality assurance principles project. It was exhausting (see my glazed expression below!), but there were many beautiful moments of connection with people I talk to online but rarely get to hug, and I came away just feeling so thankful for the changes we are already seeing, for our incredible community, and for my place in it. And my suddenly inexplicably tall and clever Arthur has started school. He has been so anxious about it over the summer, and I'm immensely proud of how he’s handled things. As I met him at the door after that first day, he said, “It turns out it’s actually very nice.” I don't know who was more relieved. He’s still so little and I worry for him so, but somehow he's simultaneously also so grown up and marvellous. He isn’t a baby anymore: I grieve that I missed out on enjoying him when he was tiny, and I can never get that time back. When I reflect on it all – the pregnancy, birth, mother and baby unit, the long hard grind afterward – I think, look how far we have come. And here we are. Chapter one is taking longer to write than I expected. Before I launched the crowdfunding campaign, I asked for advice from my friend, Anna, who has written and published a book. She replied, “I thought writing a book was about sharing my thoughts to help others. It turns out it is more about me sorting out my own thoughts and learning a lot about myself.” How right she was. I’m currently filling in some extra background about my pre-pregnancy life and mental health history. Retrospectively, it seems a bold move to get pregnant when I did – not just with a bipolar diagnosis, but having been so recently in such bad shape. I’m having a hard time forgiving five-years-ago me, to be honest, for being so naive and immature and annoying and just so – young. How much of what happened was my own fault? And I worry about not being a sympathetic character in my own story. I mean, I’m trying to counteract stigma, not compound it, for a start. I do love writing, though, so much. From a really young age, writing has been my 'thing' in a way that nothing else has. It’s what I’ve always done and what I’ve always wanted to do. I can't help it because the words form in my head and annoy me until I write them down. "There's a voice within me that will not be still." But, PhD thesis aside, this is the first big writing project that I’ve really taken seriously. It feels so luxurious to be taking hours out to write what I want to write like this. It’s what I dreamed of growing up. It feels like coming home to myself. And, when I’m not writing this book on paper, I’m writing it in my head, endlessly. It's cooking in there. My friend, Nikki, calls this ‘book-pregnant’ - which is rather fitting in this case. I’m also recruiting for people (probably people who already know me) to read drafts of chapters or bits of chapters – as long or as short as you have time for, really. So if you’d like a sneak preview, or if you just really love me, or if you’d like me to read and feed back on some of your own writing in return, hit me up. And, once again, thank you. Your support is making this possible. I really believe this book is going to make a difference. With love, Laura x

Dearest everybody,

So today we reached 15% and we are rapidly approaching 100 supporters. Tremendous. <a href="https://www.positivebirthmovement.org/">The Positive Birth Movement </a>also very kindly featured me on their blog. Thank you and welcome on board to everyone who has pledged recently. If you fancy, you can catch up on the previous update <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/ten">here</a>. And do let’s be pals on Twitter, if you are of a tweeting persuasion. I am <a href="https://twitter.com/cooksferryqueen">@cooksferryqueen</a>.

Yesterday I was at the <a href="https://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/">Maternal Mental Health Alliance</a> annual conference, which was a bit of a whirlwind of catching up with dear ones. I find just being around people who ‘get it’ and are working so hard and so passionately to improve things incredibly emotive. The theme this year was diversity and there were a range of talks by and about migrant mothers, mothers in prison, mothers facing multiple and complex disadvantages. I decided to practise self-care by sitting out many of these as I was already utterly overwhelmed (and had been awake since 4am), although I now feel a nagging sense of guilt that I should have taken the opportunity to learn as I am not looking enough beyond my privileged bubble. On the other hand, I’m not sure my sobbing in the loos would really have helped anyone, so...

We had a meeting for the <a href="https://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/campaign/">Everyone’s Business</a> campaign in the tea break and I was also presenting our poster and womanning the stall for the <a href="http://mcpin.org/maternal-mental-health-peer-support/">peer support quality assurance principles project</a>. It was exhausting (see my glazed expression below!), but there were many beautiful moments of connection with people I talk to online but rarely get to hug, and I came away just feeling so thankful for the changes we are already seeing, for our incredible community, and for my place in it.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-09-07_19.14.45.jpg?v=1690912281" width="379">


And my suddenly inexplicably tall and clever Arthur has started school. He has been so anxious about it over the summer, and I'm immensely proud of how he’s handled things. As I met him at the door after that first day, he said, “It turns out it’s actually very nice.” I don't know who was more relieved. He’s still so little and I worry for him so, but somehow he's simultaneously also so grown up and marvellous. He isn’t a baby anymore: I grieve that I missed out on enjoying him when he was tiny, and I can never get that time back. When I reflect on it all – the pregnancy, birth, mother and baby unit, the long hard grind afterward – I think, look how far we have come. And here we are. 

Chapter one is taking longer to write than I expected. Before I launched the crowdfunding campaign, I asked for advice from my friend, Anna, who has written and published a book. She replied, “I thought writing a book was about sharing my thoughts to help others. It turns out it is more about me sorting out my own thoughts and learning a lot about myself.” How right she was. I’m currently filling in some extra background about my pre-pregnancy life and mental health history. Retrospectively, it seems a bold move to get pregnant when I did – not just with a bipolar diagnosis, but having been so recently in such bad shape. I’m having a hard time forgiving five-years-ago me, to be honest, for being so naive and immature and annoying and just so – young. How much of what happened was my own fault? And I worry about not being a sympathetic character in my own story. I mean, I’m trying to counteract stigma, not compound it, for a start.

I do love writing, though, so much. From a really young age, writing has been my 'thing' in a way that nothing else has. It’s what I’ve always done and what I’ve always wanted to do. I can't help it because the words form in my head and annoy me until I write them down. "There's a voice within me that will not be still." But, PhD thesis aside, this is the first big writing project that I’ve really taken seriously. It feels so luxurious to be taking hours out to write what I want to write like this. It’s what I dreamed of growing up. It feels like coming home to myself.

And, when I’m not writing this book on paper, I’m writing it in my head, endlessly. It's cooking in there. My friend, Nikki, calls this ‘book-pregnant’ - which is rather fitting in this case. I’m also recruiting for people (probably people who already know me) to read drafts of chapters or bits of chapters – as long or as short as you have time for, really. So if you’d like a sneak preview, or if you just really love me, or if you’d like me to read and feed back on some of your own writing in return, hit me up.

And, once again, thank you. Your support is making this possible. I really believe this book is going to make a difference.

With love,

Laura x

School Daze

Dearest 317 supporters, It feels like the 317th of January - how is it still January? - and I just wanted to check in, really, and say that I haven't forgotten you. Thanks for being the invisible cheering crowd that I envisage when I hit the brick wall of "I can't do this." I did lots of bookwriting in a frenzied burst a couple of weeks ago. My friend Nikki and I went to the Isle of Wight for a writing weekend (well, I was writing; she was marking essays and nursing a cold). Three nights is the longest I've ever been away from Arthur and I was uneasy about it, but it was good: I wrote 5000 words and had a marvellous walk on a windy beach. I can't tell you how satisfying it was to really get down to it and write uninterrupted instead of nibbling round the edges - although I've clearly done more writing than I thought I had: I ran a word count of the entire manuscript in its unshaped, rambly notey form - 56,000 words! I took home a particularly good pebble from the beach to remind me that I am perfectly capable of writing when I'm allowed to do so. I must remove myself like that again fairly soon. It's how I'll finish this book. (holding my pebble aloft in triumph) It's just as well that I went when I did: the past couple of weeks have been incredibly intense with mental health work: disseminating the perinatal peer support principles, helping to supervise a PhD study on peer support, plans for a forthcoming pilot of a peer leadership training programme, a meeting on infant mental health care, a talk to health visitors who champion perinatal mental health, plans for a piece of work on peer support sustainability/funding and another on peer support in mother and baby units, not to mention the three events I'm presenting at in the last week of January. I daren't contemplate February or March, to be honest! And I'm still doing a couple of history bits alongside. I'm oscillating between excitement and overwhelm, and I am exhausted, and yet all this isn't a distraction from the book. It informs the book, because the book isn't just about me. I apologise if you’ve noticed that I’ve been a bit distant or quiet lately: it’s a busy spell and my hatches are well-battened. When not working, I’m processing furiously toward this book, and burrowing deep into hobbies to maintain my sanity and general levels of functioning. I’m very into my creepy doll collection at the moment, and also a music generator app, and combining the two… Anyway, I won’t start on that because if I do I’ll never stop and you’ll all be frantically scouring the Unbound website, like: “How do I unsubscribe from this bizarre monologue?!” Hang tight and I hope to see you soon. Love, Laura x

Dearest 317 supporters, 
 
It feels like the 317th of January - how is it still January? - and I just wanted to check in, really, and say that I haven't forgotten you. Thanks for being the invisible cheering crowd that I envisage when I hit the brick wall of "I can't do this." 
 
