Quetzalcoatl

10 days before birth When I started this blog, I wanted to bare all about certain aspects of motherhood and I guess I'm now happy and ready to open up. The biggest reason for publishing this is for there to be some positive stories out there. I found that, during a lot of my pregnancy, everyone would tell me about the horror birth stories that have been passed down from friend to friend and generation to generation equalling a progressively worse story as it passes on. Like someone rushed into A&E with a hand shoved up there. This can happen, yes, and I've heard a similar story since giving birth so it's not actually that rare. Giving birth is hard, and it can also be the most enlightening, uplifting, and empowering thing ever to experience. I remember being pregnant and someone asking me how I felt about birth. I was looking forward to birth. I actually couldn't wait. They were surprised. It's like the person that had asked me thought I should be nervous ab...

I wrote the following on April 4th 2020 just as Lockdown started to really kick in: "Today, I spoke to a 87 year old woman who was upset about her husband who's in a nursing home and could be suffering with Coronavirus. It's the first sentence of this blog post and I've already mentioned the word that is circulating the world. It's a scary idea. People are full of fear. We are told to stay in and be safe. Of course, we know it's for the best but it doesn't mean it's easy. It feels we're in a future dystopian novel but also like we've stepped back in time into the rationing times of war. I miss popping into the pub. I miss going out to my new yoga class (it's not the same at home). I miss going to baby clubs so all the mums can sit in a room and feel like zombies together because it's more better feeling like zombies together. I miss Oscar going to work because I miss Olive's face when he comes home from work. But most of all I miss...

I started reading this to my daughter when she was a few months old in her playroom/my library (my playroom!). She was listening intently but then she started crawling and, well, all the nice playing went to pot. She wants to get everywhere. So, I finished the little book at nighttime when I’d get into bed. I’d dissolve into a world unlike any other. I was transported into the trusted, childhood memories of our favourite characters such as the white rabbit and the mad hatter. The imagery is surreal, the world we are transfixed by reminds me of the nonsense poems that I’d read in my first year of studying poetry at school, like Jabberwocky. The nights I’d read this book, I was able to remove myself from weaning, sleeping cues, nap times, play time, and able to morph into a new world that was all my own creation. Well, Carroll helped me, but it was still mine and I was still Alice. Most of the time, though, I did realise how obnoxious Alice is and how confident she was. It’s remind...

This book was discovered during pregnancy in my local WHSmiths. I used to go there as a little child and pick out some new gel pens as a weekend treat. Yes, I love my stationery. My children I teach will tell you that! I have a special drawer with stationery treats in for star of the week presents. I have a special box with my stationery in that they can’t touch and I have my classroom stationery box that they can explore and use. Anyway, I’ve gone off piste. I could talk pens all day. But I’m here to talk Blood Meridian. I picked it up because McCarthy’s The Road is taught in the A-Level Dystopian module. We compared The Road with The Handmaid’s Tale (when it was on the cusp of going big). The Road has a sparseness to it like Blood Meridian. Like HT, BM was published in 1985. From the start, I was enthralled with McCarthy’s exceptional descriptive writing. The way he describes landscape is like nothing I’ve ever read: simplistic in lexis but detailed in syntax. He uses plenty of syn...

Yesterday morning I checked my school emails. I had a few in backlog so I was tidying my inbox up and getting everything into the right folders. I love an organised inbox. Anyway, as I was scrolling through, putting some emails into folders and deleting some, I noticed normality of previous life fluttering in. Emails like when they tell us that a car park is being cordoned off for visitors or the notice of a new CPD session or when the reception and office will be open. Emails that happen as a part of normal life at school. They stopped. All these 'normal' emails made me feel a twang of normalcy which we're craving so much since the outbreak of Covid-19. It's changed everything. We are all getting used to this change. We are forming a new normal. Education has been flipped on its head. However, what teachers are good at is adapting to change. We have to. Every year, pupils surprise us, technology advances our classroom practice and we have to learn to adapt or get los...

This blog was started due to beginning the MTPT Project (Maternity Teacher Paternity Teacher Project) whilst being pregnant and preparing for my maternity leave. My school fortunately contributed to support me through this process and I started having coaching sessions with a life coach that was arranged through the project. The one-on-one time with this coach began as a conversation about what this maternity project would look like during my maternity leave. I had all sorts of ideas; from starting an MA, to helping the elderly. One thing I knew is that I didn't know what I was capable of until I had a child so I was going into the project quite blind. I wanted to be open minded. For the first months of motherhood, I was absorbed into being a Mummy and our lives completely changed. Now, with a six month old, things have changed very slightly. Light has started to creep in from working life. I was sitting in the waiting room of the doctors and I read the introduction of Blood M...

I just had my haircut at 7:30pm on a Monday evening in the salon opposite me. That's the first time I've been out in the evening for 6 months. 6 months. It's flown by and it doesn't feel that long. I even missed her a bit. Silly me. Anyway, it was amazing. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Oscar, for cuddling Olive back to sleep when she woke up. I'm feeling like a new lady. This post, I'm harking back to the old days of being pregnant. It's been a while coming and my friend, Antonia, asked me to write something about this when we discussed it as she was pregnant at the same time and we spoke about how people felt like they had to right to discuss all your birth details with you even if they're a stranger. It's lovely chatting away to people (I'd chat to anyone) but I've never had anything like it when I was pregnant. Random people would say all sorts of things to me. It was such a bizarre thing. Last summer, when I was pregnant (that was a subo...