Tuesday I am no longer going to St Albans every Thursday, to sit in an empty room for a couple of hours. Now I go to Radlett, near Watford, on a Tuesday. I work alongside the Health Visitors and have seen more mums in my two sessions there than I saw in four months at St Albans. It takes me a bit longer to get to and from, though, and this week the M4 was hideous.

Back via Sainsbury, but I realise I have forgotten both shopping list and shopping bags, so I wing it. Still spend silly amounts of money. Have you noticed how much food costs these days? I also purchase books: one Julia Donaldson book as a tombola prize for the school fair, one book to donate to the school library, and a Lego sticker book for Bernard, to cheer him up. I thought I had a half hour shift on the Breastfeeding Line, but I’ve been double-booked with someone else and I’m quite happy not to do it. I sit on my bed and read a book instead. Half an hour of peace!

Bernard comes home in a happier mood, he got to read today and he loves the Lego sticker book. While he’s playing with that, I write a book review for my Doula blog. We have toad in the hole with roasted cauliflower for dinner and the boys are much more satisfied with that. However, Bernard spots the tombola prize and is most upset that he is not allowed to keep it. Pete says he cried at bedtime; I avoided this by being out teaching an antenatal breastfeeding class, in the church hall on the other side of the railway line. It’s nice to be close to home and not get back so late.

Wednesday Bernard sleeps in until nearly 7am; school is making him very tired these days. Very tired and very sensitive. I take the tombola prize into school a few days early so it isn’t lying around the house torturing us all. I have about half an hour to kill before a small group of mums and babies arrive at the house for an Introducing Solids workshop, so I sweep the floor. The workshop seems good, but I’m never very confident with these. More than ever, mums want precise how-to instructions when it comes to starting solids, and I want to convey that it’s okay if everyone does it differently. A mismatch.

After lunch it’s back to the next town for a Bumps & Babies group, where I am the BFC In Residence. We have a talk from an Early Days leader, and the mums grumble about being too tired for sex. The ED leader tells me I always seem very calm and lovely. Ha. We’re supposed to finish at 2.30 but it’s nearly 3pm by the time I’ve kicked them all out and I have to race home for school pick up.

Wednesday is swimming day, so that’s another reason why it’s nice to have the car this week. Bernard enjoys swimming lessons but his teacher upset him in some way this week, probably by getting impatient with his bimbling about, from the few details I can glean. I give Bernard his tea as soon as we get home, and Pete and I make a pizza later, and drink beer and eat chocolate and do all those indulgent things that are allowed on weeks when we only have one night in together.

Thursday Bernard sleeps in again. So do we. Rushed breakfast, Pete takes the boy to school. I have few plans, for once. Walk to the post office to collect a parcel and post another parcel. Meanwhile Pete is talking to a plumber who has come to look at the leaky water tank in the loft. I do not like this sort of job, as I have no confidence with the teeth-sucking adding on of extra costs business that always seems to occur. Pete sorts it all out and then goes off to work. I can finally tackle the mountain of email that has been building up all week, type up my book review, and organise my diary a bit. I have a two-hour counselling shift over lunchtime, and then a bit of extra free time because Bernard has a french lesson after school.

This brings me up to date. We’ll be having tuna and pasta for tea, and I’m teaching in the next town this evening.

Friday Going to see my doula client in the morning, probably a bit more light housework and listening. Then down to Basingstoke for a meeting and a conference call as part of the Introducing Solids training team. Then home in time for school pick-up and straight out for our weekly playdate with Alice. Bernard will have tea there, Pete and I later, watching Waking The Dead with some beer.

Weekend Our only plan for this weekend is to give the wall a second undercoat, and buy some plywood. There might also be a curry on Sunday lunchtime.

When I talk about breastfeeding to an antenatal class, I know they expect me to idealise it. Sometimes I react against that and terrify them with too much reality. My aim is to be realistic, but more than anything else, to help them open up their minds to the idea that breastfeeding is complex and challenging AND rewarding, and that there are people out there who understand the challenges and don’t judge mothers for experiencing them.

Almost daily, I talk to a new mum who is encountering challenges. Sometimes it’s the same old story from three women in a row; those are the ones about weight gain, sleep, routines. The more unusual stories are often more harrowing.

