When I first entered the dark satanic mills of parenthood, I spent a good deal of time stomping around shouting, ‘This job should be unionised!’ The hours are terrible, the demands unreasonable, there are numerous occupational health and safety breaches, you are always ‘on call’ and its really hard to understand what your boss wants. The pay is horrific too.

For the ten minutes before my children sleep the internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest. Tonight’s book is a treasure. Behind its thick crème cover, its pages, also crème, are stiff and square with sixties-vintage pictures. Chapter One, Down the Rabbit-Hole, begins on page eleven. ‘Why not page one?’ a […]

There are lots of reasons why people choose to have kids, but for many women in Tanzania, the word ‘choice’ may not be the most appropriate one. No one is arguing that the birthrate here isn’t high. The Daily News, one of Tanzania’s newspapers, recently listed the country as having one of the 10 youngest […]

This morning I stood in my sun-drenched garden thick with the perfume of jonquils. Everywhere around me was new life. The apple trees full of tight little buds, grass thick and bright from recent rain, the birch tree trailing bushy new growth. And on this day filled with lushness my baby was due to be […]

Some time ago I was offered a short term position as a special needs teacher at an international school in Kuala Lumpur. With my partner, Liza, on maternity leave this was an ideal opportunity; she could have a holiday of sorts with our three-month-old daughter, Ksenya, while I worked. We’d been to Thailand when Ksenya […]

Unmarried parents now account for one in three births, compared with about 10 per cent of births in 1980 and just 5 per cent in 1960. ‘Families tend to blend as single-parent households now the most common.’ The other day a friend was bringing me up to speed on a mutual friend, an older woman […]

When a friend told me that two of her children had been homebirthed and she was thinking of having her third in a hospital, it was the answer that a friend of hers gave which made me sit up and take note. ‘What makes you think going to hospital will make the birth any easier?’ […]

It would be an understatement to say that whole new worlds have opened up to me as a result of parenthood, but nothing brought this home more than discovering the toy section of a department store. You would think as a mother of a toddler, or perhaps even, as general citizen of the capitalist consumption […]