What do you believe in?

 As this Christmastime like no other rolls around I find myself mulling on the nature of belief.

I believe in science. But my belief in science is no less built on faith than other people’s religious beliefs. I know very little about it, beyond a couple of GCSEs, some populist books and newspaper articles, and what Professor Brian Cox says whilst standing in picturesque locations.

Religious faith rests on believing in something that, by its very nature, can’t be proven one way or the other.

Science is all about trying to understand the world by coming up with theories and then trying to prove them. That’s great for scientists, but for those of us who don’t understand what they’re talking about, we just have to take their word for it.

Some things in the world you learn from experience. You learn that when you drop an apple it will fall to the floor and if someone drops an apple on your head, it hurts. You go to school to learn why it happens: it's not magic, it's gravity. 

What happens when apples fall (in case you weren't sure).
Photo by Grey World via Flickr Creative Commons. 

I know if I press the switch on the wall it will make an electricity connection from a cable that feeds into my house, and lo there will be light. I’m pretty hazy on how it is. I’ve learnt that it works, but as for my understanding of the science, well it might as well be magic.

Believing in the virus

And so to today. I believe that we’re in a pandemic. Not everyone does. My belief is based on the news articles that I compulsively consume from organisations I trust.

My first-hand evidence for being in a pandemic is slim: the presence of face masks, the non-availability of toilet roll and pasta for part of this year, and the restrictions on shops and other businesses, the closure of the theatre where I work. There’s a bunch of causes that could have led to this.

I also believe that there is a vaccine which will hopefully bring us out of the pandemic, although those who know say it won’t bring an end to the virus. I know what a vaccine does and how it’s supposed to work, but how you can actually do that – make something that you can inject into our arms that will magically stop us getting sick from a particular disease – seems miraculous.

The first vaccine was administered by Edward Jenner when he figured out that having cowpox would prevent you from getting the much more serious smallpox. He took the gunk out of a cowpox blister in someone’s arm and injected it into the arm of the person he wanted to vaccinate. Lovely. The process is quite a lot more technical these days. Still, I wouldn’t say no to that if the alternative was getting smallpox – a hideous disease for which the best case scenario is disfiguring facial scarring. This isn’t ancient history - the last person died of smallpox a few weeks before I was born, in Birmingham.

My extensive liberal arts education may not have given me the ability to understand electric lights, viruses, vaccination, but it has taught me to check my sources.

The web is an incredible invention allowing people to disseminate information and opinion across the globe at the touch of a button. It has allowed us to have contact with friends and family, and for many of us to continue doing our jobs whilst locked out of our offices. But it’s also full of shit. The freedom to distribute your opinions so widely means people claim authority and manage to get their unsubstantiated claims in front of an audience.

Edna’s opinion that electricity pylons give you influenza might once have been limited to her immediate family, neighbours and those she ran into at the bus stop, but today she can dress them up to look much more plausible and chuck them out on Facebook. If she’s a bit more adept she can make a meme, to help spread them far and wide, like the cheerful one I made above. 

Look before you believe

There are so many conspiracy theories around: there isn’t a pandemic - it’s a plot to take away our freedoms; it’s a plot devised by pharmaceutical companies; death rates are being inflated to manipulate us; Covid-19 doesn’t actually exist; that one about the 5G networks. And those who have poured their personal wealth into funding vaccine research aren’t really doing it for altruistic reasons.

Whatever Bill Gates’ corporate ethics were, he’s no longer in charge of Microsoft. His day to day job now is mostly curing malaria and climate change, so discrediting the vaccine on the grounds of his involvement is ridiculous. Given the direction of his philanthropic projects in the last few years it was extremely likely that he was going to support a vaccine. Dolly Parton has also put huge amounts of money into vaccine development – do we think there’s going to be a mysterious surge in country music downloads on Spotify once it’s rolled out?

Believe things will get better

If you’re going to have blind faith in something, let it be something that helps yourself or others. Maybe I'll make more of an effort to try and understand this science stuff, since I believe in it so much. 

Believe in stars and stables and barns and babies if you like; believe in doctors and nurses who are working themselves into the ground to help people recover from Covid. Believe in facemasks, vitamin D and extreme handwashing. Believe in the genius of scientists who in just 12 months can go from discovering a new virus to making a vaccine for it. Believe that one day we won't be afraid to step outside our own front doors - that things will get better than they are now.

Anyway, I have another kind of mulling to do now, and Dolly Parton has a new Christmas album out. Joy to the world. 

Ay Corona

Hey there. Did you hear the one about the pandemic? 

Remember a year ago? When Corona was still a type of beer, ‘social’ and ‘distancing’ weren’t words that belonged together and facemasks were something that women wore in the bath. 'Furlough' wasn’t a word I could define, and isolating wasn’t something that everyone did. 

If you’d said then children wouldn’t be able to school, that theatres would shut down, that I wouldn’t be able to step inside my parents house or hug my brother, or that we wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without hand sanitiser, who’d have believed you? 

School’s out - again

I never realised how much my child’s right to go to school mattered, until it was taken away. I felt so sad as I took her in on her last day before lockdown. School symbolises so much - the opportunity to learn, to discover talents and interests, to build relationships, to have independent experiences, away from your family. 

Photo by Educators.co.uk via Flickr Creative Commons

Education is a hard-won right. Laws were made banning children from working in factories so they could get an education. It’s hugely important for their life chances - children from the most deprived backgrounds may be disadvantaged, but school gives them a chance at a better life. Without school there would be no social mobility and women would find it much harder to work. 

And without teachers there would be no school. Teachers work incredibly hard and this year they’ve worked harder than ever, as well as putting themselves in danger so that children could still get an education and people with essential jobs could go to work. 

Last weekend I had an email from my daughter’s school to say it was closed. Staff had tested positive for Covid and others had to isolate so there weren’t enough adults to run the tiny village school. Since then three out of the four classes have to isolate as they had been exposed to someone who tested positive. So we’re back to home educating. And I feel totally desolate, that she can’t have this so basic thing, of getting up and going to school every day. 

So what did you do during lockdown?

When this all started, I tried to approach it positively. I would likely have more time on my hands. I could do more writing, learn some new violin pieces, improve my tech skills.

Photo by Chi Wai Un via Flickr Creative Commons

Next time I hear someone say they used the time to learn Italian or write a novel, I may punch them, except that’s almost certainly in breach of social distancing. 

Louis Theroux, in his Grounded podcast, said that the pandemic had divided people into roughly two camps: those who had too much to do  - working, families and those who didn’t have enough - people living alone or furloughed not working. Neither is a whole lot of fun. 

The worst thing for me about combining work and childcare is the feeling of inadequacy. Whatever I do, I can’t give my work or my child 100% attention. I think I overcompensate, working more than I should. And my daughter is happy and healthy and hasn’t forgotten how to read. She’s also very adept at giving technical support to her grandparents over Skype. But I’m followed around by the feeling that I’m failing at everything

What did you do during lockdown? I tried to survive. I’m still trying. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m healthy, I don’t live alone, and currently I still have a job. I’d take that over the alternatives, any day. But I’m seriously stressed. I’m actually so stressed that at night and during work I clench my jaw to the point that it’s so damaged I can barely open my mouth. I stopped taking my inhaler because it hurt too much - not a good idea in a pandemic for a virus that affects your lungs. 