The most common thing is pain, and I find that lots of the people I meet antenatally expect it to be painful because of a misconception that babies suck nipples. This is the myth we bust, if you’ll excuse the choice of word, with the use of a knitted boob. The nipple goes far back into the baby’s mouth and is not sucked, and should not rub on the gums or the tongue. Milk is extracted by a sort of gentle squishing of the breast tissue by the baby’s jaw, and this should not feel painful. Personally, I advocate an approach where mum lets baby find the nipple using his or her own feeding reflexes, because experience and my reading have shown me how successful that can be, and mums usually look comfortable like that.

But again, it’s not the only tool in the box, and some women do prefer to sit upright. I think there’s a psychological hit in imitating the position (bolt upright, knees at a right angle, baby across the chest) that most books describe as ‘right.’ Here at the coalface, I can tell you that the right position is the one the mother is most comfortable in.

Sometimes she will be most comfortable in a position that doesn’t require any connection at all between her breast and her baby. What a lot of mixed feelings that invokes for me, but it’s not my job to persuade her otherwise, and if she wants to tell me her story, I will listen and learn.

I feel much more strongly, as you know, about babies being left to cry. I could probably pin the entire downfall of society on the utterly flawed belief that babies need to exercise their lungs. Intuitively, and scientifically, I know that denying comfort harms a baby. So this is much more difficult for me to square with my NCT mother-centred training, and when a mum tells me her baby ‘needs’ to cry himself to sleep, I shudder (on the inside). How horrible that must be for both of them.

But what can I say? With breastfeeding, I can confidently and respectfully explain, for example, that there are no discrete substances called foremilk and hindmilk, therefore you cannot control your baby’s fat intake by somehow making him or her stay longer at the breast. (nb. that’s not the language I use in a counselling situation). In the case of crying, I can only listen, reflect, and suggest some reading material.

And then there’s all this stuff about birth that I’m just starting to learn about, and I read Ina May Gaskin and think “yes! of course!” and then I read some anti-HB stuff and worry that I’ve got it all wrong, because there are statistics and research that don’t support what I’m feeling. This is my trouble: I’m not sure I can ever categorically say ALL the research supports what I’m saying. I’ve passed my Understanding Research module and I know what confidence intervals and medians and randomised controlled trials are, but it always seems like someone else’s research might trump the studies I’ve got in my hand, and I just don’t have the confidence, myself, to decide.

Maybe I don’t want to be certain; I should just shut up and listen instead.

The stairs are often frustratingly Escher-like, with impossible turns and doors that I knew I could go through earlier but can’t seem to manage now. They often lead to attics, sometimes to underground corridors.

Sometimes I’m viewing the house, looking for somewhere to live. I remember a dream about house-hunting in Leeds, where we decided to live in a house chaotic with piles of books and papers. I am rarely alone in these expeditions, but I don’t know who the other person is. Sometimes there are already people living in the houses, and I know they will have to leave.

Some of the houses seem familiar, or I know my subconscious is basing them on places I know. The main model is the family house in Grasmere, with its dramatic staircases and disappearing doors. A Victorian Gentleman’s residence, the house was carved up 40 years ago. My great aunt still lives in the front part of the house, and for a while my grandparents owned the east wing, so I can remember glimpses of the changes, particularly a plastered up doorway that would have connected the wings, at what is now the top of the cellar steps. A huge wooden staircase was installed at the back of my grandparents’ part of the house, and the corridor must have been sealed off. In my dreams the house is whole, and sometimes I discover passageways and rooms I have never seen before.

I’m now living at my 29th address in 40 years, and I’ve had two periods of living in a hotel. We’re coming up to our fifth year in this house, and I’m not sure if I’ve ever stayed in the same place for such a long time.

It’s been over ten years now, and this internet thing completely changed my life, as those few remaining Rise readers who remember this place in 2003 will know. I was chatting before I was blogging. Then I was blogging, mostly about car boot sales and newly acquired html skills.^[1] At that point, it was mostly Real Life people who knew about my blog,^[2] and I didn’t have a clue that it could ever be any other way. I remember a blog^[3] about some students who lived across the world from each other, and had fallen in love, and opened a paypal account for people to stump up for their airfares to visit each other. That was the first time I heard of paypal. I don’t think it turned out very well in the end.

