Women With Influence

Last week the post I'd written last year, Don't Fear the C-Section re-surfaced itself on Twitter courtesy of Kirstie Allsopp. She'd come across it via a hashtag I assume, read my piece and deemed it worth a re-tweet to her 399k followers. How terribly exciting for me and very flattering of course. I've watched her television programmes for years and was quite taken aback by such a compliment. Fully aware that this would be the first and last time my blog received any level of notoriety from the outside world, I allowed myself to get a bit giddy about it, told anyone who would listen and congratulated myself with a large glass of wine at the end of the day. Oh yeah.
Then I got to thinking about why she'd done that, what was her motivation. Why does she care what I think about C-Section births? Kirstie Allsopp is typically known as a broadcaster of property programmes and has made a living selling vintage home ware and interiors. So I had a good google on her and discovered that it was a topic close to her heart, something she'd written an open letter about a few years ago. Having had two Cesarean births herself, she'd taken an exception to the "too posh too push" stigma and spoken out about how we should be better prepared for the eventuality of a C-Section birth, as now 1 in 4 results in one. Turned out she'd started a bit of a debate. With many women supporting and thanking her for speaking out and others slating her for promoting unnecessary birth intervention. She's not afraid to speak out about other women's issues either from her opinions on marriage and banning homework. Through to acknowledging your fertility window and considering putting that first before your education and career. You may or may not agree with her opinions but at least she has some and there relative and real. I found it really refreshing to see a woman with influence sparking a discussion about something important that actually relates to my life.

I Need To Talk To You About Lena Dunham

I need to talk to you about Lena Dunham.
I need to talk to you about how much I love Lena Dunham.
You will know her from the HBO series Girls, which she writes, directs and plays neurotic Hannah Horvath. But I know her from this article she wrote for the New Yorker last year : Growing Up in Therapy.
I don't know how I came across this piece (maybe I was googling 'why am I so weird?') but I am so glad I did. I've read it at least five times, I keep going back to it every now and then. I connect with it and have a 'oh thank god' moment everytime I read it. Its not glamourous, its not glossy if anything its hard to read because its very personal and very direct.
But it is very real.
Not everything she writes completely connects with me, I haven't had the same experiences as her exactly but the parts about death, health anxiety, worrying about the world and every little eventuality, resonate with me and how I felt as a teenager.
Its the rawness of it is thats important, the truth in it. Its the fact that thousands, millions of girls and women will read it, see it and hear a real message. If I was a young girl now having these issues, finding and reading this article would help me, it would make me realise that I'm not alone and that even 'celebrities', even people who are your idols or look like they've got it all, suffer from overwhelming thoughts and worries.

And so I loved Lena Dunham instantly, in the moment that I read that article because of the colossal balls she must have to write it.

Grandparent Guilt

Three days a week Finley spends his day with his two sets of Grandparents. We drop him off in the morning and pick him after tea but he spends his whole day with them, all day long for about ten hours. This is because we both have to work full time and we are seriously lucky to have two sets of parents who can step in and help us in this way. I know there are a lot of people out there who don't have the help that we do and we are aware of how fortunate we are in this regard. 

However, I do think that society wants me to feel bad about this set up. In that I should feel guilty for abandoning my child, burdening our parents and skipping off to work without a care in the world. I get this vibe from the media, from other parents and from people who comment about how much time my son spends at my Mum and Dads house. The implication of course, is that our parents shouldn't have to raise their children's children. 

Well no, they shouldn't.

C-Section Bashing

Ok so I read this article recently and well, it kind of pissed me off.

How-C-section-affect-baby-s-BRAIN-development

Here’s the link if you want to read it and obtain a more articulate overview but allow me to give you a brief outline.

It’s basically a piece about a study carried out in Canada comparing the spatial attention of babies born vaginally to those delivered by Caesarean section.

In a nutshell the study was carried out on 36, three- month old babies who had some stuff waved about in front of them. If their eyes followed the object, that meant their attention had been caught and everything was hunky dory. If their eyes didn’t follow the object, it was deemed that their spatial attention was slowed.

The results of the study found that babies delivered via C-section were more likely to fall into the latter category.