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PERSONAL

40

I’m 40 today. To be honest, I’m in a bit of a funk about it. I’ve been joking for years that I was born to be 40, but now that it’s actually here it feels so… adult. I don’t know how to do anything yet! I can’t be halfway done when I’ve barely even started.

I remember waking up on the morning of my 30th with $12 in my bank account and nothing but tomato sauce and wine in the fridge. I was flatting, stone cold broke from blowing all my money travelling, perpetually single, and working a job I enjoyed but that frankly wasn’t going anywhere.

On paper, it’s been an absolute ride of a decade. Husband, business, two kids, house, move across the country, brain work, body work, work work. I’ve come such a long way. I’m really proud of myself, when I think about it. I made human people and birthed them out of my body! My business partner and I have kept our wee business supporting our families for almost 10 years! I found an exceptional human being and had the sense to lock him down and put a ring on it! I suffered the consequences of neglecting my body all through my teens and twenties and I did the work to heal it! I did all that! Well done, me!

I’m learning, as I get older, that real progress is slow and boring. I’ve spent literal decades making wild plans to upend everything and crashing after a day or a week. The changes that stick are the little ones, the small tweaks and half-measures that I can stick with because I enjoy them. I resolved to read 50 books in 2012 and I’ve kept it up ever since. I resolved to go for a walk every day one month in 2019 and I’ve kept that up ever since too. I went two full years without touching a single morsel of gluten or dairy. I still fail more than I succeed, but it’s nice to know I can do hard things when I really want to.

The elephant in my room is my own writing. I decided to be a novelist when I was 12 years old, and here I am at 40, still dabbling. I can call myself a writer – that’s what I get paid to do, after all. I’ve written articles and blogs and a million government websites and several partial (and one complete) novels that are chilling in a box in the closet.

I’ve come back to fiction this year, after almost 10 years away from it. I’m making slow progress, but it’s progress. I give it an hour or two most mornings, and I’m enjoying it, and maybe that’s what really matters anyway. Maybe I’ll be published at 45, or 55, or maybe I’ll never be published, and writing fiction will just be the hobby I tinker with while I have my morning coffee.

And maybe that will be okay.

Maybe that will be more than okay, as part of this incredible life I’ve built with my family where I can swim in the sea and take the time to write and go for walks every day and play with my hilarious, infuritating children and obsess about curtains in my really very freaking nice house that’s more than I honestly ever dreamed of having. 

This morning I woke up 40, and there’s enough money in my account to pay our mortgage, and enough food in our fridge to feed our family, and an amazing family to feed. It’s all more than I ever dreamed of having. I’m very lucky, and very thankful, and apparently also very middle-aged.

Categories
PERSONAL

Two thoughts about parenting

1.

They say things “skip a generation” – often about innocuous things like having a green thumb or a passion for cooking – but I think it’s wider than that. Life is a wheel, and so is parenting. 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how you’re always parenting from your own trauma. We all want to give their kids whatever we didn’t have – but the flipside of that is that we can’t pass on what we’re not conscious of.

Here’s the simple version: my nana was an amazing cook who made everything (soups, pickles, sauces and jams) herself from the vegetables and fruit my grandfather grew all over their half-acre section. 

My mum, meanwhile, is a diabolical cook. Dinner in our house was usually boiled until it was grey or burned to a crisp – but we ate out a lot at actual restaurants, and our lunchboxes were always packed with hideously expensive (and hideously hideous) Eighties health foods like carob-coated rice cakes and gluten-free seed “crackers” with the texture and flavour of damp cardboard.

They both believed that food was love, but because Mum had never had packet foods and restaurant nights out, and I guess because Nana took care of all the cooking so she never felt the need to learn (no one wants to be into what their parents are into) – and maybe even because she saw how much time her mother spent making food instead of working or doing anything for herself – she showed that love by spending money on food rather than growing or making it.

And now the wheel turns back. My memories heavily feature nightly battles over tasteless dinners, and the crushing disappointment of opening my lunchbox to find nothing at all I actually wanted to eat, while all around me my friends tore open crinkly, colourful packets and crunched their way through brand-name biscuits. I love to cook. I’m an absolute nerd about nutrition, and growing and making food from scratch. And although they’re only 5 and 6, so far my boys only care about food that comes in shiny wrappers…

So now the less-simple version. I was listening to a podcast with Dr Becky Kennedy, who was talking about how your triggers with your children are often around whatever you had to learn to push down or ignore in yourself to get love as a child. Makes sense. But it made me think about the opposite, too – how we’re all trying to give our children the experiences that we didn’t have, or to heal whatever we feel was wanting in our own childhoods. But, in doing that, we can’t see whatever we did have, so we can miss out on passing on what our parents worked so hard to give us. It skips a generation, and we accidentally do the damage our parents were trying to heal in themselves as they parented us.