Some of the people who I count amongst my favourite Actual People Who I Know, were bloggers from my first couple of years of blogging: Hydragenic and Turquoise immediately spring to mind. During the whole year-in-hungary debacle, my circle of blog friends grew (and came to be known as the ghouls as everything collapsed around me). My ex blamed ‘people in chatrooms’ for our relationship’s demise, and it was much more complex than that^[4]; but the fact that I had a group of friends that did not include him was very hard for him to understand. They helped to keep me sane.

The chatrooms dropped right off as the blog circle got stronger; and by the time I came back to England, alone, I had broken that habit. I felt very much part of what we were then referring to as The Blogosphere, along with a whole raft of others, including the mysterious petedotnu, who I met in a comments box belonging to the aforementioned Hydragenic, or Mr Hg, as we like to call him. Mr Hg invited me to London to a blogmeet, I met oodles of lovely bloggers, most of whom I’m still in touch with, and looked up into the eyes of a very tall man who introduced himself as Pete…. petedotnu.

Pete and I spent the next three years socialising like mad with other bloggers. I’m not going to name anyone else because the chances are I’ll miss someone out and offend them. As I’m writing, I’m remembering all sorts of madness, online and off, mostly around the theme of cocktails (and cocktail sausages). When I moved in with Pete, I left the majority of my old ‘real’ life completely behind. I’m not in touch with anyone from school, university, or anywhere I’ve worked before moving here. In retrospect it feels like it was the biggest party of my life.

On becoming pregnant, I started noticing that some people also blogged about parenthood. Who knew? It had gone completely under my radar until that point. The focus of my circle shifted a bit, but a core of friends remained. Most of those are friends I’ve made through blogging but also met in real life, and chatted with on some sort of instant messenger, and now tweet at.

But the other thing that happened when I was pregnant, and more so once I became a parent, was that I met Real Life people too. Other couples on the antenatal course, mums at the baby clinic, NCT branch committee, people who shared a childminder with me, friends of friends of real life friends, students in my breastfeeding counselling tutorial group, more NCT volunteers, qualified breastfeeding counsellors and antenatal teachers, upwards of 20 parents-to-be per week in antenatal classes, mums at the drop-in groups, parents in the playground, and so on. Real People. Who know me. And if any of those people were to write a paragraph describing me, I don’t think anyone in the blog circle would recognise it.

Last year Pete, Bernard and I went for a pizza in Zizzi’s in December. Four other tables had people I had met in antenatal classes or at the drop-in. I feel more observed offline than on, because this is Karen as a Grown Up, and it Matters. Online friends are my family, I can relax and be silly and serve imaginary cocktails. Try explaining that to someone in the branch fundraising team, while we’re planning whether to use sponsor forms or justgiving.com for the sponsored toddle in August.

This is one of the several reasons why I stopped using facebook, which was cluttered with people who know me for real. I find it too easy to drop my guard and behave like erzsebel when I should be being Karen.

1. there was a marquee tag I was rather pleased with [↩]
2. the umbrella stand [↩]
3. damn the pacific [↩]
4. after all, he broke my arm [↩]

Top row: Conrad’s socks, wipes [for ice-cream], tissues, leaflets from various attractions, wallet stuffed with receipts, half-knitted socks, spare cloth shopping bag, knitting pattern.

Middle row: Sticky organic sun cream, bookmark, paper napkin, shells and a stone, sore throat lozenges, anadin, party invitation, colouring picture and some crayons, keys.

Bottom row: Pencil case containing useful things such as moleskine notebook, pens, my ID badge, and usually my phone; receipts and train tickets; sweeties, two packets of sugar and two sachets of brown sauce; Bernard’s purse, green sparkly thing from the top of an ice cream, my phone, two sunhats.

He had a go at grinding corn into flower, felt the weight of a shield and a sword, and speculated about where people cooked their tea when they had no cookers. He was even allowed to stand on a rampart and fling pointy sticks over the fence, which was pretty terrifying.