I did lots of bookwriting in a frenzied burst a couple of weeks ago. My friend Nikki and I went to the Isle of Wight for a writing weekend (well, I was writing; she was marking essays and nursing a cold). Three nights is the longest I've ever been away from Arthur and I was uneasy about it, but it was good: I wrote 5000 words and had a marvellous walk on a windy beach. I can't tell you how satisfying it was to really get down to it and write uninterrupted instead of nibbling round the edges - although I've clearly done more writing than I thought I had: I ran a word count of the entire manuscript in its unshaped, rambly notey form - 56,000 words! I took home a particularly good pebble from the beach to remind me that I am perfectly capable of writing when I'm allowed to do so. I must remove myself like that again fairly soon. It's how I'll finish this book.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2020-01-04_18.04.33.jpg?v=1690912284" width="281" height="500">


(holding my pebble aloft in triumph) 
 
It's just as well that I went when I did: the past couple of weeks have been incredibly intense with mental health work: disseminating the perinatal peer support principles, helping to supervise a PhD study on peer support, plans for a forthcoming pilot of a peer leadership training programme, a meeting on infant mental health care, a talk to health visitors who champion perinatal mental health, plans for a piece of work on peer support sustainability/funding and another on peer support in mother and baby units, not to mention the three events I'm presenting at in the last week of January. I daren't contemplate February or March, to be honest! And I'm still doing a couple of history bits alongside. I'm oscillating between excitement and overwhelm, and I am exhausted, and yet all this isn't a distraction from the book. It informs the book, because the book isn't just about me.

I apologise if you’ve noticed that I’ve been a bit distant or quiet lately: it’s a busy spell and my hatches are well-battened. When not working, I’m processing furiously toward this book, and burrowing deep into hobbies to maintain my sanity and general levels of functioning. I’m very into my creepy doll collection at the moment, and also a music generator app, and combining the two… Anyway, I won’t start on that because if I do I’ll never stop and you’ll all be frantically scouring the Unbound website, like: “How do I unsubscribe from this bizarre monologue?!”  

Hang tight and I hope to see you soon.

Love,

Laura x

Short days, long months, writing and not writing

Hello dear supporters, This update is only visible to yourselves, and you'll see why in a moment. I have some news! In fact, I have two items of news: Firstly, the crowdfund campaign for All My Worldly Joy will relaunch on Monday 28th November. This means that both I and Unbound, separately and together, will be banging on about the book again to secure the final 18% of funding. As most of you know, the writing of AMWJ has involved all sorts of unexpected happenings and has been an adventure of its own. Some of you have been on board from the beginning and have watched this all play out, and I will be forever grateful to you for getting me through it. Honestly, I would have given up, and I'm so glad I didn't. The manuscript is approaching something like completion now and it is, in some ways, a different book to the one I set out to write four years ago. I've come up with new text for the crowdfunder page which feels more relevant and more up-to-date. And, furthermore.... We have a cover! It's not necessarily the final cover, in that it was created the adorn the crowdfunder page and give people more of a sense of what exactly it is that they are buying, but I love it and I think it's not far from what the final cover will be. This cover image isn't being publicly shared until the relaunch but I really wanted you to be the first to see it. You're such an important part of this process; you've believed in this book (and in me) before it even existed. Anyway, drumroll please... What do you think? Initially, I saw the image that the designer came up with and thought, "Oh, that's quite weird," but then I remembered that the book is quite weird, because I wrote it. The more I look at this cover, the more I'm in love with it. It's definitely a grower. For me, it really captures that sense of what it's like to have a vivid imagination (sometimes too vivid), and the feeling of being out of place, and the strangeness of motherhood, and the awe. I love the attention to detail. It feels distinctive and characterful and not like a book trying to be another book. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments or on social media if you'd like to. We are so nearly there now and my hope is that we can get the book funded by Christmas. That would be the best present for me, to know that the funding was sorted and I could focus on finishing off the manuscript. I have a big research project on the go at the moment, looking at transport and maternal mental health; the bulk of that will be done by Christmas, creating both the time/space and a bit of financial cushioining for me to give the book the dedicated attention it needs for the last push. I will write another update when the funder relaunches, but until then - Much love, Laura x

Hello dear supporters,

This update is only visible to yourselves, and you'll see why in a moment. I have some news! In fact, I have two items of news:

Firstly, the crowdfund campaign for All My Worldly Joy will relaunch on Monday 28th November. This means that both I and Unbound, separately and together, will be banging on about the book again to secure the final 18% of funding. As most of you know, the writing of AMWJ has involved all sorts of unexpected happenings and has been an adventure of its own. Some of you have been on board from the beginning and have watched this all play out, and I will be forever grateful to you for getting me through it. Honestly, I would have given up, and I'm so glad I didn't. The manuscript is approaching something like completion now and it is, in some ways, a different book to the one I set out to write four years ago. I've come up with new text for the crowdfunder page which feels more relevant and more up-to-date. And, furthermore....

We have a cover! It's not necessarily the final cover, in that it was created the adorn the crowdfunder page and give people more of a sense of what exactly it is that they are buying, but I love it and I think it's not far from what the final cover will be. This cover image isn't being publicly shared until the relaunch but I really wanted you to be the first to see it. You're such an important part of this process; you've believed in this book (and in me) before it even existed. 

Anyway, drumroll please...


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2_42c322d9-4809-486a-98a3-964814da1155.png?v=1690912289" width="500" height="500">



 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/3_f43af73b-c529-41e1-bec7-fcba2985cb91.png?v=1690912289" width="500" height="500">


What do you think? Initially, I saw the image that the designer came up with and thought, "Oh, that's quite weird," but then I remembered that the book is quite weird, because I wrote it. The more I look at this cover, the more I'm in love with it. It's definitely a grower. For me, it really captures that sense of what it's like to have a vivid imagination (sometimes too vivid), and the feeling of being out of place, and the strangeness of motherhood, and the awe. I love the attention to detail. It feels distinctive and characterful and not like a book trying to be another book. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments or on social media if you'd like to.

We are so nearly there now and my hope is that we can get the book funded by Christmas. That would be the best present for me, to know that the funding was sorted and I could focus on finishing off the manuscript. I have a big research project on the go at the moment, looking at transport and maternal mental health; the bulk of that will be done by Christmas, creating both the time/space and a bit of financial cushioining for me to give the book the dedicated attention it needs for the last push.

I will write another update when the funder relaunches, but until then - 

Much love,

Laura x

Sneak peek - the cover!