When it’s over

I miss my parents. I miss my friends. I miss my colleagues. I want to sit in a crowded bar with sticky tables and stinky people. I want to dance and sweat and not care that I can smell the person next to me. I want to stop telling my daughter to wash her hands and keep her distance from people. I want a desk that isn’t the kitchen table. I’d also like to eat a sandwich without it being excruciatingly painful.

We lost all this stuff in an instant - the instant we left offices and locked down into our homes. It will come back, not all at once, but there will come a time when life starts to settle down again. One day I will wake up with a thumping headache after drinking and dancing too much, full of regret until I realise what I just did.

Panic buying

There's been a lot of talk about people panic buying the things they might need to get through the next few weeks, particularly if the supermarket shelves start to empty. 

This worry made lots of people rush out and buy a load of stuff to make the supermarket shelves empty, thereby inducing panic at their emptiness. Surely we will reach a point when people realise they have enough taglietelle and toilet roll?

I'm afraid to say, I did my own version of panic buying. This was my shopping list

• Jeeves and Wooster books (because when the going gets tough the not-so-tough stay home and read books about posh people in massive houses)
• Boxing pads and child's boxing gloves (because when the going gets tough we need to get tougher)
• Yoga mat (you never know when you may need to adopt the lizard position)

My corona shopping list is slightly weird, but there are two main themes which bring it together - trying to stop myself from panicking and keep myself fit.

The self-isolating warrior
Photo by cmwruby via Flickr Creative Commons

I have mild asthma, which probably put me at slightly higher risk than others my age, but the 'mild' makes a big difference, and for once in my life I'm taking all my meds. The thing that has most kept my asthma in check is being really fit. This approach definitely won't work for everyone (see 'mild'), but it has worked for me. I work really hard to keep up my fitness, going to the gym twice a week and doing a weekly yoga class. I can't do these things now, and will miss them. But more importantly, I need to find way of keeping up my aerobic fitness to make sure my asthma stays at bay. If I catch this scary virus, this is what will give me the best chance against it. I can't just go for a run - I have dodgy knees. So I'm going to be relying on exercise videos and turning my tiny living room into a gym for an hour occasionally

I'm not a keyworker (it turns out that theatre web editors aren't considered critical to the running of the country), so the only way I can do my bit is staying in my house, out of everyone's way. So here I am, saving the world once yoga pose (and a few punches) at a time.

The show must go on

I work at a theatre and last Monday evening, as a result of out Prime Minister's announcement, we found out that the show would not go on, for a long time. 

I said goodbye to my friend that night - maybe we would see each other the next day in the office, or maybe it would be weeks and weeks.

The whole world is in the grip of a terrible thing. All we can do, is take the advice our government and medics give us, and try to adapt our lives to this new world of encroaching fear.

'The show must go on' has taken on a new meaning. We must go on, living our lives as well as we can, caring for our children, doing what work is available and trying as much as possible to do the things we used to do, without going outside our front doors.

Photo by Dillyboase via Wikimedia Creative Commons

Staying home

Working at home used to be a once a week luxury - I'd fire up the coffee machine, listen to Popmaster and blitz through the most difficult tasks in my working week without any distractions. But I'm a social animal, and I need to get out and about. It's going to be hard to adjust to not going out every day.

When the announcement came that the schools were closing, it felt like the bottom had fallen out of my world (again). Education is my daughter's right, and I value it. She complains about going in every single day, but she comes out bright, happy and having learned something wonderful. Watching her learn to read and write under the guidance of her lovely teacher at the tiny village school has been an amazing privilege. And now we don't have that.

Plenty of people choose to home educate their kids and there are lots of advantages, and many children blossom with the individual attention and flexible learning approaches that parents can provide where teachers can't. But what they don't generally do is home educate their kids whilst completing near full-time hours of work.

The next few weeks

When this started to happen I imagined I would have a lot of time on my hands. But at this point it looks like the opposite - work is busier than usual as the theatres fight back to show that the arts are still here, that we can entertain, educate, distract, and make sure we are still here for the future.

This next few weeks our society will divide into people who don't have enough to do, who are isolated and lonely; and those who have too much to do, whether because they are combining childcare and work, or because they're on the front line, doing the essential tasks that will keep our society running.

A lot of people are going to be very stressed. And while I know I'm lucky to be in the best camp for me (busy), and I'm grateful for that, it makes me unbelievably sad that as an only child my lovely little girl may not see another child for weeks and weeks.

Come back tomorrow and I'll tell you all about my panic buying...

How did we get so grown up?

"They grow up so fast" - you hear it from the mums around the playground regularly. But if there's one thing more puzzling to me than my daughter's gathering maturity, it's my own.

It really does seem that yesterday I was worrying about leaving school and heading off for university. Would I be able to work the washing machine? Would I remember where I lived? What happened if I lost my keys? How would I eat?

And somehow, here I am, 41 years old. And I'm not worrying about exams and how to find my first job. Looking back, those things were fun things to worry about, although they didn't seem it at the time. The things my friends and I worry about today are divorce, redundancy, miscarriage, cancer, addiction, caring for children with disabilities, caring for sick parents. Horrible big dark things that change your life and not in the way you want.

These things have been building, but when I hit 40 they seemed to multiply. Everyone I know has faced or is facing something terribly, terribly difficult. If I think about it too much, it takes my breath away and I wonder how I will get through the day.

2020 has so far been a pretty shocking year. Those moments when it feels like someone has just pulled the rug from under you have come thick and fast - moments that used to be few and far between.

Now that I am 41 I know that in what seems like a matter of minutes I will be in my 50s and my tiny dependent baby girl will be spreading her wings and flying away to experience life outside my protection.

Women's responsibilities

There's a quote or proverb, which is pretty unpleasant:

"A son's a son 'til he takes a wife, a daughter's a daughter all of her life."

It suggests that often women will stay closer to their parents in adulthood. Men do of course take on caring responsibilities, and can be just as fantastic about it. My Dad is an only child and when his parents needed help he made sure they got it, with little help from anyone else. But often when there is a brother and sister, she is the one who takes on most of the caring load.

I play the violin in a small community orchestra populated by nearly all women, mostly of my age and upwards. Attendance is very erratic. One of the few men commented on it. He wasn't complaining - he noted that this group of women have so many responsibilities to other people, that they rarely find time to do this single thing for themselves. It's a situation that you don't generally see replicated in groups of men. They too have caring responsibilities, but when the chips are down it's far more likely to be the mothers, daughters and wives than fathers, sons and husbands.

If the orchestra was made up of men, I'd bet it wouldn't have the same attendance issues as we do. Men are, by and large, better at putting themselves first, and there are undoubtedly times when we'd all benefit from following their example. Women's way isn't always the right way (naughty feminist).

I haven't written this blog for a long time. Largely because the weight of all this pain is wearing me down. And I'm sure there are many people in my age group who feel the same.