Here’s a concrete example, and a reason why I’m so grateful that my husband and I had different upbringings:

My parents were very typical helicopter parents. They were married a long time without children, and by the time they adopted me at 36 and had my brother at 37, they were determined that we would be and have everything. Mum’s stated goal for our childhoods was that we would be “well-rounded” – which is a noble goal, unless you have a hyper-focused, obsession-prone, socially-anxious, introvert bookworm for a child (me, hi. I’m the problem it’s me) who frankly just wanted to be left alone to read and write in her room until she was old enough for university. 

I found the constant parade of extra-curricular activities and team sports and exams and performances insanely stressful. I hated nearly all of it, and “it” was a lot. A team sport every term, swimming, speech and drama, a musical instrument, sailing, ballet, tennis, Scouts – I only realised in my thirties how tense and stressed out I was basically all the time. And because I was a kid, I thought the problem was me. I felt like there was something wrong with me that needed fixing so I could be “normal”. I felt perpetually anxious, not good enough, and like I could never be myself – or even figure out who that was until well into my twenties.

Diogo is the only child of a social worker single mother. He was, and is, her pride and joy, but she always worked full time so he spent a lot of time alone in their apartment or playing with the other kids in his building. His mum worked her ass off to give him whatever he wanted, and supported him so deeply that he grew up feeling like life often had no guardrails or boundaries. When he looks back, he sees himself as spoiled and entitled and ungrateful of how hard his mum had to work to give him what he had.

He wants our boys to appreciate how privileged and lucky they are, and to have the discipline to see things through and follow the rules – and to have those rules be clear-cut and concrete so they can feel secure in where the boundaries are. I want them to feel free to be themselves, and to always make their own choices.

This is the essential paradox of our family life. You can’t see what you never had. Diogo’s mum was permissive and indulgent, so he has no experience of feeling controlled and judged, which makes it hard for him to see the long-term consequences of occasionally being too strict or inflexible. Meanwhile, I’m hyper-aware of that, but I have no experience of feeling like I have more control of my parent than I should, so I find it hard to see the long-term consequences of being a pushover or letting my kids (Nico, he’s the problem it’s him) negotiate everything with me.

(On the other hand, I believe Nico could debate anyone on the planet and crush them into dust with his absolutely insatiable energy for arguing, negotiation, bargaining and disagreement, so… life skills? We’ve taken to calling him “Do Contra”, which more or less translates as “Mr Contrary”, because there is literally nothing you could say to him that he won’t find a way to disagree with or negotiate. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: that kid will save the world or he’ll end it.)

Just something to ponder.

—

2. 

Something else to ponder: I was thinking about boys and girls yesterday while I was watching the boys’ swimming lessons, and wondering how much of the fact that girls perform better at basically all forms of organised learning is because organised learning is by definition not set up well for little boys.

Part of it is definitely socialisation – we still reward little girls for listening and being kind and following the rules more than boys, so they’re very quickly indoctrinated into being rewarded for people-pleasing. Which makes them more tractable and teachable, because they follow the rules better.

But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because we also punish boys for being boys. This isn’t really a new idea, but it hit me hard in that moment. Nico was the last to have his turn at “frog kicking”, and his teacher had spent 4 or 5 minutes with each kid before him showing them where their legs needed to be. 

So, he, a six-year-old who has never stopped moving for a second in his life (without Minecraft being involved, anyway) had to wait quietly on his own, IN A POOL, without moving or playing, for upwards of 10 minutes. Spoiler: he could not. He wasn’t disruptive or dangerous, he was just amusing himself by diving under and popping up while he waited – but his teacher made him get out and sit on the side for the rest of the class, and he missed his turn. He actually seemed to take it in stride, but I was fuming on his behalf. I don’t know if I could stay still that long in a pool!

Before Nico was born, I did a lot of reading about how there’s no difference in boys’ and girls’ brains. And I know there’s enormous variation between and among the genders, and biological sex is a spectrum, so this is all a generalisation, but also: hormones exist. Nico has never played with a doll in his life. Luca loves them. They both say pink and red are their favourite colours. But, left to their own devices, they will always decide that the best game involves jumping on and/or pummeling each other. The urge to wrestle and fight and learn by moving their bodies in violent and unpredictable ways seems to be built in.

