Pain and heartbreak in friendship feels absolutely awful. It is so much worse when we don’t have spaces to scream, cry and vent. Even more so when we can’t admit just how much it hurts and changes our hearts. Thank goodness for art that recognises and tries to capture that, before the world’s end.… Read More F.R.I.E.N.D.S
Maybe it’s the spirit of tough love tacitly encouraged by the BFHI. Maybe it’s the health system still recovering from the damage wrought by COVID-19. In this story, I saw a little bit of my own lonely, isolated moments of motherhood reflected. A combination of a system that assumes there is a singular way to teach mothers to feed their children, and a society that expects so much of mothers and asks that we bear the burden of tasks in private, in silence. … Read More Mother-Friendly
As esoteric as this all seems, it is much easier than a world in which we are tallying workshops held, and numbers of attendees, and spend on office stationery. It brings to bear the truth that those of us committed to development work know: this is heart work. We are in it because we are or want desperately to be helpers. Our hearts are in it. It makes sense that there will be heartache and grief involved. By facing this, and being honest with ourselves and one another, we perhaps give ourselves a real shot at being part of radical change.… Read More On Working Without Guarantees and the Necessary Grief of Change Work
If you’ve ever been an unwitting part of a cultish group, you may have experienced The Moment. It is a single moment (that stands out in a series of moments) in which you realise the extent of the horror to which you’ve been a party to. … Read More The Costs of Cults
Even if we can’t agree on the lessons of COVID, I am sure we can all agree that the price associated with a crisis of that scale is far too high. Isn’t it worth our while, then, to make sure we never again have to pay it?… Read More Body Politics
We deal in possible worlds, yes. But not to the complete exclusion of present worlds. What’s the point of forecasting a perfect future for mothers if you don’t acknowledge current imperfections?… Read More Odd Futures and Possible Worlds
A good mother, I think, can only be made when her life, her health and the enormous responsibility placed on her person is acknowledged. A good mother, with her life respected, her journey supported, and the freedom to choose motherhood every day.… Read More Pro-Choice
The rich tapestry conjured up by the term ‘star stuff’ is lost in the pieces, and along with it, the nuance and complexity that make this life worth living after all. As a mother – or a child becoming a woman with children – my saving grace has been finding spaces in which to explore the nuance without guilt or caveat. The rooms I am most comfortable in are the ones in which I can gather all of myself together and share it with other whole mothers. Other spaces – the ones that require me to show up as just my breastfeeding journey, or my birth story, or my unalloyed delight at every moment of my children’s existence – are deeply uncomfortable at best, downright hostile at most. But the hardest rooms are the ones in which I am alone with the contradictions of motherhood. … Read More An Edible Woman
My six-year-old, Sam, wants to know if it’s hard being a grown-up. Or rather, being a parent. He says being a kid is hard, with respect to having to do what your parents say. So, I imagine that he wonders about my end of this raw deal.… Read More The Long View
Listen. I like my comedy kooky. I firmly believe that the weirder the set-up, the smarter and funnier the punch line. I’ve long been a fan of Celeste Barber, an Australian comic who is famous for spoofing some of the more ridiculous expressions of glam culture. She shares most of these spoofs with her huge audience on Instagram and captions them #CelesteChallengeAccepted. … Read More The Guilty Pleasure of #CelesteChallengeAccepted
Rumbi Writes 
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