I think, maybe, these things were all there but they were masked by to very important things: 

1. The selfishness of youth - in my 20s, I was just so busy having a nice time. I barely spared a thought for anyone else. Is this the right job for me? Do I want to live here? Shall I go travelling? 
2. Our parents protecting us: My parents never burdened me with the problems of my ageing grandparents and they largely shielded me from horrible things happening to people they knew. When they did tell me of tragic illness and sudden deaths these people seemed so remote from me and my life. I couldn't really comprehend it.  

I could breeze into my grandparents' lives for cups of tea and meals out, have a bit of a chat and breeze out again, safe in the knowledge I'd done my granddaughterly duty. Few of my friends now have any grandparents left, so it's our turn to help our parents if they need us to. 

We're all grown up. And I still don't know how it happened.

"You can't go out dressed like that"

Rapy knickers and skirt-rolling: what women and girls wear shouldn't matter, but we still want to protect them.

What women wear is the cause of endless speculation. There are articles written about the clothes worn by members of the Royal family to different events and what they signify. Go into a department store and compare the amount of floor space dedicated to dressing women compared with men.

Rapy knickers?
Photo by Henry Henrietta via Flickr Creative Commons

In 1998 judges at the Supreme Court in Italy ruled that a woman can't have been raped by a man because she was wearing tight jeans which were difficult to remove, so she must have helped, proving the sex was consensual. The ruling was overturned ten years later, but move on another decade to Ireland where a lawyer suggested in 2018 that, because a woman was wearing a thong with a lace front, she was attracted to the defendent and open to a sexual encounter.

An exhibit in Belgium last year replicated the clothing that women wore when they were raped. It wasn't tiny skirts and lacy thongs. It was pyjamas, tracksuits, calf-length dresses, shirts and trousers, and even a work uniform - normal clothes for normal people who just happened to be victims of a horrible crime.

I'd like to think it was now accepted that the only person to blame for rape is a rapist. But there's still a way to go before we stop questioning women for their choices, their behaviour, rather than placing the blame squarely on the aggressors. You can't accidentally rape someone, just as you can't accidentally break into their house and steal all their stuff.

Feminism v protection

So, then, to parenting, where 'she should be able to wear whatever she likes' becomes 'I have to keep her safe' which easily turns into 'you can't go out dressed like that'. As my friend said to me recently, "I'm a feminist, but I'm a mum first." We all are - feminism is political, it's intellectual, it's interesting, it's important. But motherhood is primal.

We fight for the right for all women to wear what they like, but that doesn't mean we're happy to send our children out into the world wearing clothes that highlight a female sexuality before they've developed one.

In the shops this summer you could find loads of shorts for small boys that extended to the knee, while girls' shorts stop at the top of the thigh. Why the difference? We're not talking teenagers are, who know what they want and they will want to wear the clothes they see on YouTube or wherever they hang out, so if tiny shorts is where it's at, that's what the shops need to give them. But it's not teenagers, it's 5, 6, 7, 8 year-olds, whose parents will generally shop for them. Can't our kids stay kids for little longer? Do we have to dress them as young women?

Photo by Eric Parker via Flickr Creative Commons

Teenage girls for generations have been rolling up their school skirts to show a little more thigh and many girls in the 90s went out wearing a tiny satin nightie. I remember with fondness the navy blue PVC skirt that I dearly hope my daughter never gets her hands on (I can't bring myself to throw it out).

Girls are still rolling up their skirts, they're tying up their T-shirts to expose their midriffs, and probably lots of other things that I haven't caught onto yet. We can't stop them - they'll do it as soon as they get on the school bus, and the more we try, the more they'll do it. And rolling up a skirt never caused a women to be sexually assaulted or raped - a bloke did that.

It's normal that girls and young women use clothes to experiment with how they look, with their sexuality, and push the boundaries. And it's normal that their parents want to stop them.

Do I sound like a hypocrite? I'm saying that women and girls should wear what they want, but I'm uncomfortable seeing sexualised young girls, and I don't want my daughter going out like that. One day I know that, even if I don't speak them out loud, the words 'you can't go out dressed like that' will run through my head.

The Great Skincare Swindle

How many cosmetic and cleaning products are you using on yourself? Do you know what they all do? We're becoming increasingly aware of what we put into our bodies, but not really thinking about what we put onto them.

The billion-squillion dollar cosmetics and skincare industry is genius. It offers a panacea to youthfulness and beauty and we throw our money at it, slathering our faces and bodies in beautiful smelling chemicals, without a clue what they do. This isn't new - from the Ancient Egyptians onwards we've been slapping on dubious products - lead, arsenic and belladonna have all been used in the pursuit of beauty.

I looked at the products I use on a normal day, and I recalled what I used 10 years ago, when I was 30 years old, and 10 years before that. It doesn't look like I use that many things, until you think about the fact that I'm putting all those things on my skin every day. And this is without the moisturisers, foot scrubs, face masks, hair dye and foundations I might want to use occasionally, when I actually make an effort...

A typical day in the life of my bathroom cabinet when I was 20 (basically just kept clean), 30, and then 40.

I think I'm reasonably low maintenance, but I've gone from using four products a day to 16. At this rate of increase (doubling every 10 years) I will be using 64 different products every day when I'm 60!

What do we want from skincare and cosmetics?

Women are complex always-changing creatures, so I can only speak for me, now. At 40, I want to look pretty, smell nice and preserve my attractiveness for as long as possible. I also want to do these things within my means and without damaging myself or the planet.

What do these things actually do? I still remember the time I went into the Body Shop and a sales woman started telling me about the special particles in something or other - sales patter masquerading as science.

We know that make-up works, because we can see the results immediately. Applied correctly, it makes us more attractive. We know that soap, shampoo and deodorant make us less smelly. Conditioner makes hair softer and easier to brush. What about the other things? I have no idea if the moisturiser I put on my face is actually protecting it, or what it's supposed to be protecting it from - damage and dust from the outside world, or the effort of holding up my face for 40 years?

Nine steps to loveliness

I looked up what the beauty gurus recommend I should be doing to my face every day, now that I'm 40. I found The Ultimate Skincare Routine for your 40s (written by two people who make a living from selling and writing about beauty products). It's pretty typical - there's a lot of stuff like this out there. You're supposed to do all these steps twice a day, with variations for morning and evening. I've paraphrased them for you:

1. Cleanse - wash your face with chemicals
2. Cleanse again - with some different chemicals (in case you missed a bit)
3. Tone (rub some kind of alcohol on your face)
4. Exfoliate (scrub in case the cleansing wasn't good enough)
5. Antioxodise with serum - very concentrated moisturising stuff that no one seems able to explain
6. Retinol - helps regenerate old skin cells or something
7. Eye cream - because you're probably feeling a bit sore now
8. Moisturise - put back the grease that you just took out
9. Face oil (apparently different to moisturiser) - gives you something to cleanse off tomorrow

Do normal people really do all this every day? I do just three of these and it feels like a lot. When are you supposed to find time to do anything else? And it must cost a bomb!

There is so much written about skincare products, it's almost impossible to find any proper answers about what these things are - when you try, you are just deluged with articles claiming they are the best things ever without really having any explanation of what they do. Where 'research' has been done, it seems to involve giving a bunch of women a cream and asking them if they like it. I haven't yet found anything to say whether or not any of this stuff actually works.

