Becky Boop

This post begins with a little disclaimer – it could be worse. All I have had to worry about over the past two months has been keeping my kids fed, entertained and passably clean. I am not on the frontline, I am not a keyworker expected to keep showing up against all the odds and, although I am furloughed, my job security is not threatened. There may be a bit of moaning in the paragraphs ahead, but I have not lost all sense of perspective or gratitude at the privileged position I am in compared to thousands of others. However, there are fundamental issues with using ‘it could be worse’ as a comforting life philosophy. Some days it is immaterial whether or not it  could  be worse  –  it’s still bloody hard. And there have been many, many days over the past two months that have felt significantly longer than their allotted 24 hours. Looking after my kids in these strange times has been a test of patience, endurance, creativity and humour – it has been a Mega Parent Challenge that

When you sit down to write a birth plan, regardless of whether or not you have done so before, all you can do is hope for the best. Of course you add in 'epidural if I feel I need it' or 'complete silence and being left entirely alone by absolutely everyone if I feel I need it', but you also write aspirational things like 'empowering music', 'a dark and peaceful space', and 'aromatherapy massage'. Needless to say, there is a reason why some midwives are advocating for referring to these as birth 'preferences' and not birth 'plans' - as anyone who studied Robert Burns, or even Steinbeck at  GCSE , will know, the best laid plans gang aft  agley , and this seem as (if not more) true for birth as it is for everything else.  One of the things I most definitely did not write in my birth plan for  Seb  was 'three different catheters please' or 'such a painful urethra I need an epidural more for that than for the contra

One of these days, someone will say to me "Remember that time you decided it was a good idea to take a residential job in a boarding school with a toddler and C working (more than) full time and then you nearly had a nervous breakdown?" and I will be able to smile wryly. At the moment, the ongoing catastrophe that has been my work/life balance since January 2018 is still very much too close for comfort, or any wry smiling. Flash back to June 2017, and the logic is pretty damn logical. I am about to return to work, with just the school summer holidays between me and a four-day-a-week teaching job, located 40 minutes from Brighton. I am asked whether I would be interested in a promotion - and it's a promotion that comes with accommodation on site. I LEAP at the chance. No mortgage, no commute, the chance to save - and of course the actual desire to learn more, the ambition to be more senior within the school, and the chance to develop my pastoral skill set which I had

Unbelievably, my maternity leave is almost over. On Friday I go back to school for a shiny new academic year, and Craig’s turn at baby wrangling begins. It feels moments since I sat on my bed in January, writing an annoyed blog post about watching Mandy Moore have triplets in ‘This is Us’, but all of a sudden M is seven months old and I’ve been off for ages. In the spirit of reflection, I have decided to jot down the best and worst bits of my leave, before it’s over. So here it is: Maternity Leave, The Review. Best Bits ·          Every morning in the week, C makes a bottle of milk and a cup of tea and leaves them next to me, before depositing M in our bed still all warm and snuggly in her PJs. She has the bottle, I have the tea, and then we lie around until I remember she is wearing her overnight nappy and therefore there’s wee in the bed. From next week, I will be the bringer of sustenance but also the shutter of the front door at 7.15am, leaving my two faves to snuggle. It’

I have had the great privilege recently of knowing not one but two families in the early stages of raising twins. Obviously I can’t speak for them – I can’t even imagine the complexity of such a mammoth task – but one thing I do know, because they have told me, is that it is hard. One friend, when I saw her last week, told me she was deliriously happy but also felt she had no understanding of quite how tough it was going to be. Partly because nobody  really  told her what to expect. I was chatting to the parents of some friends about this (who have also raised twins) and we were thinking about the nature of advice, and how every new mother feels, somehow, like they didn’t really know what to expect and that they could have been better forewarned / forearmed. This is such a predominant theme among new parents, and I have heard variations on it (and said it myself) a zillion times. Why wasn’t I warned? How could I feel so unprepared? Why did I go in blind? Why wasn’t this in the bo

After last week’s very serious post about empathy and children, I have been thinking more about my absolute inability to ‘curate my viewing’, as my friend Ben put it, in the light of impending/new maternity. If you had asked me a year ago which films should be avoided in this psychologically delicate state, I would have got as far as ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, and that’s about it. I’m not a horror nerd, although I do like horror films, and I am sure there are several involving pregnancy and babies, but they had not crossed my path. Children, sure –  The Shining ,  Don’t Look Now , even things like  The Woman in Black and  The Others . But not necessarily babies. What follows is a list of films I have watched recently that seemed, as per the previous post, to be SPEAKING DIRECTLY TO ME, and which I almost immediately wished I hadn’t seen. Massive spoilers ahead. The Witch Have you ever considered the answer to the question, ‘how can we make breastfeeding frightening’? Robert Eggers has

When I was at university we had a professor who surprised everyone by saying that, if it were possible, he might like to have ‘The Pillowman’ banned. The play, which features a series of brilliant but brutal scenes and stories of abuse, had changed for him fundamentally as he grew older. He mentioned having a child as a turning point, a softening. The suggestion was that by becoming responsible for a tiny life, your view of the world could shift. Art which you had previously tolerated, even liked, could suddenly take on a new meaning, your tastes changing as your perspective shifted. At the time I didn’t fully understand what he meant – I think as a class we prided ourselves on our ability to handle quite shocking drama and subjects – but I am beginning to now. It goes without saying that the first few days of motherhood are emotionally overwhelming, and that new mothers cry  a lot . What I hadn’t really bargained on was the longer term effect it would have on how I saw the world,