All kids have that to a degree, but in my experience it is much stronger in most boys. And then we ask them to sit still and be quiet to learn things, and punish them when they can’t. Imagine how that compounds over a kid’s school career. In that swimming class, the girls learned the thing, and the boy both didn’t learn it, and was punished for being asked to do something his body couldn’t do. Next week, the girls will have already had the lesson, so it will be easier for them to try that kick again. Nico hasn’t, and he’ll probably be distracted by being in a pool and trying to keep his body under control, so maybe he’ll fail to learn it again. And on and on and on.

“The data show, for the first time, that gender disparities in teacher grades start early and uniformly favor girls. In every subject area, boys are represented in grade distributions below where their test scores would predict.

The authors attribute this misalignment to what they called non-cognitive skills, or “how well each child was engaged in the classroom, how often the child externalized or internalized problems, how often the child lost control and how well the child developed interpersonal skills.” They even report evidence of a grade bonus for boys with test scores and behavior like their girl counterparts.”

I don’t know what the solution is, but I’m so thankful (again and always) that my kids are in Montessori environments where they can move their bodies and learn things in their own time and way.

Categories
PERSONAL

Luca turns five

My baby is five. His birthday was three weeks ago today, and I’m only just getting around to saying anything about it now because that’s how second children work.

I worry about this kid, but in a completely different way than I worry about his brother (about whom my concerns tend towards extreme sports or jail). I worry that other people can’t see how incredible he is, or that he’ll get passed over or not noticed at preschool because he’s so self-contained and low fuss.

That makes it sound like he’s shy or quiet, which for a long time we thought he might be – but it turns out he’s neither. Once he’s comfortable, he’s a tempest of action and wild stories. He’s the centre of all the action in his little squad of boys and an absolute chatterbox at home. He’s figured out how to provoke his brother into an absolute frenzy using nothing but a few well-placed words, and he gets deep and abiding satisfaction from doing it.

He’s a real little dude – always running and shouting and making a mess. But he’s also still my little clingy koala and an absolute mummy’s boy. Drop-offs are still hard for him every morning, and his favourite phrase is still “I want to be with YOU, Mummy”. He needs a back scratch and a face rub and a foot rub and all his stuffies and a thousand kisses to get to sleep, and he’d still vastly prefer it if I carried him everywhere. 

He’s stopped telling outrageous lies, mostly, but he’s still playing with language – he makes up his own words for things, or will spend a week replacing all his nouns with the word “cucumber”. He also has a very well-defined sense of drama that he chooses to employ in just the strangest possible ways. A couple of weeks ago I came home and he’d replaced my bedside lamp with his bunny lamp and put my lamp in his room. When I asked him why, he glared at me and said, “I will NEVER tell you”. And so far he has not.

He’s my little emotional manifestor, so he always has his own stuff going on. (Personality sun in the gate of aloneness; design sun/earth in the gates of skills and focus. (Interestingly, because our birthdays are exactly 9 months apart (yes, I know), I’m the reverse.)) He’s very self-contained, and can play quietly on his own for hours at a time when he’s in the mood (home sick the other day, he asked me to go and work in a different room because he needed “some time alone”). 

The flip side of that is that he struggles intensely with the Monday to Friday routine, and is always an exhausted mess by the holidays. One of our parenting challenges with him is going to be working out how to help him navigate knowing when he needs time out or a rest, and helping him get it.

Our other challenge is that he knows exactly how cute he is, and he plays up being the baby to avoid getting in trouble and to get his own way (which is also, annoyingly, really cute because mostly his own way is cuddles). He is acutely, painfully delicious and I can never get enough of his little face and his sweaty little hands and his giant feet and his bony knees and his soft tummy. It’s shocking that he’s already five, but also he’s more interesting and more fun all the time, so I guess I have to forgive him for getting so big. 

He’ll always be my baby though… possibly literally, since there’s a real risk I’ll still be carrying him into school when he’s 12.

Categories
MONTHLY PERSONAL

March 2022: In which we are moving and one of us (not me) is a liar

Every month since, oh, January of last year, I’ve planned to post a general life update here. 15th time lucky!

Somehow a third of this year has disappeared already. We made the massive, protracted and very angsty decision at the end of last year to move to Tauranga. Apart from 10 months in equally-grey Vancouver, I’ve lived in Wellington my whole life. The year before, I’d made the (I thought) final call and decided we would plan to stay in our house for the long haul. I hate the cold and the constant wind, but we love the kids’ school, and we’re close to coffee, the gym, old and new friends, ducks and dog walks.