Dear everyone, We have had stinky covid again. I finally tested negative on Sunday and crossed that threshold from the parallel world of the sick and self-isolating. Outdoors is very good, isn't it? I'd forgotten. I'm out of covid stasis and lumbering onward once more, if a bit slowly and breathlessly. As I write, we are one hardback copy away from 95%! Wowsers. Thank you so much to those who have just joined us, and especially to everyone else who has been patiently waiting. The manuscript is coming along too. I'm editing at the moment, pruning, tightening, clarifying... it's really making it jump off the page and feel vivid and immediate. I still need to write the final section and to re-write the first two chapters, which are not fit for purpose anymore. It's a real 'so near and yet so far' situation. Sometimes I look at it and think: this is nearly there. This is so close to what the final version will be. And then I think of all that still needs doing and I want to howl. My friend Andy says, "Don't look down." Also, while I think of it, Unbound have a promotion going at the moment where you can get 15% off books that are almost fully funded, including a very good memoir that you might have heard about... Use the code ALMOSTTHERE15 at checkout before midnight on Sunday 19 March. You could up your pledge for extra goodies or buy a copy for someone else. I feel massively jammy even suggesting this, but we are so close now! You may have seen on social media that another clever idea from Unbound was the creation of some graphics featuring extracts from the manuscript. Here are a couple: I'll release more over the next few weeks. One idea I had was that I could choose a couple of pages' worth of short extracts which didn't become graphics and release them exclusively to you as supporters. Is that something you'd be interested in? Would it spoil the surprise? I want to find ways to properly thank the people who came on board before this book was even a book - namely, you lot. Without you, it just wouldn't be happening. People who buy it on Amazon or in Waterstones later are all very well and I'm sure I'll be glad, but you - you are the real deal! Just a little more general life news before I sign off and dash down the road for my school run. You might remember last year I was doing research for the Mental Health Foundation to find out how we can address transport barriers so that mums can access all kinds of support for their mental health. That research is done now, and the Maternal Mental Health Alliance very kindly offered to host the summary report on their Resource Hub. That's available here. I had a grand time launching the report and presenting some findings at the Amplifying Maternal Voices conference on 1st March. Nice to be quoted in the conference write up as well! Then I came home in the evening to a snotty child - and the rest, as they say, is history. Last week I could hardly believe I was the same strong, healthy creature who swept through London streets in her excellent black coat, and stood up on stage and spoke truth to power in a loud voice. But I am thankful to be improving each day. Onwards and upwards, and thank you again. Love, Laura x

Dear everyone,

We have had stinky covid again. I finally tested negative on Sunday and crossed that threshold from the parallel world of the sick and self-isolating. Outdoors is very good, isn't it? I'd forgotten. I'm out of covid stasis and lumbering onward once more, if a bit slowly and breathlessly. 

As I write, we are one hardback copy away from 95%! Wowsers. Thank you so much to those who have just joined us, and especially to everyone else who has been patiently waiting. The manuscript is coming along too. I'm editing at the moment, pruning, tightening, clarifying... it's really making it jump off the page and feel vivid and immediate. I still need to write the final section and to re-write the first two chapters, which are not fit for purpose anymore. It's a real 'so near and yet so far' situation. Sometimes I look at it and think: this is nearly there. This is so close to what the final version will be. And then I think of all that still needs doing and I want to howl. My friend Andy says, "Don't look down."

Also, while I think of it, Unbound have a promotion going at the moment where you can get 15% off books that are almost fully funded, including a very good memoir that you might have heard about... Use the code ALMOSTTHERE15 at checkout before midnight on Sunday 19 March. You could up your pledge for extra goodies or buy a copy for someone else. I feel massively jammy even suggesting this, but we are so close now!

You may have seen on social media that another clever idea from Unbound was the creation of some graphics featuring extracts from the manuscript. Here are a couple:


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/4_2ee38c7c-faf5-4a9d-8fe6-6f5e34410b40.png?v=1690912292" width="500">



 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2_e2cd49ab-ab13-4e5b-9a69-7c0f918b48f1.png?v=1690912292" width="500">


I'll release more over the next few weeks. One idea I had was that I could choose a couple of pages' worth of short extracts which didn't become graphics and release them exclusively to you as supporters. Is that something you'd be interested in? Would it spoil the surprise? I want to find ways to properly thank the people who came on board before this book was even a book - namely, you lot. Without you, it just wouldn't be happening. People who buy it on Amazon or in Waterstones later are all very well and I'm sure I'll be glad, but you - you are the real deal!

Just a little more general life news before I sign off and dash down the road for my school run. You might remember last year I was doing research for the Mental Health Foundation to find out how we can address transport barriers so that mums can access all kinds of support for their mental health. That research is done now, and the Maternal Mental Health Alliance very kindly offered to host the summary report on their Resource Hub. That's available <a href="https://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/Transport-Maternal-Mental-Health-2023.pdf">here</a>. I had a grand time launching the report and presenting some findings at the <a href="https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/about-us/news/breaking-barriers-our-national-perinatal-mental-health-conference">Amplifying Maternal Voices</a> conference on 1st March. Nice to be quoted in the conference write up as well!


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="375" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2023-03-07_20.32.38.jpg?v=1690912292" width="500">


Then I came home in the evening to a snotty child - and the rest, as they say, is history. Last week I could hardly believe I was the same strong, healthy creature who swept through London streets in her excellent black coat, and stood up on stage and spoke truth to power in a loud voice. But I am thankful to be improving each day. Onwards and upwards, and thank you again.

Love,

Laura x

Sneak peeks and plague times

Dear everyone, I'm learning that a book is two stories: the story within the book, and the story of writing the book. The two merge and fuse and blend in all sorts of unexpected ways. I'm currently reading Tom Cox's Help the Witch, a collection of ghost stories and almost-ghost stories. They’re unsettling in a way that I find strangely satisfying. And as I read them I remember his blog posts from last winter, when he was writing the book, having taken himself off to a freezing and remote plague village in the Peak District, to live alone and often snowed in, in an undoubtedly haunted house on top of a mountain. That is commitment. The stories, especially the first one, after which the collection is named and which so far is my favourite, have such a sense of bleak, harsh cold; of the unknowable, the elemental; of physical remoteness and history so close it’s tangible. Tom’s writing - I call him Tom, but I have actually never met the man and don’t know him at all – has encouraged me to think more about the interaction between physical landscapes and our own emotional landscapes, physical weather and emotional weather. As I’m writing a memoir of events which happened just a few years ago, the dance between that story and the story of writing it, between then and now, within and without, is so intimate and so intricate. Right now winter is pressing in and I find myself facing my own winter of sorts. Last Tuesday, Jon – my husband of ten years and Arthur’s dad – announced that he was ending our relationship. Less than twenty-four hours later, he had packed his bags and gone. The evenings are eerily quiet here. There’s a post-apocalyptic sense to it, as if the worst has happened and I am somehow still here. As if the walls tremble just a little with the memory of everything that’s happened, everything which is over now. And the future is so uncertain. It’s hard to know what to say about it, without airing dirty laundry and encroaching upon the privacy of others. (A theme of writing the book, in fact. And Jon will approve this post before I publish it.) I think it’s fair to say that Jon has some problems which we’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to tackle together for a number of years. Those problems are causing such difficulties that it’s time for Jon to step away and confront them alone, hopefully with professional help. He’s determined to do so and we are on very amicable terms. I hope to be there with open arms if and when he sorts himself out, but a lot of damage is done and I honestly don’t know, at the moment, if I will be able to welcome him back. We are all heartbroken. As the shock subsides, I find myself embracing a new toughness and leaning to the coldness of winter as it comes. I have always loved how sunflowers turn their heads to follow the sun over the course of the day. What a lesson. There were sunflowers in my nan’s garden when I was little and I thought they were magical, growing right up into the sky like that. Arthur and I grew sunflowers this year and I so enjoyed them. I could have wept when they died in the autumn and I had to hack down the stalks and bundle those sad brown husks into plastic garden waste bags. Now I find myself thinking of snowdrops and bright spidery witch hazel and even purple pansies – there is a lot to be said for plants that endure the cold. Resilience is a word often misused, especially in mental health: it’s not invulnerability or imperviousness to damage. It’s the ability to accommodate damage, to cradle it in your hands, claim it as your own, to live with it and grow with it. It’s not the stuff of inspirational posters, but I do think it has its own bleak beauty. It says: everything hurts but I’m still here. This past week, I have been firefighting practicalities and finances, whilst trying to comfort a devastated little boy and stare down my own grief and anger. But I have not been alone: family are nearby; I have friends on the end of the phone (some of whom have put in a fair amount of overtime this week); and the dear ones of Twitter have sent a steady stream of good wishes. Finances, also, are looking much better than they were, as Jon is going to live with his parents a while in order to keep paying our rent. This means I don’t have to scramble for employment – and employment that would enable me to still do the school run, etc. I have savings too. I can continue to do most of my history work and my mental health work, at least for the next nine months or so, and I can continue writing this book. But, longer-term, there is still a lot of uncertainty, and I want to be transparent about that. I am going to finish this bloody book, though, even if it takes until I’m sixty. I’m still in if you are? I could never have anticipated how writing this book would be. Your support, since I launched the crowdfunding page, has been incredible, and I’ve read and transcribed and treasured every kind message. You endlessly renew my sense of mission and of hope. The writing so far has been instructive and productive for me, but it’s simultaneously been slow and painful - and it’s likely to get harder before it gets easier, especially now. But I’m going to hang tight and grow through the cold. Everything hurts but I’m still here. Thanks for being here too. With love, Laura

