postnatal depression Archives

May 28, 2020May 28, 2020

Maintaining Your Own Identity in Motherhood

Women are often considered guilty of “losing their identity” once they become a mother.

Friends lightheartedly complain that their once-lively social media feeds are now purely full of baby photos, or that conversation seems to only swing in the direction of sleep routines and exploding nappy anecdotes.

Exercise buddies or other hobby partners (correctly) quip “haven’t seen you in a while” and “miss you!”.

Talk of girls nights on the town are promised but never gotten around to.

And let’s not forget there are still many women who are considered to be less qualified for their previous career, simply because they now have a child.

It’s true, for many women it seems like once they have a baby that their whole life becomes about their child.

That’s because it does.

May 14, 2020May 14, 2020

Limiting social media: Why I cut back my time online

Personally, I’ve always been a huge social media user.

I was a young high school student at the golden age of MySpace and MSN Messenger, and I greeted Facebook and Twitter with open arms as they were invented.

I went through an intense, emotionally-charged affair with Tumblr during its heyday (if you know, you know), and I jumped onboard with Instagram and Snapchat as well, soon after their invention.

I was part of that first generation of “If my social activities aren’t documented on social media, then did they really happen?”

May 6, 2020May 6, 2020

Books I’ve Been Reading: April

I’ve always been a massive bookworm.

As a child my parents used to joke about how I always had my nose in the pages of the newest hardback I could get my hands on.

As a teenager learning to drive I found out how much I didn’t even know the streets of my hometown well enough to navigate without help, as I’d usually spent my time as a passenger reading.

As an adult I still spent hours immersing myself in different worlds from fiction novels, or filling my brain with new information from non-fiction books on topics I found interesting.

Since becoming a mother six months ago, however, I found I hadn’t really been taking part in one of my favourite activities, reading, at all.

April 21, 2020April 21, 2020

My sweet baby, please stop growing

My darling baby girl:

You are now six months old.

Please, stop growing.

I can hardly believe it was only six months ago that you were born: A tiny, red, wrinkled bundle of pure joy, and complete innocence.

You’ve grown so much and have developed into the little human you are now, with her own cheeky personality and funny traits.

It makes me so proud to see how far you’ve come.

But please, stop growing.

April 17, 2020April 17, 2020

6 Reasons Why Mum and Baby Groups Are Awesome

Mum and Baby Groups are a fantastic resource for new and not-so-new mums alike.

I’ll admit, before I had a baby myself I wasn’t quite sold on the idea of Mum and Baby groups.

A whole heap of crying babies in one room plus a bunch of strangers with whom the only thing I share in common is that I too recently pushed a little human out of my vagina*?

No thanks, don’t think it’s for me.

April 9, 2020April 9, 2020

Measuring ‘Productivity’ by the Little Things

Recently I posted on Instagram relating to mental health, parenting, productivity, and that feeling of having not gotten anything “done”.

The post got such a fantastic response, so I wanted to expand on that topic a little more here.

March 27, 2020March 31, 2020

Motherhood: The hardest thing I’ve ever done

Motherhood is hard.

Harder than I ever thought it would be.

There, I said it.

Everyone acts like being a mum is this blissful little bubble that feels like rainbows and butterflies 24/7.

In actual fact, motherhood is a rollercoaster – yes, it soars upwards into those moments of heaven on earth, but then catapults into stunning depths of stomach-sinking emotions.