The guide did say that it was impossible to know how people with no written tradition would have lived, when all they have to go on is what they find in the ground: post holes and bits of broken pot. So I was very interested by her reconstruction of a wicker moses basket. Remember this is conjecture ^[1] about a culture from more than 2,000 years ago. That’s where the baby would sleep, she said.

And my inner mothering-nerd immediately kicked in: Really? Not in the bed with the parents?

She shrugged. Well, during the day he would have gone in the basket and been hung up on the wall.

How could she know this? And does it fit with what we do know about baby management in ancient cultures. Pretty much the only thing we know for certain is that there were no manufacturers with a vested interest in keeping parents apart from their babies. There was no formula milk (there may have been wet nurses, but I’m not convinced this was a common thing at that time). There were no sleep monitors, dummies, pushchairs, automatic swings, car seats or any other place where babies could be left while mothers got ‘back to normal’ after giving birth to them.

What would normal have been, for women in a Celtic tribe? Going to the gym to get their figure back? Having lunch with friends? Sitting down with a cup of tea and a book for an hour? Or continuing to do the day to day things that contributed towards the tribe’s survival?

Until very recently (and currently, in some Asian and Hispanic cultures), new mothers would have had a lying-in period for days or weeks following the birth of a child. In China, new mothers ‘do the month,’ staying at home and being looked after by the women of their community. We are among the first generations of humans to become parents almost in isolation from a community. I conjecture^[2] that Celtic women would have been surrounded by a community of other women, who would have eased the transition to parenthood (which, incidentally, wouldn’t have been such a dramatic event in ancient cultures); and that after a lying-in period, the new mother would have strapped her baby to her front and got on with the chores.

[Just as an aside, I think we are believing that Celtic spirituality would have been largely about goddess-worship and veneration of fertility, so motherhood and lactation would be highly valued, in contrast to modern western society.]

So that’s item one for the case against the moses basket. Item two is the basket itself. Again, I conject^[3] that Moses’ mum^[4] didn’t have a moses basket to hand. I think there’s some story in some work of fiction about how she hid him for three months before making a basket and casting him into the river. It wasn’t a standard piece of baby kit back then, and I’m not convinced it came into regular use until much much later. I’m thinking Victorian orphans, also the early recipients of artificial milk; or whichever orphan babies were actually kept, as opposed to being exposed on hillsides etc.

My final piece of evidence is, you guessed it, breastfeeding. We have already established that baby would have been strapped to mother, because, as we have also established, the moses basket wasn’t around yet. The style of breastfeeding is very different in non-western cultures, and perhaps that gives us some insight into the way children would have been nursed in ancient Britain. We know that the human newborn needs to feed little and often, because that’s how his digestive system works best, and because he is growing (physically, socially and neurologically), very fast, day and night. We know that this little-and-often business establishes a robust milk supply; and also that exclusive, on-cue breastfeeding prevents conception, and therefore this would have naturally spaced out the pregnancies.^[5] Having baby strapped to mum is easily the most practical way to achieve this.

So my proposal is that Celtic villages would not have featured beautifully woven moses baskets with darling little blankets in them. And that it’s all very well having a conjectural reconstruction, with oodles of enthusiasm and imagination, but then you’re inevitably going to get some nerdy type coming in and saying that’s not what they would have done, whether it be the druid’s temple or the handspun fleece or the parenting style. Even archeologists are not immune to the marketing of the modern mummy.

1. I do really like this word, but also I’ve just finished reading Fermat’s Last Theorem, and there was a lot of conjecturing in that. [↩]
2. some discussion about use of ‘conjecture’ as a verb resulted in my decision to do so [↩]
3. this one I used for a dare [↩]
4. Jocheved [↩]
5. only where baby really is breastfed on cue, round the clock, and given nothing else. Please don’t rely on it and then blame me. [↩]

When I originally stumbled across the website, it was Hannah’s gallery that really attracted me, and I fell in love with one of the images of butterflies. I used to have a watch on a bracelet a bit like a charm bracelet, with little silver butterflies dangling off it. It sounds pretty but it was annoyingly jangly, and when I waved my arms around, as I do, it occasionally snapped. I got fed up of having it repaired. On the whole, I like bracelets but I don’t like either the jangly noise or the clunky interference between wrist and desk. Having seen Anna’s fabulous birds, tattoed on her wrist, an idea began to form.

