The morning of July 24, hundreds of paparazzi and thousands of fans wait outside St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, after hearing confirmation that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will soon introduce their new baby to the world. At 7.15am, one of the largest doorstop press conferences in the world begins when Prince William and…
Read more
I have never called myself a feminist. Being raised by a single mother in the 1980s with my sisters, equality for women wasn’t a concept that I questioned. You could say I took it for granted that women had equal rights. At this early age I didn’t question gender equality because I was only influenced…
Read more
How do we grow into our beautiful bodies when we don’t see real portrayals of them around us? A Beautiful Body Project uses photography and book-making to celebrate women who have bodies and stories and all things that maintain their beauty as they change. This week we spoke to Jade Beall, founder of the A…
Read more
We’re continuing our series on the Dale Young Mothers’ Program (YMP) from Wyong, NSW. Funded by the Youth Connections program and the Wyong Better Futures Local Solutions Local Advisory Group, the Dale Young Mothers’ Program gives young parents the chance to complete their year 12 certificate and form pathways to further education/work by creating a…
Read more
I blame Kochie. I blame Kochie for perpetuating what I like to think of as the “myth of choice” when it comes to breastfeeding, because it seems that somewhere along the line, ordinary people (people with breasts, people without breasts; people with babies, people without babies) got super distracted about breastfeeding. Distracted by strange concepts…
Read more
I immediately shot my hand up to write about Mother’s Day and then, a few minutes later, I thought, ‘why?’ What exactly excited me so profoundly that I said yes in the blink of an eye without even thinking of what I might, you know, actually write about? I think I did it because motherhood…
Read more
Thank you to all of the mums (and dads) of the world. Thanks for having sex, enduring a nine-month period of an alien growing in your belly and then pushing it out in a tawdry episode of sweat, blood and tears. And maybe poo. Because I really like your baby. I like the way I…
Read more
Mothers: whether we like it or not, the majority of us have lived in them, lived with them and learnt from them. But one thing we daughters may be learning all too readily from mum is a sense of guilt as she makes her choice to be a working mother, or not to be. You’d…
Read more
In May, Jamie Lynn Grumet literally became the poster mum for attachment parenting. After appearing on the cover of TIME Magazine (‘Are You Mom Enough’?) with her breastfeeding three-year-old, Grumet set off a multi-national debate about attachment parenting, with people wondering if it was natural, psychologically damaging, or selfish. And then Latch On NYC happened….
Read more
I haven’t ever wanted kids. Not even when I was younger, when everyone around me was either a child themselves or a parent and I assumed that all women had to have them. Because every tantrum, every complaint that ‘so and so got more than me’, every ‘I hate you mum’ that came out of…
Read more
True by Finnish author Riikka Pulkkinen is a tender and heartbreaking examination of secrets families keep from each other, and how even if we try to file it away, the past always informs our present. The novel centres around a family who gather when the matriarch, Elsa, is dying of cancer and wishes to live out…
Read more
I originally wrote this as a post for my blog, The Coconut Chronicles, but have expanded it here! Let me just put this out there – I’m not a fan of children. In fact, I would go so far as to say that children are like little aliens to me. I see them and I’m…
Read more
It’s certainly not news that many mothers have copped flack for breastfeeding their babies in public. I, for one, recall stories from my mum about the struggles that she faced when my siblings and I were young. However you’d think in this day and age the most natural process of feeding one’s young would be…
Read more