Pretty much immediately, the universe does what the universe does, and upended everything. First, Diogo got a job where he works remotely from home, and I realised that all my client meetings had been online for the past year – so neither of us needs to physically be in Wellington anymore for work. Another big part of our decision to stay put had been about family – my parents are here, and although I desperately wanted to be closer to my brother and his wife, especially once they start a family, we had two of my amazing cousins and my aunt nearby. Then both cousins promptly moved away – one to Tauranga, no less – and my aunt and her partner decided to move overseas.

We’ve spent pretty much all our holidays in Tauranga since the boys were born. My brother has been there for about 10 years now, and his wife grew up there. We love the beach, the sunshine, the relaxed pace, the food. We have friends there and regular spots we like to go. We discovered there’s a Montessori primary school there, right by the beach, and I went and visited it and found it absolutely delightful.

Then I got home and it rained for three weeks straight. On the rare day that the sun came out and stayed out, we discovered our kids are old enough to spend pretty much the whole day pottering around outside without us. They love it. We love it. I realised how much of my time I spend being cold, and how intensely it saps my energy. I realised I want my kids to grow up looking like the kids I saw up there: sun-bleached hair, bare feet and tanned skin, riding their bikes and playing in the surf. There seems to be kids everywhere in Papamoa and the Mount – out playing on the street and in driveways in a way they just don’t in Wellington.

So we decided. We’d do it. We got Nico into the new school and found Luca a preschool, and I took January off work and spent it working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life, painting and sanding and scrubbing and weeding. Our aim was to get up there for the term 1 holidays, to start term 2 at their new schools.

Now it’s the end of March, and those holidays are two weeks away. Our house is still on the market – we had an offer, but they dropped out when they couldn’t find a buyer for their own home. This morning we put in an offer on a house, again, after several unsuccessful attempts. This one is probably also likely to be unsuccessful. We’ve managed to absolutely nail our timing and be caught in a perfect storm of bank regulation changes and Covid that mean the housing market is an absolute nightmare. But we’re sticking at it, because we’ve come too far now to go back to everything as it was.

It’s stressful, and it’s frustrating. And it’s exciting and overwhelming. I’m very scared and very hopeful.

Updates hopefully to follow.

—

I started an exercise in February that I heard about on a podcast – for 30 days, you journal each day under three headings:

  • What filled me with enthusiasm today?
  • What drained me of energy today?
  • What did I learn about myself today?

It’s meant to help you gain clarity about which of your habits aren’t serving you, and where you should be putting your energy. On day 30, you go through everything you’ve written and find patterns. These were mine:

  • Say what you need (it’s okay to say what you need).
  • Have a routine and stick to it; getting rid of the little choices makes the big ones easier.
  • Get outside and do things with friends and family.
  • Play with your kids (but say what you need).
  • Walk a lot.
  • Inertia will eat you; just do something. (Not scrolling your phone. Put it down.)
  • Eat the things that make you feel good.
  • Aim high but go slow – do things well and enjoy the process.
  • Just start writing. It’s always hard until it’s not.
  • Clean your house.

—

Nico is about to turn 6, which at Montessori means transitioning to primary school. He’s excited but I think also a bit nervous about being the youngest again – being a role model and a leader is a big part of his identity at preschool. He’s absolutely obsessed with drawing at the moment – it’s even eclipsed Lego. He’s discovered YouTube tutorials and will do 10 or 12 of them a day, some of them staggeringly good. He’s grown so much all his pants from last year are up above mid-shin, his limbs suddenly so long and skinny he looks like a little spider.

Luca is four and a half. He’s learned to ride a bike, has a girlfriend in his class, and has discovered the concept of “tomorrow” (a parenting issue I didn’t see coming. One evening, I mentioned something he was waiting for was happening tomorrow. The next day, when he asked me what day it was, I said “Tuesday” and he broke down in furious betrayed sobs, yelling “YOU TRICKED ME, MUMMY! YOU TRICKED ME!”). He’s also a consummate and elaborate storyteller, which is maybe just a euphemism for an out-of-control liar.

His stories/wild fibs have three components: “Did you know”, “Logan said”, and “Right?”. For example, if Nico was to mention that a jellyfish was poisonous, Luca would promptly respond, “Did you know that Logan saw that jellyfish and it stinged him so that means it’s poison, right Mummy?” 

Although he’ll also happily go for something as mundane as “Did you know that today at lunch Logan said he likes carrots the best. He said that because carrots are yum, right?” The line between what’s real and what’s not can only at this point be verified by Logan.