Dear everyone,

I'm learning that a book is two stories: the story within the book, and the story of writing the book. The two merge and fuse and blend in all sorts of unexpected ways. I'm currently reading Tom Cox's <a href="https://unbound.com/books/help-the-witch/">Help the Witch</a>, a collection of ghost stories and almost-ghost stories. They’re unsettling in a way that I find strangely satisfying. And as I read them I remember his blog posts from last winter, when he was writing the book, having taken himself off to a freezing and remote plague village in the Peak District, to live alone and often snowed in, in an undoubtedly haunted house on top of a mountain. That is commitment. The stories, especially the first one, after which the collection is named and which so far is my favourite, have such a sense of bleak, harsh cold; of the unknowable, the elemental; of physical remoteness and history so close it’s tangible. Tom’s writing - I call him Tom, but I have actually never met the man and don’t know him at all – has encouraged me to think more about the interaction between physical landscapes and our own emotional landscapes, physical weather and emotional weather. As I’m writing a memoir of events which happened just a few years ago, the dance between that story and the story of writing it, between then and now, within and without, is so intimate and so intricate. Right now winter is pressing in and I find myself facing my own winter of sorts.

Last Tuesday, Jon – my husband of ten years and Arthur’s dad – announced that he was ending our relationship. Less than twenty-four hours later, he had packed his bags and gone.

The evenings are eerily quiet here. There’s a post-apocalyptic sense to it, as if the worst has happened and I am somehow still here. As if the walls tremble just a little with the memory of everything that’s happened, everything which is over now. And the future is so uncertain.

It’s hard to know what to say about it, without airing dirty laundry and encroaching upon the privacy of others. (A theme of writing the book, in fact. And Jon will approve this post before I publish it.) I think it’s fair to say that Jon has some problems which we’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to tackle together for a number of years. Those problems are causing such difficulties that it’s time for Jon to step away and confront them alone, hopefully with professional help. He’s determined to do so and we are on very amicable terms. I hope to be there with open arms if and when he sorts himself out, but a lot of damage is done and I honestly don’t know, at the moment, if I will be able to welcome him back. We are all heartbroken.

As the shock subsides, I find myself embracing a new toughness and leaning to the coldness of winter as it comes. I have always loved how sunflowers turn their heads to follow the sun over the course of the day. What a lesson. There were sunflowers in my nan’s garden when I was little and I thought they were magical, growing right up into the sky like that. Arthur and I grew sunflowers this year and I so enjoyed them. I could have wept when they died in the autumn and I had to hack down the stalks and bundle those sad brown husks into plastic garden waste bags. Now I find myself thinking of snowdrops and bright spidery witch hazel and even purple pansies – there is a lot to be said for plants that endure the cold. Resilience is a word often misused, especially in mental health: it’s not invulnerability or imperviousness to damage. It’s the ability to accommodate damage, to cradle it in your hands, claim it as your own, to live with it and grow with it. It’s not the stuff of inspirational posters, but I do think it has its own bleak beauty. It says: everything hurts but I’m still here.

This past week, I have been firefighting practicalities and finances, whilst trying to comfort a devastated little boy and stare down my own grief and anger. But I have not been alone: family are nearby; I have friends on the end of the phone (some of whom have put in a fair amount of overtime this week); and the dear ones of Twitter have sent a steady stream of good wishes. Finances, also, are looking much better than they were, as Jon is going to live with his parents a while in order to keep paying our rent. This means I don’t have to scramble for employment – and employment that would enable me to still do the school run, etc. I have savings too. I can continue to do most of my history work and my mental health work, at least for the next nine months or so, and I can continue writing this book. But, longer-term, there is still a lot of uncertainty, and I want to be transparent about that. I am going to finish this bloody book, though, even if it takes until I’m sixty. I’m still in if you are?

I could never have anticipated how writing this book would be. Your support, since I launched the crowdfunding page, has been incredible, and I’ve read and transcribed and treasured every kind message. You endlessly renew my sense of mission and of hope. The writing so far has been instructive and productive for me, but it’s simultaneously been slow and painful - and it’s likely to get harder before it gets easier, especially now. But I’m going to hang tight and grow through the cold. Everything hurts but I’m still here.

Thanks for being here too.

With love,

Laura

Snowdrops and witch hazel

Dearest everyone, First of all, thank you for your beautiful, heartfelt, overwhelming responses to my last update. I’m sorry that few of you got more back from me than variations on “Thank you x” - I was just so depleted at that point, and had used up all my words. I am still quite short on conversation, to be honest. But please know that your kindness and support really does mean the world, even when I am not articulate in saying so. On the advice of a number of people who are cleverer than I am, I decided to take a couple of weeks off writing this book, while I reassemble my various fragments. I am trying to be kind to myself, although generally the more I need self-care, the less I feel I deserve it. I’m not quite resting: there’s been a lot of stressful newly-single-mum admin to plough through. Plus I’m on a grants panel, reading and assessing funding applications for peer support projects, as well as applying for more freelance work. I am struggling with depression and everything feels bleak and black and hateful. The wise ones were quite right that I need to take some pressure off myself, however I can, while we all adjust. But, at the same time, I have always found writing immensely therapeutic, and so I’m going to ditch chronological order for now and just start jotting down whatever I fancy – probably all the depressing bits. I promise they won’t all end up in the book. Finally, I wanted to share this interview with yours truly in the latest Sprogcast. (It's a fifty-minute podcast, with about twenty minutes of me.) I really enjoyed getting to talk all things birth trauma and maternal mental health with Mark. I discuss psychiatric mother and baby units, what it was like to be admitted to one, and about how histories of trauma affect women in pregnancy, labour, birth, and postnatally. I also got to say a bit about diagnoses of ‘personality disorder’ and how harmful these are for trauma survivors and for humans generally. I haven’t actually listened to myself back because I would only crumple in agonies of self-consciousness, but by all accounts this podcast is a good ‘taster’ for the book. Please help your girl out by sharing it with anyone you think might like to join us here in Bookland. All the love, Laura x

Dearest everyone,

First of all, thank you for your beautiful, heartfelt, overwhelming responses to <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/snowdrops-and-witch-hazel">my last update</a>. I’m sorry that few of you got more back from me than variations on “Thank you x” - I was just so depleted at that point, and had used up all my words. I am still quite short on conversation, to be honest. But please know that your kindness and support really does mean the world, even when I am not articulate in saying so.

On the advice of a number of people who are cleverer than I am, I decided to take a couple of weeks off writing this book, while I reassemble my various fragments. I am trying to be kind to myself, although generally the more I need self-care, the less I feel I deserve it. I’m not quite resting: there’s been a lot of stressful newly-single-mum admin to plough through. Plus I’m on a grants panel, reading and assessing funding applications for peer support projects, as well as applying for more freelance work. I am struggling with depression and everything feels bleak and black and hateful. The wise ones were quite right that I need to take some pressure off myself, however I can, while we all adjust. But, at the same time, I have always found writing immensely therapeutic, and so I’m going to ditch chronological order for now and just start jotting down whatever I fancy – probably all the depressing bits. I promise they won’t all end up in the book.

Finally, I wanted to share <a href="https://soundcloud.com/pinterandmartin/sprogcast-episode-44-brains-december-2018?in=pinterandmartin/sets/sprogcast">this interview with yours truly in the latest Sprogcast</a>. (It's a fifty-minute podcast, with about twenty minutes of me.) I really enjoyed getting to talk all things birth trauma and maternal mental health with Mark. I discuss psychiatric mother and baby units, what it was like to be admitted to one, and about how histories of trauma affect women in pregnancy, labour, birth, and postnatally. I also got to say a bit about diagnoses of ‘personality disorder’ and how harmful these are for trauma survivors and for humans generally. I haven’t actually listened to myself back because I would only crumple in agonies of self-consciousness, but by all accounts this podcast is a good ‘taster’ for the book. Please help your girl out by sharing it with anyone you think might like to join us here in Bookland.