Destroying the planet

Perhaps my biggest concern about all this consumerism is the toll it takes on the planet. There's the packaging for starters - a lot of plastic. Of course I recycle, but it would be a lot better if I didn't buy these things in the first place. If I want small bottles to carry around, then I buy large bottles and decant them into smaller reusable ones. I have switched to shampoo bars which cuts out plastic bottles and I use soap not shower gel, which is much more economical on packaging. But there's still a lot of plastic.

Then there's the products themselves. The ones with the exfoliating beads wash into our water supply and damage plants and animals (avoid them). Then there's animal testing. I Google cosmetics that don't test on animals before I buy, but invariably these brands aren't available on my small-town high street. I want to buy this stuff in a shop, not online, because that way I can try it on and see what I'm getting, and also save the ridiculous amount of packaging it's apparently necessary to post this stuff.

It's hard to find soap that doesn't contain palm oil. This stuff is an environmental disaster that has led to epic deforestation with species like chimpanzees losing their homes and therefore their lives. I don't want to kill chimps so I'm trying to find products without palm oil. It's almost impossible and made even more difficult because palm oil masquerades as other things on packaging (palm kernel, palmitate, palmate...)

All the mainstream brands of soap that I have found contain palm oil. I ventured into Lush (for the first time) to buy a bar of palm oil free soap. It cost me £6.70. That is ridiculous. I just want to wash my body without orphaning any chimps. Does that really involve paying nearly £7 for a bar of soap? What did we do before they invented palm oil?

Destroying my body

So I'm tripping along smearing moisturiser into my face and then I see something on Facebook about cosmetic products linking to cancer. Because what are these things made of? Chemicals. So we're smearing chemicals all over our faces and bodies. And thinking this is a good idea. Far from giving us the appearance of eternal youth, they may actually be hastening death.

If we follow the nine steps above that so many skincare gurus are telling us then we are smearing no fewer than none types of unknown chemical into our faces every day, probably more if we use different products in the morning and evening. On top of that there's the washing products - shower gel, shampoo, deodorant, and of course the make-up, made of more chemicals.

What the great skincare swindle means for all of us

To summarise, if you are a woman then you are probably spending a lot of your time and money smothering your face and body with chemicals that could not only damage you, but are very definitely damaging the world around you. I want to be beautiful. You want to be beautiful. But maybe we need to be more sensible about our pursuit of beauty. And apply a healthy squirt of scepticism to the skincare and cosmetics industry, before we hand over all our hard-earned money.

How Trump’s America is taking back women's bodies

The United States of America considers itself one of the most progressive countries in the world. It's the Land of the Free with the Great American Dream. What they don't say it it's The Land of the Free Men, where any opportunity is open to anyone, just as long as you're a man.

In the country that has never yet had a woman in charge, Alabama this week passed a bill stopping women having abortions.

Whether the child is severely disabled, the result of incest or the product of rape makes no difference. Once a woman has seen the blue line on the pregnancy test she's responsible for it for the next 18 years. A doctor performing an abortion can be sentenced to 99 years in prison.

The Pro Choice argument

It should be enough to say women should have the right to abortion because no one should be forced to have a baby if they don't want to. But it's obviously not, so I'm going to spell it out anyway.

We know from history what banning abortion means, and it's not more happy smiling children in idyllic family settings. It means bringing yet more unwanted children into the world who will be at risk of physical and mental suffering, who may have to suffer the distress at being removed from the parents who didn't want them in the first place. It means children of women who have been raped growing up hating a part of themselves knowing their existence is only down to abuse. It means desperate women seeking out dangerous underground solutions to terminate their pregnancies which put themselves at risk. It means women having to give up the lives they wanted to care for children they shouldn't have had.

The anti-abortion argument

What shocks me most is that there doesn't seem to be much of a counter argument. It goes something like this: "I think that this supreme being that I believe in probably doesn't want women to terminate their pregnancies, so therefore it should be stopped." It doesn't seem to take into account all the people who don't believe in that particular supreme being, or in this assumption about their god's beliefs. Or indeed the lives and bodies of women.

Men taking over women's bodies

There were 25 people who voted to approve the new law. Six who voted against it. Of these 31 senators, four were women. Can you guess which group the women were in? Yes, they were the small minority that voted to continue allowing women in Alabama to have abortions. So only two men voted that women should be allowed to make decisions about their own bodies.

The new ruling is opening the floodgates to 16 other states which are considering cracking down on women's rights over their own bodies.

I hope that in a few years time those 25 (white) senators will be prepared to open their homes to foster some of the many children who will be born into difficult circumstances as a direct result of this legislation.

Photo by Victoria Pickering via Flickr Creative Commons

Abortion may not be for everyone, and if you don't agree with it, then don't ever have one, but pregnancy, childbirth and bringing a child into the world should be a choice, both for the women and the children involved.

When a society stops allowing women to make their own decisions about our bodies, then we are instantly made more vulnerable and less important than men, who do not have these restrictions. If men really want women to stop having abortions then maybe they should stop having sex with them.

Alabama

Today it's Alabama, but anti-abortion bills have been introduced across the US and other states could follow suit. I know I'm writing this purely for the people who already think as I do. But if I can provide just a few more words in support of those women in Alabama who are fighting for their freedom, then it's worth it.

It is absolutely essential that we, as women, insist that we are the ones qualified to make decisions about our own bodies. Men should not be doing this for us.

If ever there were an argument for women to be involved in the political process, then this is it. Because if the Alabama senate had been reflective of gender balance, with 17 female senators instead of just four, this bill would never have got through and women in Alabama would still have been able to make their own decisions about what happens to their bodies.

Turning 40

I turned 40. I’m still getting over it. I expect that by the time I have got over it I will be well past it. Possibly closer to the next big milestone.

The year I turned 40, life hit me in the face. I had two miscarriages, a collapsing roof to deal with, and then I very nearly lost my Dad. Oh and my daughter started school. I don’t lump that in with the other things, but it was a major life event and having a child in school is another being a proper grown up milestone. No matter that, at 40, I am one of (if not the) older mothers in the tiddler section of the school. It was the year that I had to face life and think about death

So a couple of months ago I finally became middle aged. And I can’t get my head around it. It’s only a number, but it’s a big number, it marks a new life stage and, even if I live to 100, I’ve now used a large chunk of my time.

My friend invited me to her husband’s 40^th birthday party, shortly before I reached the milestone. I puzzled over the invite. “But I’m sure we already did this, a couple of years ago.” Slowly, it dawned. That was 10 years ago you idiot - that was his 30th. So there goes a decade. It’s true you know – time really does speed up as you get older. Except for Monday mornings. 

Chocolate and mortality in Bruges

Turning 40 came as a bit of a shock. I’d just about come to terms with being in my thirties. I was comfortable with that. I felt like I got good at it. I accomplished a few things as well. When I turned 30 I was married with no children. Since then I have gained a PhD, a divorce (surprisingly not related to the PhD) a good job, a five-year-old child and a new partner. I have also moved house four times (maybe not an achievement, since one of the times was moving back with my parents) and grown out my fringe (we’d been together a long time). I have still failed to publish a novel, but I have a blog which was going pretty well until my annus horribilis kicked in (more on that shortly). Put like that, maybe I don’t sound so bad. I mean, at least I’m doing stuff with my time.

