A number of years ago, when I was still working in the development sector, I visited an organisation working in an area in Mpumalanga that has high rates of ‘teen pregnancy’. Most of the visit was spent at the local primary school where I met girls as young as 13 who were balancing first-time motherhood and… Read More 16 and Pregnant in South Africa
In the end, we – or I – caved. My son was measuring big, huge, large, especially his head. There was no way I was even going to try to push him out. Yes, I carry that shame. And I still feel the need to justify it. But his head was huge, look at him,… Read More A Birth Story
There’s a word I’ve been religiously avoiding using in all my conversations, and writing about this experience, and the word is this: infertility. I avoid it partly because our doctor is yet to use it to refer to either of us (medically, officially, you are only allowed to assign it after a couple have… Read More The ‘I’ Word
Last week was incredibly hard. Dr Maya Angelou died. I suppose I knew it was coming. And to be honest, it wasn’t a death I thought of with great dread, as I did whenever I contemplated President Nelson Mandela dying. Maya Angelou’s work and her story meant a great deal to me, but I didn’t expect… Read More On mourning Maya Angelou, Ursula Le Guin and Failure
Somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that there will be absolutely no zen-ning this out. All of the wisdom, all of the stuff I’m reading, all the message boards I’m on, all the conversations with our doctors – I mean every thing – tells us to just relax. Rome wasn’t built in… Read More Myth Busting the Baby Dreaming
“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love” Leonard Cohen I’ve been trying to figure out when to write about this. After all the treatments and poking and prodding is done, and the losses have been endured, and we have what we want –… Read More Pre-baby Body
Rumbi Writes 
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