All the love,

Laura x

Sprogcast

Dearest everybody, We’re at 10%! Ten may not sound like a lot of per cent but this is a big project and I'm awed and thrilled that we've reached it so soon. Thus far 62 glorious individual humans have pledged for the book. When we launched, Fiona (the commissioning editor at Unbound) said to me, “10% is your first target,” and it felt impossibly distant. Then we hit 5% in the first 24 hours! And here we are at 10. Most of all, really, I just wanted to say thank you so damn much. If this is landing in your inbox, you are first on board, the original supporters who will see me through this whole weird process from the beginning. If I haven’t got round to thanking you personally, please know that I have noticed your pledge and take this as a heartfelt hug/handshake/whatever-means-of-communicating-warmth-you-prefer from me. I’m excited to see your names in the back of the book. I’ve been overwhelmed so many lovely emails, tweets, Facebook comments, WhatsApps, pledges (of course), social media shares… Just, wow. Thank you. You should know that I have a notebook – The Book of the Book – which is full of notes, ramblings, and all sorts for All My Worldly Joy, and it now contains The Big Bank of Book Encouragement, pages into which I have lovingly transcribed your words to reread when I am too scared to write. Because - full disclosure here – this book absolutely bloody terrifies me. There have been many sleepless nights. It’s both the crowdfunding, with the implied rejection if people don’t support it, and the fact that I’m going to be putting a lot of very personal, vulnerable content into a public arena. At the same time, I know it’s absolutely the right thing to do. Since I started speaking, writing, and tweeting about birth trauma, I’ve had a steady stream of emails and private messages on Twitter and Facebook. Acquaintances, friends of friends, colleagues, even complete strangers contact me to pour out their grief around their birth experiences, as if I’ve somehow given them permission to talk openly about it by doing so myself. Similarly, when people ask me what I do and I try to explain, about three-quarters tend to respond by sharing their own experience or that of their sister or mother or friend. It’s been a revelation to discover that birth trauma is simultaneously so common and so hidden. At the end of the day, who cares if people read my book and think I’m pathetic or annoying or self-indulgent or - worst of all - not very good at writing? This is bigger than me. It’s still early days for this book, although I have been poking at it for at least a couple of years, jotting down notes and stream-of-consciousness, without a clear idea of where it was going. About six months ago it just started to ‘come together.’ I organised all of it – about 40,000 words of notes! - into chapters. I had wanted to submit to Unbound for ages because I’m such a big admirer of how they operate and other books they’ve published (especially Tom Cox’s 21st Century Yokel; if you haven’t read it, treat yourself) - but I chickened out. My friend Julie, for whom I am ever thankful, contacted Unbound on my behalf, after I gave my blessing, thinking nothing would come of it – and the rest, as they say, is history. Or perhaps the future? I’m now writing the book up from Laura-language into coherent prose, with much editing - and agonising - along the way. I’m still on chapter one of seven. (Currently it’s June 2013: I am newly-pregnant and navigating this with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I am also very young and a bit of an idiot.) So this book isn’t going to be finished imminently. I am caught between not wanting to rush it, so that it isn’t as good as it might have been, and not wanting to keep you all waiting. Those of you who know me will know that I do a lot of maternal mental health work, both paid and voluntary, and I'm also a historian, and I have a small child with various health problems. I get so much done by harnessing the extra hours I get from insomnia, and the extra energy from anxiety. This is definitely fine as a long-term strategy. *sips coffee amidst flames* But I have carved out time and this is happening. My not-so-little Arthur starts school in less than a fortnight. He’s got his smart red school “unicorn”, which I have washed and labelled, writing out his name and class over and over in permanent pen. (The pen withstands tears, at least.) I do hope people will be kind to him. I have very mixed feelings but a definite bonus is it allows me a few more hours in the day with no one shouting at me about spirit orbs. Nonetheless I beg your patience as I finish this book. I’m excited to have you all along for the ride. Here are Arthur and me, being excited on the London Eye, one drizzly day last week. Thank you for joining me. I started writing this book to help others, and yet I am already untangling all sorts of things about myself. They say that to understand something, you should explain it to someone else. It's taking quite a lot out of me, but I know that it's good for me, ultimately, and I trust that it will do good for others. I'm thankful for the process, and for your support - because I can't do this alone. With much love, and gratitude, Laura x

Dearest everybody,

We’re at 10%!

Ten may not sound like a lot of per cent but this is a big project and I'm awed and thrilled that we've reached it so soon. Thus far 62 glorious individual humans have pledged for the book. When we launched, Fiona (the commissioning editor at Unbound) said to me, “10% is your first target,” and it felt impossibly distant. Then we hit 5% in the first 24 hours! And here we are at 10.

Most of all, really, I just wanted to say thank you so damn much. If this is landing in your inbox, you are first on board, the original supporters who will see me through this whole weird process from the beginning. If I haven’t got round to thanking you personally, please know that I have noticed your pledge and take this as a heartfelt hug/handshake/whatever-means-of-communicating-warmth-you-prefer from me. I’m excited to see your names in the back of the book. I’ve been overwhelmed so many lovely emails, tweets, Facebook comments, WhatsApps, pledges (of course), social media shares… Just, wow. Thank you.

You should know that I have a notebook – The Book of the Book – which is full of notes, ramblings, and all sorts for All My Worldly Joy, and it now contains The Big Bank of Book Encouragement, pages into which I have lovingly transcribed your words to reread when I am too scared to write. Because - full disclosure here – this book absolutely bloody terrifies me. There have been many sleepless nights. It’s both the crowdfunding, with the implied rejection if people don’t support it, and the fact that I’m going to be putting a lot of very personal, vulnerable content into a public arena.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-08-16_12.00.06.jpg?v=1690912297" width="375">


At the same time, I know it’s absolutely the right thing to do. Since I started speaking, writing, and tweeting about birth trauma, I’ve had a steady stream of emails and private messages on Twitter and Facebook. Acquaintances, friends of friends, colleagues, even complete strangers contact me to pour out their grief around their birth experiences, as if I’ve somehow given them permission to talk openly about it by doing so myself. Similarly, when people ask me what I do and I try to explain, about three-quarters tend to respond by sharing their own experience or that of their sister or mother or friend. It’s been a revelation to discover that birth trauma is simultaneously so common and so hidden. At the end of the day, who cares if people read my book and think I’m pathetic or annoying or self-indulgent or - worst of all - not very good at writing? This is bigger than me.

It’s still early days for this book, although I have been poking at it for at least a couple of years, jotting down notes and stream-of-consciousness, without a clear idea of where it was going. About six months ago it just started to ‘come together.’ I organised all of it – about 40,000 words of notes! - into chapters. I had wanted to submit to Unbound for ages because I’m such a big admirer of how they operate and other books they’ve published (especially Tom Cox’s <a href="https://unbound.com/books/21st-century-yokel/">21st Century Yokel</a>; if you haven’t read it, treat yourself) - but I chickened out. My friend Julie, for whom I am ever thankful, contacted Unbound on my behalf, after I gave my blessing, thinking nothing would come of it – and the rest, as they say, is history. Or perhaps the future?

I’m now writing the book up from Laura-language into coherent prose, with much editing - and agonising - along the way. I’m still on chapter one of seven. (Currently it’s June 2013: I am newly-pregnant and navigating this with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I am also very young and a bit of an idiot.) So this book isn’t going to be finished imminently. I am caught between not wanting to rush it, so that it isn’t as good as it might have been, and not wanting to keep you all waiting. Those of you who know me will know that I do a lot of maternal mental health work, both paid and voluntary, and I'm also a historian, and I have a small child with various health problems. I get so much done by harnessing the extra hours I get from insomnia, and the extra energy from anxiety. This is definitely fine as a long-term strategy. *sips coffee amidst flames*

But I have carved out time and this is happening. My not-so-little Arthur starts school in less than a fortnight. He’s got his smart red school “unicorn”, which I have washed and labelled, writing out his name and class over and over in permanent pen. (The pen withstands tears, at least.) I do hope people will be kind to him. I have very mixed feelings but a definite bonus is it allows me a few more hours in the day with no one shouting at me about spirit orbs. Nonetheless I beg your patience as I finish this book. I’m excited to have you all along for the ride. Here are Arthur and me, being excited on the London Eye, one drizzly day last week.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-08-16_13.18.28.jpg?v=1690912297" width="375">


Thank you for joining me. I started writing this book to help others, and yet I am already untangling all sorts of things about myself. They say that to understand something, you should explain it to someone else. It's taking quite a lot out of me, but I know that it's good for me, ultimately, and I trust that it will do good for others. I'm thankful for the process, and for your support - because I can't do this alone.

