My gentle boy and my strong girl

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You are both so little still, both still under 3, and already I can see that society is valuing some of your traits over others.

This breaks my heart, because you are both so much more than stereotypes, you are incredible and complex and will only get more so as you get older. I hope that I can bring you up to not be ashamed of parts of you just because they don’t conform to gendered expectations. Nothing about you is wrong, society and it’s small boxes are wrong.

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One year on

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Today is the 24th of January, a spectacularly uninteresting day to many I imagine. For me it was the start of a traumatic experience, an experience that is still ongoing, but there is finally a light at the end of the tunnel.

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A 2014 recap: Puking, parenting, pain and feminism

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It has been an interesting year, thought I’d go through it with some blog posts.

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“I am a poser and I don’t care, I like to make people stare”

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A slightly silly start to this blog post, but I do love this song and it is kind of what I wanted to talk about.

As my blog title suggests I’m a little bit of a goth (unless you are totally unaware of it being a play on “murder of crows” and are one of the odd breed who think it means I want to kill goths), and so no stranger to standing out in a crowd, or at least, that’s how I used to be.

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Judging and motherhood

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Think we all know that mothers (and some fathers) will get judged no matter what they do. That seems to be a given, and mothers seem to get judged more harshly – probably because they do the bulk of childcare.

I’m no longer shocked, but this disgusting excuse for an article on ParentDish got me thinking about my own mother.

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Mothers’ Day – pain and joy

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Mothers’ Day is a hard one for me, my own mother died 2 years ago. She died 3 weeks before my first child was born. So my own motherhood is intrinsically linked with the loss of my mother. Obviously it would still be linked if she’d died before or after that, but the proximity of the two events makes it hard to think of either in isolation, and if my grief didn’t already take a fresh pummelling around my son’s birthday then Mothers’ Day turns up at the same time. All three events happen in March. This is not my favourite month. But it does make me think, a lot, about motherhood and it’s joys, conflicts and troubles.

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Am I a “mummy blogger”?

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This blog has been sat empty for a while, I keep meaning to post, but then I never know what to start with. So the blank page sits and taunts me, like a blank piece of paper when you’re about to start drawing. Ominous and daunting, making you worry that the first mark you make will be the wrong one.

However I’ve been following the furore over the Mumsnet Blogfest, in particular the panel about whether you could be a feminist and a “mummy blogger” and it spurred me on to actually get this blog started.

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