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
“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” Joan Didion “Writers are always selling someone out.” Joan Didion David Sedaris published the most beautiful essay on the death of his youngest sister, Tiffany, and how her… Read More Our writing, our selves: Meditations on the ethics of writing
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon… Read More Narrating Grief
By some strange coincidence, in the 6 months preceding my aunt’s death I had worked my way through three seminal ‘grief narratives’. I have half-joked to friends that I was sort of ‘studying up’, without knowing it, in preparation for what was to come. There really is no preparing for it, though. The best… Read More The Grief Book Club
One of the weirder things about grief is that all of the cliches – the ones you’ve seen play out on TV shows or movies, the ones you’ve read about it in books by more sophisticated authors who write in ways that mask the pallid clicheness – are true. It all comes to life… Read More On Grief
I broke up with one of my best friends last year. It was a spectacular, real-life, parting of the hearts – angry words were sent back and forth across the interwebs and via our phones, accusations were flung, incredibly hurtful things were said (by both of us). Reader, it got ugly. And as these things… Read More On Friendship
by Shehnaz A few weeks ago I bumped into an acquaintance of my mum’s at the mall. She knew of my current illness and inquired after my health, she then gave me a once over and asked, “Are they not giving you anything for the swelling?” That evening we had dinner with (my husband) family and my… Read More On being a ‘chubster’ – meditations on beauty and bodies
Rumbi Writes 
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