With much love, and gratitude,

Laura x

Ten!

Morning folks, I guess this is less of a book-writing update and more of a not-book-writing update… Truth is I’ve been feeling somewhat flattened the last week or so. Part of this is that my husband, Jon, has been working away in the Netherlands, and I missed him. He called to tell me how enthusiastic the Dutch are. The company he was visiting declared it ‘British Week’ in his honour. ‘British Week’ involved fish and chips in the cafeteria, Union Jacks everywhere, and, surprisingly, bowls of liquorice allsorts all about the place. We felt liquorice allsorts to be a strange emblem of Britishness, but I’ve decided I’m okay with Bertie Bassett as our representative on the international stage – certainly better than Boris Johnson, or whoever has replaced him. I’ve been having more nightmares than usual lately, including one about being sexually harrassed by Boris Johnson. To be fair, that would be awful. As Arthur started school, he obviously immediately caught a cold, which meant that I also caught a cold. Schools are, as someone on Twitter rightly pointed out, biological weapons. I’m overwhelmed with maternal mental health work: August was quiet and so September is the month of All the Things. I’ve been buzzing like a blue-arsed fly from meeting to meeting, event to event. I’m exhausted, actually. An old friend from Surrey died unexpectedly. My period is currently five days late and I’m not pregnant but I am trapped in a sort of hellish premenstrual limbo. It’s autumn. I think autumn is beautiful and I vastly prefer the cooler weather, but my mood always dips with the fading sunlight. There’s been a stupid newspaper article doing the rounds about how women should shut up about birth trauma because it scares pregnant women and we’ve given them tokophobia with our selfish moaning… I recognise this for what it is: another attempt to use guilt to silence women, and prevent us calling for better care. But, on some level, judging from my productivity this week, it’s working. All these things combined to suck me down the metaphorical plughole, wanting to avoid everyone and everything. I noticed my red flags popping up, one by one: daydreaming all the time, feeling paranoid, tearfulness, thoughts of self-harm, general misery… etc etc. Depression is so boring. I knew my body was clamouring for a rest. When Arthur was born, I completely lost the ability to rest and it’s something I am slowly relearning now. The feeling of not getting anything done and ticked off a list is a kind of torment. It’s a dilemma, really, because the times when I need to rest the most are often the times when I have the most stuff to do, and I’m in no place mentally to prioritise or – worse – to let people down by not doing something I’d previously agreed to do. But I did manage some rest – reading, binge-watching House, a nap yesterday afternoon – and I am feeling better for that. Haagen-Dazs have done well out of me too. And writing always helps: it’s like talking, but without other people being unhelpful. In the book, I talk about The Fraud Police, an idea I read about years ago… When I was pregnant and doing my history doctorate, I would imagine the Fraud Police banging on my door in the middle of the night. “Mrs Wood, we have noticed that your archival skills are non-existent, and to describe your Latin and palaeography as ‘rusty’ at this point would be positively charitable. We have noticed that you are just pretending and not a proper historian at all. We are here to take away all your funding with immediate effect and haul you off to PhD Jail.” And now the Fraud Police are telling me that this book is exhibitionist, self-glorifying, unfair to Arthur… that, whatever my intentions, I have accidentally got it all wrong again. But I reason that, if I am open about this, that makes me at least a bit less of a fraud. I felt hypocritical last week, not being entirely open about the fact that I was feeling like crap. Usually I just didn’t know how to start the conversation. You’d think that I, of all people, would know how to start the conversation – but it’s easier in the past tense. I wanted to hide, but felt like I should be visible and promoting the book, and just felt like I was failing at everything all at once. Anyway, coming out of it now, although if someone could send me my period, that’d be great, because it’s clearly lost in the post. Apologies to anyone else who may be currently having my period. I wanted to thank you all again for your support, your pledges, your recommending the book to others, social media shares, the contents of The Big Bank of Book Encouragement. All of these have carried me through the last week. I don’t feel that I’m doing this alone, and that helps tremendously. Do feel free to chat to me in the comments, on Twitter (@cooksferryqueen) or Bookface, or to share this update for general mental health awareness reasons! Onwards and upwards. With love, Laura x

Morning folks,

I guess this is less of a book-writing update and more of a not-book-writing update… Truth is I’ve been feeling somewhat flattened the last week or so. Part of this is that my husband, Jon, has been working away in the Netherlands, and I missed him. He called to tell me how enthusiastic the Dutch are. The company he was visiting declared it ‘British Week’ in his honour. ‘British Week’ involved fish and chips in the cafeteria, Union Jacks everywhere, and, surprisingly, bowls of liquorice allsorts all about the place. We felt liquorice allsorts to be a strange emblem of Britishness, but I’ve decided I’m okay with Bertie Bassett as our representative on the international stage – certainly better than Boris Johnson, or whoever has replaced him. I’ve been having more nightmares than usual lately, including one about being sexually harrassed by Boris Johnson. To be fair, that would be awful.


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/2018-09-13_22.35.40.jpg?v=1690912301" width="375">


As Arthur started school, he obviously immediately caught a cold, which meant that I also caught a cold. Schools are, as someone on Twitter rightly pointed out, biological weapons. I’m overwhelmed with maternal mental health work: August was quiet and so September is the month of All the Things. I’ve been buzzing like a blue-arsed fly from meeting to meeting, event to event. I’m exhausted, actually. An old friend from Surrey died unexpectedly. My period is currently five days late and I’m not pregnant but I am trapped in a sort of hellish premenstrual limbo. It’s autumn. I think autumn is beautiful and I vastly prefer the cooler weather, but my mood always dips with the fading sunlight. There’s been a stupid newspaper article doing the rounds about how women should shut up about birth trauma because it scares pregnant women and we’ve given them tokophobia with our selfish moaning… I recognise this for what it is: another attempt to use guilt to silence women, and prevent us calling for better care. But, on some level, judging from my productivity this week, it’s working.

All these things combined to suck me down the metaphorical plughole, wanting to avoid everyone and everything. I noticed my red flags popping up, one by one: daydreaming all the time, feeling paranoid, tearfulness, thoughts of self-harm, general misery… etc etc. Depression is so boring. I knew my body was clamouring for a rest. When Arthur was born, I completely lost the ability to rest and it’s something I am slowly relearning now. The feeling of not getting anything done and ticked off a list is a kind of torment. It’s a dilemma, really, because the times when I need to rest the most are often the times when I have the most stuff to do, and I’m in no place mentally to prioritise or – worse – to let people down by not doing something I’d previously agreed to do. But I did manage some rest – reading, binge-watching House, a nap yesterday afternoon – and I am feeling better for that. Haagen-Dazs have done well out of me too. And writing always helps: it’s like talking, but without other people being unhelpful.

In the book, I talk about The Fraud Police, an idea <a href="http://amandapalmer.net/theartofasking/">I read about</a> years ago… When I was pregnant and doing my history doctorate, I would imagine the Fraud Police banging on my door in the middle of the night. “Mrs Wood, we have noticed that your archival skills are non-existent, and to describe your Latin and palaeography as ‘rusty’ at this point would be positively charitable. We have noticed that you are just pretending and not a proper historian at all. We are here to take away all your funding with immediate effect and haul you off to PhD Jail.” And now the Fraud Police are telling me that this book is exhibitionist, self-glorifying, unfair to Arthur… that, whatever my intentions, I have accidentally got it all wrong again. But I reason that, if I am open about this, that makes me at least a bit less of a fraud. I felt hypocritical last week, not being entirely open about the fact that I was feeling like crap. Usually I just didn’t know how to start the conversation. You’d think that I, of all people, would know how to start the conversation – but it’s easier in the past tense. I wanted to hide, but felt like I should be visible and promoting the book, and just felt like I was failing at everything all at once.

