Becky Boop

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