Open My Eyes
Open My Eyes, released March 2017, Pinter and Martin.
Could Strangers Do Skin to Skin?
Would you allow a stranger to cuddle your newborn baby? When babies come to soon, when they are sick and need to be in hospital, parents desperately want to be near them. In my work in hospitals in Ethiopia and the UK as a lactation consultant, I met mothers and fathers spending countless hours by […]Read Post ›
What Big Teeth You Have, Grandmother…
There’s a dark narrative that runs through women’s mothering stories, and it tells of the wolfish granny. She might sound like a figure from a fairy tale, but women in the mothers’ groups I’ve run in Ethiopia, Central Asia and the UK have told me that she’s alive and well. Among the kind, supportive, […]Read Post ›
I’m a writer…and a mother
I am writer…and a mother. Typically, the contents of my handbag include: keys, coins, lollipops, hair bands, plasters, umpteen pens (so that’s where they all end up), a small plastic person with his head missing, a sort of scurf of biscuit crumbs, a pebble and…a receipt with some precious words scribbled on the back. “Thunder […]Read Post ›
The Ring Road
Today I miss Addis Ababa. It glitters in my memory, in its haze of smog and dust. It’s been nearly three years now and the haze of nostalgia grows thicker. I miss our friends, good coffee, the way the eucalyptus shimmers silver and purple in the mountain breeze. I live in Central Asia now, and […]Read Post ›
5 Things I’ve learned from mothering abroad.
There are many ways to give birth. Given our basic anatomical inflexibility, obviously, there are only a couple of actual egresses, but wow, the variations in birth culture. “Just don’t go overdue!” warned a fellow ex-pat mother in Japan, “They stuck seaweed up my you-know-what!” Apparently, there is a chemical in the seaweed that dilates […]Read Post ›
Open your eyes to Addis Ababa
(www.tripfiction.com) I lived in Ethiopia for four years when my young family and I were posted there with my husband’s job. As a diplomatic family, we’d lived abroad before, but Ethiopia got under my skin like nowhere else. My book, Open My Eyes, That I May See Marvellous Things, is set in Addis Ababa. I […]Read Post ›
Cloth mothers; where do comfort objects fit into attachment parenting?
My favorite childhood toy, or to coin the great British psychologist D.W Winnicott’s phrase, my transitional object, was (actually he still is) a puffin. He was given to me when I was two and quickly usurped a boss-eyed white bear to which I had previously been attached. I was faithful only to Puffin throughout my […]Read Post ›