Anyway, coming out of it now, although if someone could send me my period, that’d be great, because it’s clearly lost in the post. Apologies to anyone else who may be currently having my period. I wanted to thank you all again for your support, your pledges, your recommending the book to others, social media shares, the contents of <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/ten">The Big Bank of Book Encouragement</a>. All of these have carried me through the last week. I don’t feel that I’m doing this alone, and that helps tremendously. Do feel free to chat to me in the comments, on Twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/cooksferryqueen">@cooksferryqueen</a>) or Bookface, or to share this update for general mental health awareness reasons! Onwards and upwards.

With love,

Laura x

The Fraud Police

Hi folks, I’m a bit nervous about this one, conscious of the (self-imposed) pressure to appear writerly and extremely talented at all times, to maintain excitement for the book that is coming, and of course to attract new supporters. The crowdfunding is a bit on hold for now: once Unbound have updated the page, I have a few ideas to sort out the final 20%. That’s all right. But here’s the problem: it turns out that writing a book is actually really hard. It wouldn’t be so hard if my standards weren’t so high, but I’m certainly not going to lower them. Perhaps I’ve been spoilt thus far: once I really got going about 18 months ago, the first three quarters of this book just poured out of me. It sounds daft and pretentious to say it, but it felt organic. Even a little smug, at times, when I read something I’d written and found it to be better than I remembered or expected, or just that sensation of basking in the glow of what it wasn’t quite yet but was going to be. It felt exciting, like I was hugging a secret. Aside from the first few chapters, I had the story wrapped up and pre-packaged before I began: I’ve been narrating these events, or elements of them, in talks to health professionals and the like for the last six years. Allowing the time and the space to tell the story as I truly wanted to tell it, in all its vividness and detail and complexity, has been a rather marvellous treat, a refreshing antidote to a twenty-minute slot before the proper speakers get going. But then I had to end the bugger, and ideally end it well. I’ve spent at least forty-five minutes of every day of the last six months working on the final quarter of this book. It’s like hacking my way through a thicket. The thing is – healing is not linear. Healing is messy. It’s so messy. It’s a swimming pool of alphabet spaghetti. I want to be true to that, while at the same time producing something readable. I don’t want to peddle a narrative that I am cured now and shitting rainbows, that I have single-handedly solved mental illness or complex trauma or just a lifetime of finding being alive really fucking difficult. I could write that ending, and everything I included would be true, but overall it would be bullshit. Behold, for example, the absolute state I have got myself in over the last few days over finishing this book. At the same time, though, objectively my life is a lot less hospital-themed, and I am having an easier time than I used to. I’ve grown and learned things along the way. I’d like to share some of those things; they might be useful to someone else. That’s all fine, but it’s the transition from A to B, and the hooking it onto the story, and the making sense… I’m genuinely afraid that I can’t do it. I’m afraid that I’m not clever enough, or not a good enough writer. I am so confused by my own life. I told myself that I just needed to get something down on paper. I can edit a shitty draft; I can’t edit a blank page. I tried various creative techniques to help with getting the content of that final section out of my head and onto the computer screen, and some of those techniques were useful. I ended up writing it all out of order as bits appealed to me. I’ve got about twenty thousand words, and they’re shit. Somehow the fact that they’re shit has spooked me, even though the whole point was that it didn’t matter if they were shit. I thought if I wrote them, the process of doing so would reveal to me how to sort it all out. But I’m most of the way there and as clueless as when I began. I’ve been mucking around endlessly with the structure and chronology, and I’m still no closer to having the first clue what to do with it all. I half-wish I could be like a Hermes delivery guy, just hurl most of a book at your hedge and drive off really fast. This is probably ill-advisedly honest, in which case it’s an excellent trailer! I will get there, somehow. I suppose I just have to trust the process. I’ve been flirting with the idea of taking a week or two off: I’m exhausted and a bit sick of the whole damn book and book-struggle. Stepping away might create room for a fresh perspective. But I also know that avoiding something anxiety-inducing is the absolute number one way to reinforce the idea that it’s dangerous. And I’m a great believer in the practice of showing up: it’s how I wrote (most of) this book, how I learned to read tarot… pretty much any goal or skill is attainable if you set aside ten or twenty or forty-five minutes a day, set a timer and just show up. You declare that something is valuable, that it really matters to you, by showing up. Even when you don’t feel like it, perhaps especially then. It’s fully possible to feel like hell on toast, and to acknowledge that, and still to choose to act in accordance with your values, to move towards what you’ve decided that you want. What I want is a finished book, and one that is compelling and thoughtful and funny and well-written and resonates with other people. I must be moving towards that, but it’s a twisting, winding, brambly, labyrinthine sort of route. Right now, I am travel-weary, and feeling rather lost. We will get there, however long it takes and even if I am howling throughout. Thank you, as ever, for being alongside and for the virtual hand-holding. I would have given up without you. With love, and a fair amount of anguish, Laura

Hi folks,

I’m a bit nervous about this one, conscious of the (self-imposed) pressure to appear writerly and extremely talented at all times, to maintain excitement for the book that is coming, and of course to attract new supporters. The crowdfunding is a bit on hold for now: once Unbound have updated the page, I have a few ideas to sort out the final 20%. That’s all right. But here’s the problem: it turns out that writing a book is actually really hard. It wouldn’t be so hard if my standards weren’t so high, but I’m certainly not going to lower them. 

Perhaps I’ve been spoilt thus far: once I really got going about 18 months ago, the first three quarters of this book just poured out of me. It sounds daft and pretentious to say it, but it felt organic. Even a little smug, at times, when I read something I’d written and found it to be better than I remembered or expected, or just that sensation of basking in the glow of what it wasn’t quite yet but was going to be. It felt exciting, like I was hugging a secret. Aside from the first few chapters, I had the story wrapped up and pre-packaged before I began: I’ve been narrating these events, or elements of them, in talks to health professionals and the like for the last six years. Allowing the time and the space to tell the story as I truly wanted to tell it, in all its vividness and detail and complexity, has been a rather marvellous treat, a refreshing antidote to a twenty-minute slot before the proper speakers get going.

But then I had to end the bugger, and ideally end it well. I’ve spent at least forty-five minutes of every day of the last six months working on the final quarter of this book. It’s like hacking my way through a thicket. The thing is – healing is not linear. Healing is messy. It’s so messy. It’s a swimming pool of alphabet spaghetti. I want to be true to that, while at the same time producing something readable. I don’t want to peddle a narrative that I am cured now and shitting rainbows, that I have single-handedly solved mental illness or complex trauma or just a lifetime of finding being alive really fucking difficult. I could write that ending, and everything I included would be true, but overall it would be bullshit. Behold, for example, the absolute state I have got myself in over the last few days over finishing this book. At the same time, though, objectively my life is a lot less hospital-themed, and I am having an easier time than I used to. I’ve grown and learned things along the way. I’d like to share some of those things; they might be useful to someone else. That’s all fine, but it’s the transition from A to B, and the hooking it onto the story, and the making sense… I’m genuinely afraid that I can’t do it. I’m afraid that I’m not clever enough, or not a good enough writer. I am so confused by my own life.

I told myself that I just needed to get something down on paper. I can edit a shitty draft; I can’t edit a blank page. I tried various creative techniques to help with getting the content of that final section out of my head and onto the computer screen, and some of those techniques were useful. I ended up writing it all out of order as bits appealed to me. I’ve got about twenty thousand words, and they’re shit. Somehow the fact that they’re shit has spooked me, even though the whole point was that it didn’t matter if they were shit. I thought if I wrote them, the process of doing so would reveal to me how to sort it all out. But I’m most of the way there and as clueless as when I began. I’ve been mucking around endlessly with the structure and chronology, and I’m still no closer to having the first clue what to do with it all. I half-wish I could be like a Hermes delivery guy, just hurl most of a book at your hedge and drive off really fast.