It’s not my original tattoo idea, the one that has been brewing for seven years. No, that one is still in the kettle, as it were. It’s a sort of tester tattoo. At least, tester insomuch as I knew I definitely wanted this. I feel very safe, while at the same time somewhat living at least within comfortable walking distance of the edge, with my pretty little wrist tattoo of butterflies.

The thing I was most nervous about was the thing that makes me hate hairdressers. The feeling of being nowhere near as cool as anyone else in the building, in their opinion. I didn’t want to feel that. But I thought, you know, it’s taken me forty years to get really and truly happy with who I am. Forty years to know who I am, and be happy with it. If they don’t think I’m cool, I don’t think I actually care. I sit in front of groups of strangers several times a week, talking about breasts. I can handle one tattoo artist in an enclosed space, if I’m armed with a cup of tea.

And that’s why butterflies. Pete recently told me I was more socially confident than him, and that really surprised me. I don’t think of myself as confident, I’m not good with strangers, I get all tongue-tied and shy. Except I don’t anymore. I talk to strangers all the time. I listen to them, too. When I look at myself through the eyes of other people, I no longer see the person I was ten or twenty or thirty years ago. I see someone other people like and respect, and whether that’s cause or effect, I like and respect myself.

Hannah had a fab new tattooing device, and a new shade of purple she had never used before. She had also just returned from Borneo where she saw lots of butterflies, and claimed to have a head full of them. Her workspace also featured a lot of butterflies (and skulls, and octopi). It’s good when something as momentous as your first tattoo feels like it’s happening at exactly the right time.

As for the pain. Well, she did say the new device was more gentle than the standard needle thingy, and it’s an established fact that I’m no wimp; but I would not describe the tattooing process as excessively painful. Certainly no more painful than a nettle sting, with a nice after-buzz that has sadly faded now. Oh well, roll on the next one…

The things you’re expected to give up, on becoming a mother, include your pre-baby figure, your sleep, your ability to concentrate, your social life, your sex life, and your peace of mind.

The counter-argument to this is always but motherhood is so rewarding; see various mummy-bloggers’ cute anecdotes about hilarious nappy changes, first words, adoring gazes at 4am, and so on. While this is all very well, it does seem to relegate the mother’s enjoyment of life to a second-hand experience.

There don’t seem to be many sources that acknowledge the positive changes that motherhood brings about, specifically for the mother (and I’m not just talking about the oxytocin high of breastfeeding). Motherhood (and arguably, we could say ‘parenthood’ but I’m just writing about me today) can bring about huge personal growth. Understanding and accepting that you are such a key part of someone else’s world is a huge responsibility, and might be impossible for non-parents to grasp in its entirety; but when you take stock of the resources you didn’t know you had, the range of functioning you can manage on limited amounts of sleep, and the sheer protective strength you can find, all this adds up to quite a superhero status.

Motherhood can bring about a growth in understanding and empathy, especially in our relationships with our own mothers. We find out things we never expected to know about our own babyhood. For me a lot of things slotted into place when my mum talked to me about how she had felt, aged 21 alone with a newborn baby and a husband who – I’m assuming – was as emotionally disengaged then as he is now.

I particularly notice the contrast in empathy from other parents, compared with childless friends. Of course these are generalisations, and I have some wonderful childless friends who have been supportive and fun and great with Bernard. Those are the ones I prefer to spend time with, rather than the childless friends who assume I want a break from being a mother (how can I get a break from my own identity?), and that I am bored of talking endlessly about how wonderful my child is. Seriously, that subject can never tire for me, so forget it. Do you want to talk about your favourite subject all the time? I thought so. The people I tend to take a break with are other parents, who can share that feeling of enjoying the sense of freedom, while simultaneously missing the little ones. They don’t expect me not to be a mother.

Nor do you see, from the superficial coverage that is widely available, that all those sacrifices are rarely black-and white. Some of us like our new bodies; there’s a reason for being a curvy mama beyond mere indolence and chocolate biscuits! I have a far busier social life than I had before becoming a mother; and those shreds of my pre-baby social life that remain, are the ones I really value. And who expects their sex-life to remain static?