Turning 40 was the bright spot in an otherwise bleak year for me. Two miscarriages, a collapsing roof (very expensive and stressful to sort out), redundancies at work and my Dad spent 12 weeks in hospital dicing with death (he got better).  

My 40^th birthday was spent wandering happily around beautiful Bruges hand in hand with my beloved, drinking beer that is stronger than I can possibly handle. It was idyllic. The icing on the cake (metaphorical at the time, although I got one a few weeks later) was my mum’s heartfelt message that my Dad had suddenly taken a huge turn for the better.

My new favourite place in the world: Bruges. Photo by Jacob Surland via Flickr Creative Commons

Fear begins at 40

I moved into my 40^th year on this planet feeling bruised from a relentless few months. Trying to spend and treasure every possible moment with my loved ones. And feeling terrified about the future, because when the past 12 months can do that to you, then you can’t help wondering what the next 12 will bring. My dad came face to face with his own mortality this year, and we faced it too. There were many times when my family and I were certain we were losing him. Once, my daughter, who always starts difficult conversations from the back of the car, asked me: “Will I ever see Grandad again?” And I had to keep driving and say brightly “of course you will, sweetheart” hoping that it was true, not least because I knew he, the one who was waiting outside the door when she was born, was missing her even more than she was missing him.

And I look back on my year of horror and realise that so much of that is what being 40 is. I’m grown up now, so while my little girl is allowed to fall apart, I am not. Disasters, like collapsing roofs, will happen and I will just have to deal with them, not necessarily alone. Miscarriages – if you’re going to try and have a baby at this time of life, then they’re more common too. And whilst once I needed my parents' support (and still often do), now sometimes they need mine.

I've noticed I type my date of birth now self-consciously – it seems such a long time ago. I don’t want to admit to my younger colleagues that I remember the eighties, that I grew up in a world without memes and mobile phones.

Many of my friends got to 40 ahead of me, and they seem to be coping OK with it. Is it just me? 

What not to say to someone who's had a miscarriage

It can be hard to know what to say to someone who has just had a miscarriage. It's a difficult time and it's not your fault if you don't know what it's like. So I'm making it a bit easier for you. Here's what not to say.

1. At least you already have a child.

Maybe this makes it easier in the long run, but in the immediate aftermath of a miscarriage it's not helpful, because it's not about having a child, it's about having this child, the one that's been lost.

2. Next time you'll have a healthy pregnancy.

A doctor said this to me, but I don't care how medically qualified you are - it's bullshit. Maybe I won't be able to get pregnant again. And if I do the chance of that one miscarrying are exactly the same as they were for this one. So maybe I'll have a healthy pregnancy, or maybe I won't. Either way, it's not a dead cert so don't treat me like an idiot and promise what you can't deliver (pun alert).

3. It was very early.

Obviously I know that, and maybe it makes it easier, maybe it doesn't, but you saying it is not helpful. Because from the second I became pregnant my body and my brain was preparing to have that baby, and now it's not going to happen, so I have to adjust to that. Just because it was early doesn't stop it being a big deal.

4. At least you can get pregnant. 

There's not a lot of point in getting pregnant if you don't end up with a baby. You get all the hassle - putting on weight, nausea, avoidance of lovely food and wine - without the lovely outcome.

5. It wasn't meant to be. 

If you'd spent hours cooking me a lovely dinner, and I came round to your house and we had a nice chat and a glass of wine and were both getting really hungry and you went to dish up the feast you'd been labouring at all day, only to find that the cat had just eaten the lot, and then I said to you 'It wasn't meant to be', what would you do? Obviously my maybe-baby wasn't viable - but you're not saying that because that sounds a bit clinical and insensitive (correct). Just don't assume I share your crackpot notions of fate.

6. You will have a healthy baby, I know you will. 

No you bloody don't. Shut up and see #2.

7. Are you going to try again? 

None of your business. I haven't got over this yet, so why are you asking me? Trying again means opening myself up to the possibility of another loss, so don't make me think about that right now.

Empty Swings by Viola Ng via Flickr Creative Commons

If you don't know what to say, that's OK. And it's OK to not really understand. I couldn't really understand, until it happened to me. And I didn't know what to say. "Sorry" is good. It doesn't need any more than that.

Saying nothing

Everyone's different, but to me, saying nothing is worse than saying the wrong thing. Saying nothing suggests that you don't care, while saying the wrong thing is annoying, but at least I know you mean well. 

So next time you hear someone has had a miscarriage, say you're sorry that their baby died, sorry they had to go through it, just sorry. Ask them if they're OK (but don't expect that they will be), ask them if there's anything you can do, and if you've had one yourself and want to share your experience, then do.

Taking the mystery out of miscarriage

Last year I became one of many women who has experienced a pregnancy that ended in miscarriage. It was quite horrible. Then I did it all over again, just to be sure. 

The physical discomfort was nothing on the feeling of devastation that this wonderful thing that I had thought was growing inside me, that would have a name, and a mother and a father and a big sister, was ebbing away to nothing.

Around one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage (Miscarriage Association). Based on a very unscientific poll of my friends, around half of my friends with children have had a miscarriage at some point. It’s very common. If you’re a woman in your 30s or 40s you will definitely know several people who have been through it. But you might not know they have, because we don't like to talk about it.

Early pregnancy

The second I found out I was pregnant I began to make plans about how we would fit a new little person into our lives. We mapped out the rest of our year with thoughts of pregnancy and infancy, preparing to be a four not a three. And I worried constantly about how I would cope with a second child.

I try to be pragmatic about it. My pregnancies miscarried because they weren't viable. The embryo or whatever it was, could never have been a person, and in that sense it wasn’t a loss. 

That’s a lot of crap really. It’s true, and maybe it helps. But the moment you become pregnant your body and brain starts preparing to have a baby. It may not even be a foetus yet, just a microscopic collection of cells, but your body starts to make room for it. I was eating and exercising more or less as I had been before, but I was getting bigger. Maybe I could still fit into most of my normal clothes, but they weren’t comfortable anymore. 

Pregnancy is hard. Some days I felt totally fine. But at other times it felt that the thing that was trying to grow inside me was taking every piece of my energy, and I could hardly pick my feet up. There had only been very few weeks of this. But afterwards it still hurt that it was all for nothing.

Photo by tipstimes.com/pregnancy via Flickr Creative Commons

Sharing the news

There’s a lot of secrecy around the early days and weeks of pregnancy. There are reasons not to tell too many people too soon. You don’t want people congratulating you too quickly, when it can so easily go wrong. Maybe you don’t even believe it’s real until you get a bit bigger, see it wriggling around on a scan, hear a heartbeat. Or perhaps if you inform everyone of your good news, you don’t want to have to re-inform them that it’s gone wrong, so soon.

A positive pregnancy test is just a coloured line - it's a long way from a baby and I wouldn't advocate shouting far and wide as soon as you see the second line. It's nice to keep it between the two of you for a while. But being a bit more open about early pregnancy and the possibilities for it to go wrong might not take the sting out of miscarriage, might help take away some of the mystery. And if we knew how often it happened, maybe we'd be a little better prepared when it happens to us.