This is probably ill-advisedly honest, in which case it’s an excellent trailer! I will get there, somehow. I suppose I just have to trust the process. I’ve been flirting with the idea of taking a week or two off: I’m exhausted and a bit sick of the whole damn book and book-struggle. Stepping away might create room for a fresh perspective. But I also know that avoiding something anxiety-inducing is the absolute number one way to reinforce the idea that it’s dangerous. And I’m a great believer in the practice of showing up: it’s how I wrote (most of) this book, how I learned to read tarot… pretty much any goal or skill is attainable if you set aside ten or twenty or forty-five minutes a day, set a timer and just show up. You declare that something is valuable, that it really matters to you, by showing up. Even when you don’t feel like it, perhaps especially then. It’s fully possible to feel like hell on toast, and to acknowledge that, and still to choose to act in accordance with your values, to move towards what you’ve decided that you want. What I want is a finished book, and one that is compelling and thoughtful and funny and well-written and resonates with other people. I must be moving towards that, but it’s a twisting, winding, brambly, labyrinthine sort of route. Right now, I am travel-weary, and feeling rather lost. We will get there, however long it takes and even if I am howling throughout. Thank you, as ever, for being alongside and for the virtual hand-holding. I would have given up without you. 

With love, and a fair amount of anguish,

Laura

The problem of endings

Hello, loves. Fair warning that this is more of a life update than a book update. There is not much book update to tell you on account of the contents of the life update! From here, the book and the life are hardly separate. I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins. I wrote to you in April saying I'd been quite poorly with CoViD but confidently asserting I was on the mend. Then I wrote in May saying I'd had 'a bit of a setback'. Coming up for 13 weeks in now and I am still not better. I've been thinking of you all and I'm seizing upon this 'good day' to let you know about it. I've had a lot of neuro symptoms - brain fog, mostly, plus some difficulties with language and short-term memory - all of which make writing quite tricky. I have to do a lot of rereading to catch where I've used 'indifferent' for 'indefinite', for example - or, most memorably: "When this is all over, let's go out for cockatiels." Not going to lie: it's been a nightmare few months, as it has for most of us. This illness is a mindfuck; total snakes and ladders. Waves of random symptoms - nausea, myalgia, tachycardia, chest pain, headaches... The fatigue, above all, is just nuts. I've had a series of bacterial infections on top where my immune system is wiped. And I've been in lockdown with a six-year-old, who has been so, so good and considerate - bless his sweet soul - but is nonetheless bright and energetic and needs more than I'm able to provide at the moment. What I've needed more than anything is practical help: childcare, someone to put the hoover round... and of course that's what hasn't been available. Arthur's dad has upped his visits but works full-time in a demanding job. My parents have left groceries, and sometimes meals, on the doorstep. I've felt that support system around me, at a careful two-metre distance, but nonetheless it's been grim. I haven't been able to rest properly, especially as I'm self-employed: I've scaled everything back as far as I can but I can't afford to torch my career for this. It's scary having a new disease and no sense of when - or if - I'm going to feel like myself again. There are various medical theories about this 'long tail' CoViD: one is that this is a special CoViD-flavour post-viral fatigue, likely to lead to ME if you don't get lots of rest (that's my least favourite theory); another is that the virus has inflicted tiny, invisible 'micro-injuries' which cause inflammation and take a while to heal, but do heal on their own; and another is 'post-viral dysautonomia' - damage to the autonomic nervous system which may or may not be permanent. Lowering inflammation does seem to be key so I'm now trying to stick to an anti-inflammatory diet. At the moment no one really knows what's going on - and at times it has felt like the response to this is a massive shrug. Generally my experience has been that doctors seem to check that you're not actively dying and then send you on your way. I'm grateful not to be dying, but I'm not really living either. This is the sickest I've been since Arthur was born and that whole saga, and in some ways it's been oddly resonant of that time. I have the same sense of 'just getting through it', and I'm aware of the delayed trauma tsunami that hit me once the worst was over. I have a sense that may happen again, but also I know so much more than I did then and can't imagine that it would be on the same scale. I know that suffering requires an empathetic witness, and how to recruit one when I need it. I know how to relate to my own body better. At the moment my body feels half like a prison, half like a dead animal that I'm trying to coax back to life, but it is also me, and I can't help but feel a grudging respect for it. It has endured, and come back from, so much already. It even created a person, and an excellent one at that. In lockdown, Arthur has grown this gorgeous mop of curly hair; he looks like a cherub, and he's enormous. I'm learning a lot from this bleak time, and can sense it clearing space in my life that I will be able to write in, when the dust has settled. Thank you for being here. Hopefully brighter news and better times ahead. With love, Laura x

Hello, loves. 
 
Fair warning that this is more of a life update than a book update. There is not much book update to tell you on account of the contents of the life update! From here, the book and the life are hardly separate. I'm not sure where one ends and the other begins.

<a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/hello-strangers">I wrote to you in April</a> saying I'd been quite poorly with CoViD but confidently asserting I was on the mend. <a href="https://unbound.com/books/all-my-worldly-joy/updates/locked-down-mothering">Then I wrote in May</a> saying I'd had 'a bit of a setback'. Coming up for 13 weeks in now and I am still not better. I've been thinking of you all and I'm seizing upon this 'good day' to let you know about it. I've had a lot of neuro symptoms - brain fog, mostly, plus some difficulties with language and short-term memory - all of which make writing quite tricky. I have to do a lot of rereading to catch where I've used 'indifferent' for 'indefinite', for example - or, most memorably: "When this is all over, let's go out for cockatiels."


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="384" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/cockatiel-parrot-cockatoo-bird-preview.jpg?v=1690912304" width="500">


Not going to lie: it's been a nightmare few months, as it has for most of us. This illness is a mindfuck; total snakes and ladders. Waves of random symptoms - nausea, myalgia, tachycardia, chest pain, headaches... The fatigue, above all, is just nuts. I've had a series of bacterial infections on top where my immune system is wiped. And I've been in lockdown with a six-year-old, who has been so, so good and considerate - bless his sweet soul - but is nonetheless bright and energetic and needs more than I'm able to provide at the moment. What I've needed more than anything is practical help: childcare, someone to put the hoover round... and of course that's what hasn't been available. Arthur's dad has upped his visits but works full-time in a demanding job. My parents have left groceries, and sometimes meals, on the doorstep. I've felt that support system around me, at a careful two-metre distance, but nonetheless it's been grim. I haven't been able to rest properly, especially as I'm self-employed: I've scaled everything back as far as I can but I can't afford to torch my career for this. 

It's scary having a new disease and no sense of when - or if - I'm going to feel like myself again. There are various medical theories about this 'long tail' CoViD: one is that this is a special CoViD-flavour post-viral fatigue, likely to lead to ME if you don't get lots of rest (that's my least favourite theory); another is that the virus has inflicted tiny, invisible 'micro-injuries' which cause inflammation and take a while to heal, but do heal on their own; and another is 'post-viral <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysautonomia">dysautonomia</a>' - damage to the autonomic nervous system which may or may not be permanent. Lowering inflammation does seem to be key so I'm now trying to stick to an anti-inflammatory diet. At the moment no one really knows what's going on - and at times it has felt like the response to this is a massive shrug. Generally my experience has been that doctors seem to check that you're not actively dying and then send you on your way. I'm grateful not to be dying, but I'm not really living either. 

This is the sickest I've been since Arthur was born and that whole saga, and in some ways it's been oddly resonant of that time. I have the same sense of 'just getting through it', and I'm aware of the delayed trauma tsunami that hit me once the worst was over. I have a sense that may happen again, but also I know so much more than I did then and can't imagine that it would be on the same scale. I know that suffering requires an empathetic witness, and how to recruit one when I need it. I know how to relate to my own body better. At the moment my body feels half like a prison, half like a dead animal that I'm trying to coax back to life, but it is also me, and I can't help but feel a grudging respect for it. It has endured, and come back from, so much already. It even created a person, and an excellent one at that. In lockdown, Arthur has grown this gorgeous mop of curly hair; he looks like a cherub, and he's enormous. I'm learning a lot from this bleak time, and can sense it clearing space in my life that I will be able to write in, when the dust has settled.

Thank you for being here. Hopefully brighter news and better times ahead.

With love,

Laura x