—

Finally, two really good books that I liked a lot and think you (whoever you are) should read:

Categories
PERSONAL

Boring.

I’m boring now. 

I’ve fought it for years, but it’s time to give in and cop on: I don’t have anything to write about because my life – and by extension my very person – is boring. Prone as I am to solitary sports like reading and long walks, I was never the one with a daring story for every occasion, usually ending with one or more participants spending the night at A&E or under a bush somewhere (that’s my brother’s job – no, literally, it’s his job: he spent 20 years in radio), but I held my own. I went places and saw people and collected a funny anecdote or two to share once I went new places and saw new people.

But now so little happens to me that I’ve been reduced to using journal prompts to even have anything to say to myself of an evening. I know I’m not alone in this – the only reminiscing people will be doing about this portion of history is “remember when we all stayed home for two years?” – but I have some exacerbating circumstances that make me even more boring than everyone else.

For the last eight years, I’ve worked from home. For six of those eight years, I’ve also had small children. This combination means that most of the people I talk to are me or were made by me – and although I hold great hopes for the people I made, at this stage they still mostly talk about Ninjago and snacks. I’ve reached a point where I’m living vicariously through my local barista – a 23-year-old hipster with the build of a baby giraffe and some complicated lady problems.

(Do we still call youngsters with man buns and exposed ankles “hipsters”, or is there a new word I’ve missed because it’s not on Ninjago?)

Compounding the issue is social media. As someone who works from home and has small children, I love social media. It’s a lifeline, an escape, and a way to catch up with all the friends I never see because we can’t get babysitters on the same night (and even if we could we’d be obliged to go out with our husbands instead so we could talk about things other than which child gets custody of the Thor minifigure today and how many pieces of apple it’s okay to let them have before dinner).

I can give or take Facebook other than Messenger these days, but I fucking love Instagram. Presently I’m following dozens of shiny-haired American women as they redecorate their enormous, brand-new houses one elaborate built-in at a time. I love it. I’m filled with envy and deeply unsatisfied with everything about our house – but not enough to actually do any of the DIYs they share. Instead I obsessively scroll through them, saving pictures of cavernous dining rooms and enormous walk-in wardrobes and feeling an itchy sense of loathing about my actual surroundings. It’s great.

My point, though, is that social media has made us all boring. Already saddled with a dearth of stories due to a pesky global pandemic, any tiny scrap of interesting content has already been shared online by the time you actually speak to a friend or family member. Conversations that used to start with “wait till I tell you what happened on my way to…” now begin with “I saw your post about…”, and then both parties chortle awkwardly until someone says “but did you see the meme I posted…?”

There are no punchlines anymore; nothing to share that hasn’t already been shared.  Interesting life events are now so light on the ground we’ve collectively settled for sending the group chat a series of coloured boxes every morning and leaving it at that.

I can see two possible ways out of this predicament: go out in the world more often, or get off social media. Frankly, I don’t like either of them. Going out means paying for parking and finding my mascara, and I’ve forgotten how to tell a story in real time anyway – how do you even express emotions without gifs? What if I disappear off Facebook and all my friends forget I even exist? What if Lauren from Instagram tackles her master bathroom and I never get to see whether she goes with lacquered or unlacquered brass faucets?

Maybe it’s better to just stay boring.

Categories
HEALTH + NUTRITION

For my fellow skeptics

I want to go into a bit more detail about some of the stuff in this post – both to clarify what I’m saying, and to help assimilate in my own brain what I’m learning and what I’m experiencing. So, if this is the magic bullet of perfect health, why isn’t it mainstream?

I think there are a lot of reasons, but here are a few of the top ones:

It’s too new

There’s a knowledge lag of 17 years before new treatments become standard practice. 

In the case of experimental surgeries or pharmaceutical drugs, this might be a good thing – but if there’s no risk of harm, why wait?

It’s too hard to standardise 

The “gold standard” of scientific research is the randomised controlled trial. By definition, such a trial needs to be testing one intervention, with all the other variables held constant. A few of these have been done, but the results aren’t conclusive, because they can’t be. 

If you trial 100 people on a gluten-free diet, 10 of them might feel better. For those 10, that result could be life-changing, but overall, your trial is a failure because everyone didn’t get better. But the point is that everyone isn’t meant to because everyone is different. 

Five of those 10 might improve further on a dairy-free diet too, or if they eat more plant foods, or heal their gut. Some of the other 90 might have issues with candida, or mould exposure, or their blood sugar.