I told quite a few people I was pregnant. After it went wrong, I was glad I'd told them. My family could step in and help me in practical ways when it went wrong, without the need for much explanation. My friends talked to me, and told me about how it happened to them, and helped me feel less alone and despondent about it. Others just gave me a hug, which told me all I needed to know.

The end of a pregnancy

Miscarriage was just a word before this. I knew it meant a pregnancy that went wrong, but that was about it.

I learnt that, for me at least, miscarriage is a process not an event. I’d expected it to be over within hours at the most, but the first took 11 days in the end. That’s 11 days from hope and happiness to a horrible cycle of fear, anxiety, distress, pain, sadness. My second miscarriage took longer, and included surgery. 

I had no idea what to expect. Was I going to have contractions, like in childbirth? Would I be bent double in pain? Would I see the remains of a baby? Would I wake up in the night in a pool of blood?

I asked the doctors what to expect, and how long it would take, but they said they couldn’t really tell me. And when you're scared, distressed and confused it's hard to know what questions to ask. I found some graphic descriptions of miscarriages on the internet, but didn’t know what would apply to me.

Considering so many of us experience miscarriage, you’d think there would be quite a lot of information about it. The people close to me, who had been through it before, helped me the most. So I’m glad I felt I could tell them.

Rude Nasty Girl's miscarriage tips

I hope this doesn't happen to you, but if it does, here are my four top tips:

• Don’t drink too much! If you think you're having a miscarriage you'll probably get an ultrasound scan. You’re told to go with a full bladder, but you’ll probably be kept waiting and it can be quite painful. Also, as what they’re looking for may be much smaller than a usual scan they may press very hard, which is extremely painful on a full bladder, so don’t overdo it.
• Take a pen and notepad: You might not be very with it and take in what’s going on, so write down things like your next appointment, or anything important they tell you that you want to remember. You might find it’s all a blur afterwards.
• Take drugs. You can’t stop the emotional pain but you can tackle the physical pain. Keep painkillers by you, make sure you’re stocked up and knock them back whenever it starts to hurt. You don’t need two types of pain in your life.
• Take time: I didn’t do this. I didn’t give myself enough time. I wish the doctors had told me not to go to work, but they didn’t. And when you’re full of pregnancy hormones and grief, you’re not necessarily in the best place to know how best to deal with it. I was desperate for it to stop hurting and it seemed like the fastest way to get there was to carry on as normal. Wrong.

More about miscarriage

When I was going through this I couldn't really find the kind of information I wanted to. There's no shortage of information pregnancy and babies but it's a different story with miscarriage, which is shocking given that one in four pregnancies ends this way. These are some of the few useful places to go:

Tommy's, the baby charity funds research into miscarriage, which includes my local clinic, and encouraging women to share their experiences 

The Miscarriage Association provides help and information on miscarriage

Clear and comprehensive information about miscarriage from the Royal Women's Hospital, Victoria that could help women everywhere.

The policy of separating children from their parents

This week the world learned that the US is tearing children away from their parents and locking them in cages. If I’d read that sentence a week ago I’d have thought it was an exaggeration, but now we’ve seen the videos and the pictures. It's a political policy, become real.

The country has left the UN Human Right’s Council, and made a firm stand that it genuinely doesn’t give a crap about human rights.

Disabled children are being left with no support, toddlers are wailing for their mothers and given no comfort. The euphemism ‘tender age shelters’ is used for institutions housing children under five who are hysterical and distraught. It’s so horrible, I don’t really have the words, just tears. But I’m trying to find them.

There’s a horrible irony that the country founded and populated almost entirely by immigrants, is the one that takes the harshest stance on letting people in. Let’s not forget that a lot of these people are fleeing violence and terror. They’re not flooding into the US just because they like hamburgers or fancy a trip to Vegas.  

I wrote a doctorate about the subject of separating children from their parents. Basically my research found that it’s bloody obvious that children need their parents, and it’s been bloody obvious for a really long time – like at least 160 years. It used more academic language and there was like, evidence and proof and that type of thing. But that was the gist.

Photo by Gary Robson via Flickr Creative Commons

Once upon a time

Here’s an unrelated story about a mother and daughter living a comfortable, privileged life.

My small daughter spent last weekend away with her father. They have a good, loving relationship. Come Monday morning, she’d just got me, her mum, back, and we had to say goodbye again when she went to nursery and I went to work. Normally she runs off to her friends happily, but on this day she didn’t want to let me go. I left, because I had to and I watched with relief (and sadness) as her nursery teacher scooped her up into a cuddle and with reassuring words carried her into nursery.

I’m telling you this story, because it shows how hard children find separation from their parents. My daughter was in familiar places with people she knows really well. But still letting go of her mother was difficult.

So I imagine us being in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people and her being taken from me. Saying good bye and not knowing when she would see me again. And not having the familiar friendly nursery teacher to cuddle and reassure her. To have no one, just a foil blanket. And for the parents, the agony of knowing that your small, vulnerable child is out there, alone and scared. Crying and wailing with no one to wrap their arms around them.

Forced separation

Forced separation is torture for a mother and child. I’m not being glib. The level of emotional damage it has for the child and the agony for the parent means it constitutes an act of torture, to both of them. Studies have shown you can fulfil a young child’s physical needs, given it food, water and shelter, but unless you meet it’s emotional needs, with comfort and love, it will just fade away and die.

I heard a news report of a poll that said that most Americans disagreed with the policy of separating families in the immigration process – around 66%. I’m sorry? Only 66%? Because that means that 34% of Americans think it’s OK, or don’t care. So now I am screaming at America. HOW CAN YOU NOT CARE ABOUT THIS? HOW CAN THIS BE OK?  

  

Changing the policy

As I write I’m watching updates bringing in new laws to stop the practice. And that's good. But we all know why this is suddenly happening – the pictures and audio of crying children have gone around the world and the US government is suddenly in the midst of a PR crisis. So they make a swift about turn, and of course blame the previous government. Because politics is a game, to those that play it. But the pieces are real people and their lives and their children.

I hope this does stop this awful thing from happening. But what about the children who have already been separated? More than 2,300 children have been taken from their parents. Will they be immediately reunited? I doubt it will be that efficient. And if and when they are reunited then that isn’t an end to it. That’s 2,300 children who’ve suffered severe and lasting trauma. They’re not going to be OK. Some will be resilient, but for others this experience will never leave them.

Those of who live safe and comfortable lives are so lucky. But we could easily have been born in another place. That four-year-old taken from her mother could have been my beautiful, precious four-year-old. That's what I think when I see the pictures. And if it was me I would want the world to stamp and scream on my behalf until I got my baby back. And stop this happening to other people. 

We know this is a bad thing to do. We know it in our heads, from endless studies and academic research, and we know it in our hearts, from seeing and feeling. Please make it stop.

Gender pay gap

Are women worth less than men?

All companies with more than 250 employees had to report what they pay men and women this month. The figures show that eight out of ten organisations of this size in the UK have a gender pay gap. I still haven't decided if this is just depressing, or if making the information so public is a sign of change. 