I don’t think motherhood in its conventional sense came very easily to me. But as far as my identity is concerned, it has made me feel better-defined, more purposeful and more confident. I know this isn’t every woman’s experience of motherhood; I was and am exceptionally well-supported, and that makes a huge difference. What I’m saying is that motherhood can be these things, and perhaps on International Women’s Day we should be calling for motherhood to be valued and supported so that for women, it is these things.

There was a certain amount of novelty value to start with, mind you. I particularly enjoyed meeting his university friends, who observed that I was a bit older than him, and accused me of being 25. At the age of 32, I was quite satisfied with this estimate.

It may have been more of a problem for our families than it was for us. On my side, I think it took longer for them to take Pete seriously. On his side, I suspect his mum and sister found me something of a threat. What could a wizened old woman like me possibly want with a young thing like him? Would I tie him down and prevent him from some soaring career, foreign travel, or indeed from becoming a Rock God?

The truth as I remember it is that, at some point during those dizzying wonderful first weeks of our relationship, we had a conversation in which Pete told me he wanted a large number of children, and I categorically stated that I couldn’t have kids. [I had never had this medically confirmed, it was just my assumption based on experience over the previous few years]. Well we know how that one turned out, anyway.

Amongst my network of mothers, most of the women I know are around my age, and most of their husbands are older. I don’t know anyone who enjoys the level of support that I get from Pete, who is open-minded and flexible and tolerant, and a really hands-on and involved dad. This might not necessarily be down to his youth; perhaps that’s just the person he is. Now we’re moving into a new working arrangement where he carries on earning the bread, and I get to do things I really enjoy, and help people, and work flexibly from home.

Lori’s article wonders if women choose older partners who can provide for them, but in our case I think it’s working the other way round. I have done full-time work, now I want to do something different; I didn’t choose him as a provider, I chose someone with whom a relationship would be dynamic, mutually supportive, and loads of fun. And I can honestly say I don’t want the father of my child to have a soaring career that requires him to work long hours or spend a lot of time away from home, even if it did mean we could have a house with two bathrooms. I enjoy his company too much.

But sometimes I look at my tired Pete, who never quite gets enough sleep, and can’t play his music at high volumes anymore, and usually has to babysit a couple of nights a week while I go out teaching; and I really do think: he used to make me feel younger, and now I make him feel older. We’ve always been able to narrow the gap, but were his family right, have we cut the fun, youthful part of our relationship short and moved into the grown-up part too soon? Is he doing all the supporting, while I explore the life of a lady who lunches? Is this where the ten-year gap really shows?

There is more to be said on this subject, when I have gathered my thoughts a bit more!

When the boy started preschool, I gained two short afternoons of free time each week, and discovered what more experienced mothers know: you can’t fit much of anything into a preschool session. When he started actual proper big-boy school, at the beginning of this term, I suddenly had two whole days. And guess what? I immediately filled them.

And it was so much fun! Now I can do two breastfeeding drop-ins a week, I can get my hair cut, I can sit and read, I can clean the bathroom, and I can start to build up my virtual assistant business. Only, I couldn’t build it up, because my two days were already full, so even if I got a client, I couldn’t accept the job because there was no time to do the work.

Meanwhile, I continue to be irked by having to heft myself into the next town three days a week, sit in an office surrounded by verbally incontinent Daily Mail readers, and have all my achievements attributed to the meddling of sky fairies. You can see why I might find this unsatisfactory.

Those extra two days really heightened the contrast between what I want to do and what I don’t want to do, and on weighing it up, there really was no difficulty in making the decision. I am fortunate that we live a low-key life; if we lived at the edge of our means, I would not have this option. I have some reserves to help out while I increase the business (or indeed get more paid breastfeeding support work), and I guess I cannot now hire a cleaner, what a shame.

None of this would happen without Pete’s support and understanding. He’s the best.

An additional problem for me is that I hate exercise for the sake of exercise. The only time I’ve ever gone to the gym regularly was when I was living in Malvern without partner, television or internet. The fittest I’ve been in the last few years was in the first year of Bernard’s life, when I walked and walked so much, mainly to encourage him to sleep. I feel that if I was more active then I would have more energy, but I don’t have the energy to get more active.