There’s no single lifestyle intervention that will help everyone… beyond the obvious ones that we’ve already accepted because they really are universal, like stopping smoking, exercising, getting more sleep and eating less sugar.

Unfortunately, instead of the medical community as a whole saying “hey, these things help some people, they’re worth a try”, they tend to say “there’s no evidence for that, so don’t bother”.

(The funny part is that the efficacy of drug treatments are on the whole also pretty crap… for example, people with high cholesterol who may be at risk of a heart attack are prescribed a statin – a drug that lowers the level of “bad” cholesterol in your blood. Usually, you need to then stay on this drug forever.

But the “number needed to treat” (NNT) for statins taken over five years is 104 – which means that for every 104 people put on a statin for five years, one heart attack will be prevented. But the number needed to harm (NNH) is only 50 – “one in 50 people on statins develops diabetes and one in ten experiences muscle damage as defined as rhabdomyolysis”.

On the other hand, switching to the Mediterranean diet for five years has an NNT of 61, with no harms found.)

No one wants to fund the research anyway

Who’s going to put up the money for the kind of massive, intensive trial that would show results in this kind of stuff… Big Broccoli? This is not me digressing into Big Pharma conspiracies – just me saying that research costs a lot of money, and it’s generally funded by those who can make that money back from positive results of the research (like drug companies). 

No one organisation is going to make billions from everyone eating a better diet and reducing their stress.

We think about things in boxes

The way we think about and classify disease is also working against us. We’ve built a system of specialists, classifications and interventions. We think about our bodies as a series of separate boxes rather than an interconnected whole. If you have a problem with your teeth, you see a dentist. If you have a problem with diarrhea and stomach cramps, you see a gastroenterologist. No one ever connects your bad teeth to your irritable bowel.

We’ve made medicine into an assembly line – you get 15 minutes to outline your symptoms, we check them against the way we’ve classified diseases, assign a name to whatever is wrong with you, and then give you the “standard of care” solution. Which is usually a drug, and may have loads of side effects or not even be particularly effective (see the statin example above). 

The dentist might remove your sore tooth, or give you a root canal so you can’t feel the pain anymore. The gastroenterologist might put you on an anti inflammatory or give you painkillers. But if both problems were caused by an imbalance in your microbiome, you might end up in a different doctor’s office six months later, being treated for depression or candida or joint pain.

We see what we want to see

In functional nutrition, if you discover an intolerance to dairy or soy or corn and remove it from your diet for a period of time, while also working on improving your digestion and the quality of your diet, supporting your liver or other organs, and rebuilding your microbiome, you may eventually be able to start eating those foods again. This could be because you’ve healed your leaky gut, calmed your immune system, and/or reduced inflammation. Being able to resume eating a food you were intolerant to is evidence of success.

But to the medical establishment, that’s often seen as proof that the intervention didn’t work, or was all in your head. See! You can eat the thing again – that means you were never really intolerant to it! The fact that you also got better is just a coincidence.

To me, there’s a real cognitive dissonance to this view. It’s not like we don’t know how crucial vitamins, minerals, fats and proteins are to our health. We also know that 60% of the average (American) diet is now made up of processed sugar, white flour and vegetable oil – substances which have plenty of calories, but basically no nutritional value*.

Both of the doctors I saw personally about my lichen sclerosus decided to think of my recovery as “spontaneous remission” rather than accept that changing my diet had anything to do with it. Like, when the science they’d been taught didn’t match with the results they saw, they preferred to believe it had just happened by magic rather than consider new information. It still boggles my mind.

We like to believe the system is the best system

I think we really hold onto the idea that whatever the “usual” way of doing things must be the best way. I can see why – any deeper interrogation of modern society is a one-way rabbit hole that leads straight to an existential crisis. (She says, from inside the hole.)

But… the way we do school isn’t the best way of educating children. The way we farm is definitely not the best way of growing food. The way we work is absolutely not the best way to achieve a healthy, productive society. Most of our systems seem to be at best a series of accidents that built over time until they turned into reinforcing loops. Modern life is now a perpetual motion machine that we can’t figure out how to slow down, let alone point in a new direction.

Mainstream isn’t necessarily mainstream, anyway

I’d like to add one more point here, that’s becoming more and more apparent to me the longer I’m out in the world talking to people about my own health journey. Being a hardheaded, super-skeptical member of Team Science, readjusting my world view to accept that there was this whole field of health I’d never heard about, and that all these chronic diseases and mental health issues we’re suffering from are not only abnormal but also highly likely to be fixable, felt like I had to rewire my entire perspective on the world. It sounds dramatic, but I felt like everything I’d thought was true and solid was revealed to be – at best – some really mushy jelly, and I had to re-learn how to live on suddenly shaky ground.

