And, look. Comedy is in the ear of the beholder, or whatever. But I can’t help but wonder if some of the negative reviews are in response to seeing women take on roles and archetypal behaviours that we associate strongly with men. … Read More Girl Boss
The chaos of being a woman is constant. The COVID pandemic and all the ways in which it rearranged and redefined the work of women and mothers might be the source of the current disorder. MomTok and DCC might offer a subset of young women whose lives were especially jostled by the pandemic relative safe harbour and the tools to navigate the ever-increasing pressures of post-COVID existence.… Read More Notes on MomTok and Cowgirls*
Society wants piety and quiet devotion, and for me to be content with a month of platitudes. They don’t want to hear about the yawning gaps in our social welfare and security systems. They especially don’t want to talk about actually compensating the unpaid labour of pregnancy. They don’t want to hear about the links between motherhood and long-term adverse health outcomes for women. They don’t want to hear about what it means to be poor and hungry, and raising children.… Read More Making Right AKA call your mother
At the end of the day, an isolating experience like IVF needs to be witnessed. Even when it goes well. You need people who see you to see that experience. It can be a hard ask when the outcome of the experience is a loved and cherished child. How do you talk about the regret and trauma without somehow tainting your motherhood experience by association? I don’t have an answer, but I am almost certain that not talking about it isn’t it. So it’s important to hear these stories. To witness. … Read More Reading the Score
PMDD is agony. It is made even more agonising by the lack of real scientific curiosity about it. All of the strategies I have found to cope have been developed by women who got tired of waiting for someone to save them, and who realised that maybe noone ever will. So they delved into the unknown depths of their bodies and their psyches and stitched together wisdom from allopathy, homeopathy and everything in-between. It’s not a science but it is enough. The only catch is that fellow PMDD warriors have to be willing to stay in our bodies. Especially when it is the least comfortable place in which to live. We have to stay, quiet and restive, listening to the responses to all the efforts we put into feeling some relief.
A strange blessing slipped in with the curse of medical misogyny. For now, it will have to do.… Read More An Ode to this Body
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
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
That is the promise of this dark tale. The patriarchy might be too brutal to resist and it may render you incomplete. But you are not alone in your incompleteness. And you don’t need to seek wholeness in traditional gender roles. You can find it in one another. … Read More The Grim Promise of ‘Promising Young Woman’
Know that you are of woman born. You come from a long line of incredible, ferocious, extraordinary women. You carry all of their legacies and stories with you wherever you go. Honour that in every encounter with women throughout your life. The world will tell you it is okay to forget that you are of women;… Read More Things I Want to Tell My Son in this age when #MenAreTrash
Rumbi Writes 
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