What the numbers mean

This means that women are generally paid less than women, but the figures highlight where the biggest inequalities lie, both in terms of sectors and companies. It isn’t about paying men and women different amount of money for doing the same job – that’s illegal. What it is about is that if you're a woman in all probability you take home less money than most of the men you know. It's not that your employer is paying you less than the men, but it could be that it's harder for you to get to the top-paying jobs. 

The Guardian explains the data in more detail, describing it as ‘a blunt tool’. The figures are good at giving a sense of the kind of pay gap between men and women, and how that is expressed across different organisations. But you can’t use them to say that any one individual is being paid less than they should be because of their gender.

The Guardian also has a fun game: 'When does your company stop paying women in 2018?' It's used the figures to convert the gender pay gap into the number of days women effectively work for free. You can type in the name of your company and it will tell you from what date in the year you stop getting paid. It's funny now, in April. Come the fag end of the year, when most of us are effectively working unpaid in comparison to the men we know, I expect it will be more depressing. Did I say fun?

Photo by Hamza Butt via Flickr Creative Commons

The figures are across men and women in all roles. That means if a company only has men at senior level then it will come out as having a big gender pay gap. A small number of companies have a gender pay gap in favour of women - usually because they have more women than men in the top jobs.

Working out what we're worth

The landscape of work is vastly complex. It’s hard to work out whether I am paid less than a man for doing my job, because nobody else does my job. And there are millions of people out there like me, who work in companies that employ a single person to do a unique job. Comparing these jobs to each other is hugely difficult. 

Salaries are decided based on lots of factors, including:

• Geography – where you are in the country
• What the organisation pays other people at this level  
• What the sector pays other people doing this or a related job
• What’s available in the budget
• How much you asked for (you're supposed to negotiate)
• Manager’s discretion (including much they want you and how good they think you are)

What reinforces this culture, is that we’re not supposed to talk about how much we earn. A combination of Britishness and contractual obligation prevents us from discussing actual numbers. And it’s in our employers’ interest to keep it this way. So like most other workers in the UK, I have no idea how much the people who sit around me make. They could all be on six figures, or getting half my salary, for all I know and they will think the same of me.

Do people take me less seriously because I’m a woman? Am I supposed to ask for more money at some point? Has my gender pushed me into making career mistakes?

Why in 2018 do women still earn less than men? 

This is the million dollar question (literally). 

Sometimes I'm sure it's about the employers, valuing women less than men and expecting less of us, sometimes it's the employees, lacking confidence to negotiate on salary or go for the top jobs that we're just as capable as men of doing.

But the two biggest reasons that most research throws up are type of job and child-rearing. 

Women predominate in sectors that pay less - care work, teaching, charities, the arts, while men predominate in better paid areas such as finance and engineering.

And women are more likely than men to step back from work when they have children. Whether by going part time or taking time off, or just keeping their career where it is for a while, while our children are young, we're not progressing all that much. At the same time our male peers are continuing to move forward, and so leaving us behind. For this reason men are much less likely to be in jobs for which they're overqualified than women. And while our salaries are stagnating, theirs continue to grow. 

It's not about the money...

For a lot of us, work isn’t entirely about the money. Where I work, it definitely isn’t. I've wondered if I could get paid loads more money using my skills in a job I hated. But what would be the point of that? If I’m going to spend that many hours of my life doing something, I’d rather it was something I enjoyed. If I have enough money to live comfortably – pay the bills, go on holiday and keep myself in lipstick and literature, then I’m pretty happy. I don’t want a massive house and I don’t want to buy loads of unnecessary stuff to fill it.

But where the money does come into it is value. It puts a price on my head and tells me what my company think I’m worth. And so if I’m badly paid, I feel that they don’t value me very much at all – either because they undervalue me, or because I’m really not worth very much.

I would never take or leave a job for the salary. But I have been in a job where the salary was much lower than I'd come to expect for my skills and experience, and I'm sure the lack of financial value placed on my contribution to the company contributed to my overall sense of dissatisfaction. I didn't stay long. 

Where next?

If women are getting paid less than men, our employers are telling us they don’t value us as much as men, and that we’re not worth as much as a man. We need to find the confidence to go for the top jobs, and ask for the top salaries because we know we are worth them. We also need to educate our sons and daughters, teaching them that there is room for them both in the arts, sciences, caring, teaching and financial professions. If we're stuck with pay inequality, there's no reason our daughters should be. 

Call me by my name

Boris Johnson got into trouble in the House of Commons recently for referring to fellow MP Emily Thornberry by the wrong name. He called her 'Lady Nugee', as her husband is Sir Nugee, so this is a title she could have a right to, if she wanted it.

The story in the House of Commons was over as soon as it began. Johnson was admonished and apologised. And here I am still going on about it.

There were a lot of arguments about it. Some people said it was fine for Johnson to do what he did, because that's her married name, so what's the problem? Others were very angry about it, because that's not the name she uses.

Boris Johnson by johnhemming (Flickr) and Emily Thornberry by Rwendland via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do you get someone's name wrong? You might forget. It could be a simple mistake. We've all done it. Or it could be a sign of disrespect. It suggests you don't consider them important enough for it to matter. Why trouble your busy brain with someone so trivial?

Johnson's slight of Thornberry was rude for these reasons. But referring to a woman by the married name that she hasn't taken is also rude because you're taking their right to choose their name from them, and forcing them into a patriarchal convention that they don't want. It is sexist.

Name changers

I have friends who are kick-ass feminists who have taken their husband's names. There are lots of reasons to do this - tradition, and a sense of being a family together, and others. I have friends who have kept their own name, because that's who they are. I have friends who have double barreled. And I know women who have worked hard and built up a professional reputation with their name so they keep it for professional purposes.

The point, for me, is not whether or not Emily Thingummy chooses to go by her husband's name or not. The point is that you should call someone what they want to be called. It doesn't matter if that's the name on their birth certificate, the name they inherited from their husband, or a name they made up during a drunken weekend in Blackpool with a deed poll form. If they say their name is 'Knickety Split Split' then that's what you should call them.

Women criticising women

Johnson's faux pas drew the usual misogynist tits to social media, going on about crazy over-sensitive feminists, and man-hating. Though how you get from marrying to man-hating in such as easy step, I'm not sure.

I also heard some women defending Johnson (which, incidentally, he's smart enough to do himself).
When I hear women defending this behaviour, because they took their husband's name, so they think everyone should, I think that the problem is with them. It smacks of their own insecurity at the choice they made. It's a free choice, in 21st century Britain. Change your name. Don't change your name. Whatevs.

A married woman who doesn't take her husband's name isn't implicitly criticising married women who do take them. She's making her own choice, and it's really nothing to do with anyone else.

I've heard some women saying "why get married if you're not going to take your husband's name?" I am so utterly staggered by this, that I find it hard to mount a coherent argument. There are a trillions of reasons why one person might marry another. Names are really a very trivial part if marriage.

Just do what you want to do, and let everyone else do likewise.

Love
Danny, which isn't my real name, but it's what I asked you to call me.

Precious moments and FOMO

I’ve turned down lots of invitations. I’ve made lots of apologies. I’m lucky I’m still getting invited.