Over the last year I have tried to pare down all the extra things I do. I’ve stepped down from the NCT newsletter editorship and given up the allotment. And then I started a new business and decided I wanted to take up yoga. I have very strictly cut back on the antenatal classes I book, but I’m looking at my calendar for January and still only have one or two free evenings in each week. I can tell you now that I will be spending those evenings slumped on the sofa watching TV with Pete, and knitting.

Bernard starts school on Thursday, which theoretically gives me six extra hours of free time a week. I had planned that I would spend Friday doing Nothing Important, and Things That Are Only For Me. But already I have booked a conference call with someone from NCT bang in the middle, so will have to fit my bi-annual haircut somewhere around that, and try not to sleep in the gaps. Do I have a problem with saying No?

I idly wondered whether, if we were alone on 25th December rather than wrapped up in metres of extended family, we would do anything at all.

The plan for this year was to go up to Armpit; we try to do that at least every couple of years, because Stepdad is now so ailing and frail that mum can’t travel with him at all. On the plus side, it’s near the beach. On the minus side, it’s over 200 miles away, which is not that much fun in inclement weather.

We haven’t seen Stepdad since August. He is already so very unwell that it is hard to mark a physical deterioration, but now he seems confused, anxious, and highly irritable. He suffers from COPD (amongst other things). He has a machine in the corner of the room that pipes oxygen into him, and a stack of pills and inhalers in easy reach. His swollen feet are up on a stool blocking his view of the TV. When we arrive, he apologises for being out of sorts, blaming the change in his routine. Mum takes me to one side and says his routine hasn’t changed a bit, but he keeps saying this. She is worried.

It’s Christmas Eve. Bernard has explained to Granny that he is ready to suspend disbelief if she really wants to pretend to be Santa. It’s snowing hard. Mum has called 999 because she’s so worried, but Stepdad has refused to go to hospital. The on-call GP has come out and explained to him that his nebuliser causes an increase in adrenaline, which is why he feels so panicky and doesn’t want to eat anything. When he’s calm and rational, he understands what is going on and believes he won’t get like that anymore now that he knows what it is.

Bernard hangs up his stocking and goes to bed. He is very excited. He wakes at 4.30am and there’s just absolutely no chance he’ll go back to sleep. I manage to contain him for over an hour, then let him go and fetch his stocking from the sitting room. Santa has visited all three of us, and we sit up in bed looking at what we’ve got. Bernard has quite a lot of tat, some small cars, a new toothbrush [this particular Santa's trademark gift, I remember from my own childhood], chocolate coins and of course a satsuma. Pete has cans of Guinness and a thing for organising all your cables. I have a ball of sock yarn. Mum is still asleep. I have made a cup of tea for Stepdad, filled up his humidifier, opened the curtains, confirmed that he wants us to leave him alone.

When Mum wakes up, he rails at her for neglecting. She has barely slept all night and is worried sick about his condition, but it’s christmas! So there is a lot to do! He seems better after half a piece of toast, and she clatters about in the kitchen doing things to a large turkey.

And at last, she sits down with us, and allows Bernard to start bringing presents through. He is an enthusiastic little postman, carefully reading labels and distributing to the correct people, while also making time to rip paper off the parcels addressed to himself, squealing it’s just what I wanted! before he can see what it is; squawking that’s welcome in response to our thankyous. And then Stepdad asks mum to call an ambulance. He is certain that his oxygen is blocked, he feels dizzy, he actually wants to go to hospital. This is so unlike him that mum immediately complies.

While we wait, she hands over the dinner preparations to me. She packs a bag for Stepdad. I put some stuff in it for her. The paramedics come in and strap him to a chair, wheel him to the ambulance. Bernard asks why the police are taking him away. They’re gone, the house is creepily quiet with the oxygen machine switched off, and is starting to smell of christmas dinner. Pete and I look at each other, shrugging. What do we do?

I scale back the dinner; we don’t really need four different vegetables, two types of stuffing, bread sauce, fancy serving dishes, just for the three of us. We are alone on 25th December and it doesn’t feel very festive.