So I’d assumed that the process of talking about this with anyone else would be similar – I’d either become an instant pariah, or I’d have to provide a full dissertation with footnotes and references in every conversation. But it turns out that just because my doctors don’t believe me doesn’t mean that everyone else agrees with them. 

Every day I seem to talk to someone else who’s experimenting with this diet or that intervention because their doctor couldn’t help them, or they just know in their gut that they should feel better than they do. The problem is that most of them are doing it on their own, without help, in a scattershot trial-and-error way based on anecdotes or Instagram ads.

I feel like I’m still integrating this new model of the world into my brain. I still hold my breath every time I recommend someone makes a dietary change to try and help a health issue, and I’m still gobsmacked every time that change works. Recently I suggested a relative could try a gluten and dairy free diet to see if it helped his ulcerative colitis. I was not only still slightly shocked when his symptoms promptly resolved, but equally shocked (and amazed) that when he later tried a gluten challenge, the bleeding resumed the next day. 

It’s not that it works, because the more I learn, the more the science and the theories make so much sense to me – it’s that any medical professional (let alone basically all of them) would leave fixing the fucking problem out of their arsenal when it’s readily available as an option.

This stuff should not be fringe – but to make it mainstream, we’re not only going to need to change the information we teach to our health professionals, we’re going to have to rethink our entire food system, as well as the way we work, play, interact, sleep, clean ourselves, and more. It’s terrifying, and overwhelming – but also so freaking exciting. 

Some good places to start if you’re keen to find out more

Broken Brain podcast

Doctor’s Farmacy podcast

I’ve read dozens and dozens of books in the last year or two that expand on these ideas – what will speak to you will probably depend on what you’re personally dealing with. I reckon podcasts are the best way in – you can find what you’re interested in and choose to dig further from there.

That said, some of my favourites are:

*I’d go further and say they have negative nutritional value – not only are they not helping you get all the things your body needs to work properly, but they’re actively making you sick. More on that another time!

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PERSONAL

It turns out rain is just a bit wet

It’s raining this morning. That steady, relentless Spring rain that soaks everything and lasts all day. On Monday and Friday mornings, I walk to the gym for my PT session, and then walk home again via the local coffee shop. I get my almond flat white and wander home along the stream, sometimes stopping to meditate somewhere along the way. Once I get home, I shower, cook myself a big breakfast of eggs and avocado and greens or mushrooms, and settle in to work or study for the rest of the morning. It’s a routine I really love.

I almost didn’t walk this morning. I thought about rearranging our schedule so that I could get a ride – if we weren’t still in level 2, Diogo could have taken the kids to preschool early for a play in the playground, dropping me off on the way. But I love the walk – it wakes me up and warms me up, and I listen to my podcasts on the way. So I put my jacket on, stuffed a spare pair of socks in my bag, and headed out.

And it was fine. In fact, it was really nice. The birds were singing, the kōwhai were blooming. I got a bit damp around my toes and the bottom of my jacket, but otherwise it was more or less like any other walk on a cold morning. 

At some point, I’d started thinking of rain as some sort of insurmountable obstacle –  like having damp socks or wet hair would be a day-ruining cataclysm, an enduring misery to be avoided at all costs. It turns out, rain is just a bit wet. Who knew?

As a teenager, I had to walk from the train to school and back. I didn’t have a car until I was 25, and then promptly moved to Canada where I went straight back to catching public transport everywhere. When I came home, for one reason or another, I mostly didn’t have a car until Diogo moved in with me, bringing his car with him. Then we had a baby and acquired a second car, to “make life easier”.

Our logic was sound but also absolute bullshit – because I got paid by the hour, it made sense to get me where I needed to go as fast as possible, to “maximise my earning potential”. This is also the reason that we ended up adding a cleaner, and a gardener, and a Roomba, to “free me up” to do as much paid work as humanly possible. In our modern society, this is a sound and sensible plan. But over time, it was steadily becoming apparent that I hated it. In theory, I was making more than the car and the cleaner and the gardener cost – but somehow, it didn’t seem like it. We were both tired and stressed and run down, so all the extra money seemed to go on cafes and takeaways and wine.

I was resenting the work, but also, who wants to clean when they don’t have to? Who enjoys commuting on the train?