While most parents get to spend every weekend with their offspring, I only get half. So every minute of my weekends with my child is precious.

This year is a big year for many of my friends – the year many of us turn 40. But I’m repeatedly turning down invitations because they involve daytime activities without children, and I feel that I should be there for my daughter at weekends.

It’s not about getting childcare. She and I have a supportive family with lots of people who help us out and love spending time with her. It’s simply that if I don’t see her at the weekends, and I’m working four days a week, then when will I see her? Whenever she’s away from me at weekends, the next day she looks up at me and asks, heart-meltingingly: “Why don’t we get to see each other much?” 

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had the conversation “Sorry you've got childcare problems.” Sometimes I bother to explain that it’s no about finding childcare, it’s about being there for my daughter. Other times I just shrug and say “maybe next time.”

Fear of missing out

I’ve been conscious of the preciousness of these days throughout my daughter’s four years of life. As a single parent, there have been lots of occasions I missed out on. But while a few years ago the FOMO would have got the better of me, I’ve tried to look at what I have. It’s a kind of growing up – learning to appreciate the good things in my life and accept that I have to make sacrifices to have them. Mostly I’m OK with that. 

Photo by George via Flickr Creative Commons

For every missed party has been a bevy of beautiful moments – cuddles, tickles, milestones, the funny, profound and downright crazy things she says to me. Family life simply means you can’t do everything anymore. That’s not just something for single mums, that’s all of us. To be apart from her, by choice, on some of the few days we have together feels wrong.

I struggle to work out if I’m doing the right thing. Is this what a good mother does, or am I being a sap? Am I letting down my friends (who will only turn 40 once) and being overprotective? Am I allowing myself to be manipulated by a four-year-old?

Please just keep on inviting me. I'll come when I can. 

A tide is turning

Every other day it seems some new scandal of sexual harassment comes out. It’s interesting. Or tiring. Or dull. Or scary. It depends on your perspective.

Most people agree that the serious sexual offenders who have used women’s sexuality against them, manipulated them, blackmailed them with jobs for favours, should be discredited. They shouldn’t get away with it (although it disconcerts me that people are being sentenced without a trial).

Then there’s #MeToo – with women across the world using social media to demonstrate the prevalence of sexual harassment. Some call it standing up for ourselves, others call it whingeing.

A lot of men, and maybe some women are confused by this. I can see why. Do men feel that women are looking for any excuse to take them down? Is this a chance to get at men? Are we blowing things out of proportion? 

Maybe there will be the odd false accusation – isn’t there with everything? But I think the truth of it is that there is and always has been a horrible culture of treating women and their bodies as objects. It’s something that every woman experiences to a greater or lesser extent. And now we are at one of those rare moments in history where we rise up and shout that it’s not fair, that it shouldn’t be like this.

I once knew someone who admitted to occasionally copping a feel in the odd nightclub crowd. And then someone else did it to his girlfriend. That put a different perspective on it, and he stopped. The problem? He hadn’t thought it through. It simply hadn’t occurred to him how his actions affected the person, and how he would feel if someone did the same to the women he was close to.

Legs by dsasso, via Flickr Creative Commons

Having your bum pinched isn’t as significant as other forms of sexual assault. It’s a long way from rape. I mean, it’s really not that bad. You feel a sense of indignation for about ten minutes and then you move on, because you don’t know who it was and your bum has basically recovered from the affront. Where it’s scary is not in the action itself, but when it’s used as manipulation, to imply that you’re getting a job because you’re pretty, or worse, that more is expected of you. Or a dress code that says you have to wear black underwear and stilettos to do this job. It’s a sign of a culture where men see women as objects for their delight and delectation, not as people like them.

If people feel confused and threatened by the turning tide, is it that they don’t understand how widespread and unpleasant sexual harassment is? Do they understand that their wives and daughters have experienced it? Do they think it doesn’t matter?

I'm delighted that there is now a chance my daughter could grow up in a culture in which no one thinks it’s their right to touch her body without her consent, to see her as an object. I want what she does with her body to be her decision, not somebody else’s right.

But this is a dramatic culture change in the way that women are perceived, both by ourselves and each other. It was never going to be an easy transition. Maybe the current vogue for harassment stories will be just a tiny chip in the iceberg of inequality. But, just maybe, it is helping us get to a place of greater freedom and respect for ourselves and our bodies. 

Shutting Children's Centres

When you've just had a baby the world can be a scary, lonely place. You have the most responsibility you've ever had in your life, with the least experience. 

For new mums with the most supportive husbands in the world, they are often still faced with nine hours a day, five days a week of being alone with a baby. Having somewhere you can go, for just half an hour a week is a godsend. So I am sad to hear that one of those lifelines where I live is to close: Warwickshire is closing its Children's Centres.

Children's Centres are small organisations that run a whole range of services to help parents with young children in their local areas. They were set up to 'improve outcomes for young children'. From breastfeeding support to first aid courses, to play sessions for babies and toddlers, and helping parents get back into work, they offer a huge range of services to their communities.

My Children's Centre and me

My new infant and I went to courses on infant first aid, introducing solid food and some play sessions. We also went to baby massage, which sounds like the most bourgeois of pastimes. But actually, when you've never had a baby before sometimes a bit of help on how to touch your baby is helpful. Personally, my baby wasn't really into it - she liked watching the other babies getting massages but didn't really want to be messed with. But for less opinionated infants, massage can help sleep, help their digestion, improve circulation and ease teething pain. It's a great tool to equip their parents to look after them.

Photo by Katherine via Flickr Creative Commons

The best thing my children's centre did for me was counselling. I was struggling to come to terms with the end of my marriage, being single and being a lone parent. It was a tough time and post-natal depression was pretty inevitable. On maternity pay with no second income, I didn't have the money to pay for counselling. But the Children's Centre ran a scheme of offering a set number of counselling sessions to people who they assessed as needing it. My counsellor was really wonderful. And it made a huge difference to me to have window of time every week when I stopped being weighed down by my situation and preoccupied by my baby and could talk through my feelings about the situation head-on with someone who was detached from me and my life. She made me better able to cope with everything that was happening, and as a result I was a better mum, which is what children's centres were set up to do.

Having a baby is wonderful, amazing and exciting, but it can also be an isolating and lonely experience, particularly if you don't know other people in your position. Other things are available, outside children's centres, but a lot of those are paid activities which are less available to single parents or families on lower incomes. Sessions run at children's centres were generally free.

Losing children's centres

It's not just about taking away massage classes for yummy mummies. It's about providing a community hub for parents and young children, giving them services they will benefit from, providing information they need about the kinds of issues that affect young families, and bringing them into contact with each other.

Without Children's Centres, routine queries about babies' wellbeing will be pushed back to the NHS, which will not be without cost. Parents have lost a major avenue to help them become better parents, by assisting with the all-important feeding issues, and monitoring infant weight gain. I don't know, but suspect that the staff working at Children's Centres are adept at spotting children who might have issues and therefore needed a bit of support. Are these children more like to fall through the cracks now?

It doesn't affect me. I had my baby. She did well and I haven't been near a Children's Centre since I went back to work. But my local centres made a big difference to me and I'm shocked that new parents will no longer have this.