At 4pm I drive into Hull. The first ten miles are on ungritted B-roads so I’m glad it’s been such a sober day. The sun is setting across sparkling, peach-tinted fields and nobody else is out. I pick Mum and Stepdad up from the acute assessment unit and miraculously we find an open pharmacy on our way home. The house hums as all the machines are switched back on, and Mum wolfs down two helpings of microwaved christmas dinner. She hadn’t had breakfast when they left this morning; Stepdad was fed in hospital, as well as very thoroughly checked over, and sent home once his condition stabilised.

The next day we have to leave; we have a fixed appointment with Pete’s family, and I feel like I have hardly seen mine. Stepdad gets through the day without calling out an ambulance.

I accidentally got stuck in a feminist internet forum discussion about the joys of being childless. It was a horrible, horrible place, and I am struggling to articulate why without sounding all kneejerk. I don’t think I’m somehow better than other women who don’t have children. But it does seem like maybe I have a little insight into certain aspects of womanhood that are difficult to understand if you don’t.

Seems like just like any other label, there are so many different ways of being a feminist, and too many people out there claiming that they have the one true way. I don’t have to be a career woman or a prize winning author or a pop icon; I don’t have to be a lesbian or a tomboy or childless-by-choice; I don’t have to be an earth mother or a self-proclaimed witch or a SAHM or a sex kitten or a dominatrix or ANYTHING other than a human being who understands that in a patriarchal society, being a woman is inevitably undervalued.

Sitting here in my corner of the world, of course I see things from the perspective of a mother and a breastfeeding counsellor. I see that breastfeeding is a feminist activity because women who don’t have to buy formula are in some ways free from commercial and societal pressures, which come from the ‘oh little girl, of course your silly body can’t be trusted to do something important like feed a baby’ part of mankind. Seriously. [I was about to write a disclaimer about non-breastfeeding mothers, but if you've got this far down the post you must surely not find this necessary]. In modern Britain, motherhood is only valued insofar as it represents a marketing demographic. However much ‘family friendly’ employment guidance the last government pushed through [and the tories will abolish that as soon as they can], mothers are still encouraged back to work, full time, as early as possible, in order to be economically viable – with the bonus of creating jobs in the childcare industry.

We are routinely advised to mistrust our bodies and our instincts from the moment we become pregnant. Only a select few take non-NHS antenatal classes, and those are portrayed as idealistic not realistic, when what NCT and similar organisations try to do is remind us that our bodies can do amazing things like create, carry, give birth to, and nourish a child; while the NHS continues the party line that our bodies should be controlled by doctors because we have no idea what to do with them, not having medical degrees. Whose interests does this serve? Not the mothers’, that’s for damn certain.

How can celebrating motherhood not be feminist? And why does it have to be so divisive? Surely all aspects of woman have value, not just the fun or economically viable parts?

The girl who sits next to me at work is getting married next year. She had most of it planned long before the proposal came (possibly even before the man). When she had narrowed the wedding dresses down to a shortlist of two, she explained that dress A was very me, and dress B was more classic looking.

I am so glad Pix went for Very Me.

It’s so long since we’ve been Bloggers, rather than just people who happen to have blogs, that I don’t think I could find all the URLs to link people together. So let’s do this without links, after all, we don’t do it for the fame anymore, right?

After a bad night’s sleep, I snoozed most of the way to Bristol, where it was raining. Our upgraded hotel room was rather nice, although with six people in there getting changed, it seemed pretty poky. We tottered over to the venue, pictured here, and Ms Fluff and I got knitting, having been inspired to create a garter for the bride. The wedding was littered with knitters, including representatives from Simply Knitting magazine, who took quite a lot of photographs. The Fab Shoes count was also pretty high, unsurprisingly. And the bride? Just magnificent.

There were so many high points that I would characterise the entire evening as the crest of a wave. After so many years (too many to count) of knowing Gordon through his blog, I finally met him; a second meeting with Lori and Topper, haven’t we all aged beautifully? Lyle didn’t even recognise me; Hg actually smiled for a photograph; Ms Fluff wore shoes of awesome; and I got to dance with Pete (but not enough, oh never enough).

It is true that I don’t get out much, but when I do, it is SO good.