Turns out, me. I always enjoyed the train. No stressing about being on time – it was all out of my hands. I could read books or listen to music and there was absolutely no way to do anything else, or feel bad about the time I was “wasting”. On the other hand, sitting in traffic fills me with tense and impotent anxiety. I find parking in the city stressful, and I arrive everywhere frazzled and on edge.

We sold our second car about a year ago, when it didn’t pass its WOF and it wasn’t worth paying to fix it. It was originally a bit of a trial, but once it had gone, the adjustment period was actually quicker than expected. We needed to be a bit more organised about who had to be where and when. We bought a bike with a child seat so we could do drop-offs and pick-ups without the car on fine days. I started walking more… and more… and more.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started taking the kids to school on the bus, even on days when I have the car. It takes longer, but it’s so much nicer as a way to start our day. There’s no rushing, except to get out the door in time to walk to the bus stop, which is about 15 minutes away at 3- and 4-year-old speed. 

We start our day with a walk outside, checking out the river and the birds and the trees. The kids run backwards and forwards and play with sticks (and/or complain and ask to be carried, depending). The bus is more fun for them than the car – it’s big and interesting and there are people to look at and buttons to press (we’re working on at what time and how often). We’re always at the gate on time, so they have a bit of time to run around with friends before heading inside, and then I put my podcast or audiobook on and walk back home, which takes me about 45 minutes if I’m direct about it (sometimes I’m not). Everyone wins.

Is it inefficient? Sure. Is it a waste of time? I really don’t think so. I might even try it when it’s raining.

Categories
HEALTH + NUTRITION PERSONAL

New site, new me

It’s been a while. My life has changed so fundamentally that I haven’t known where to start, or how to even begin to convey the shift without losing everyone immediately. 

(Before we go any further: no, I didn’t find Jesus. Even worse.)

The background

Almost a year and a half ago, I was finally diagnosed with a skin condition on the autoimmune spectrum. It’s called lichen sclerosus, but I don’t recommend you look it up. The cliffs notes version is that it causes the skin on and around your lady parts to turn white, thin, and itch incessantly. Because the skin is so thin, scratching the itch (or doing anything that irritates the skin, such as, say, having a bowel motion, or sex) splits the skin and causes bleeding, fissures, and lots and lots of pain. Oh, and more itching. Endless, relentless, mind-bending itching.

Getting the diagnosis had been a journey of almost a year of daily misery – but my relief was short-lived. I was given a tube of steroid cream to help with the itching and told there was nothing else anyone could do. I was likely to have this forever, and it would never get better. Sucks to be you, my doctor said kindly, and shovelled me out the door.

Around the same time, I was told that my thyroid was “normal”, even though I was positive I hadn’t been ovulating since getting pregnant with Luca, my periods barely lasted two days, I was so exhausted that I could barely climb the stairs, my toes frequently got so cold they went numb inside my shoes, my brain felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool and I couldn’t even remember what it felt like to feel excited or engaged by anything. 

The only upside was that I didn’t really mind that it was too painful to have sex, because my sex drive had completely vanished, and taken my imagination with it. I’d not only stopped writing fiction, I couldn’t even be bothered to read it – my brain couldn’t see the point of wasting time on anything that wasn’t real.

My lower back also hurt so badly that lying flat on the floor felt like I was lying on bars of hot metal, and then my knees started to hurt too – until every time I bent over sharp pains shot through my joints.

I’ve suffered from IBS since puberty, but my digestive problems were also getting worse and worse. I was constantly bloated and constipated. I had hay fever all the damn time, although it was hard to tell because I also always had a cold. I got every illness the kids brought home from daycare, and stayed sick long after everyone else was better. 

Just to round things out, I’d developed an allergy to my cat, and then I started having an allergic reaction to alcohol too (wine, you guys. My beloved wine!). Cutting onions made my eyes feel like they were exploding, and I’d randomly get hives for no reason. My nails, which had always been really strong, started to peel and split. My hair didn’t fall out, but it changed texture, managing to be both brittle and fluffy at the same time.

In short, I felt like I was falling apart. After Luca was born, I’d always thought we’d have a third baby, but I couldn’t see how it would be physically possible. I was genuinely convinced that if I did, my body would never recover. I felt like everything I wanted and cared about had melted away, until all I had left was my kids, Diogo, and dragging myself with gritted teeth through the bare minimum every day.

The road back

After the diagnosis, I couldn’t accept that that was just it. Take the steroids to dull the itching, and otherwise just live with being perpetually exhausted and stupid and in constant pain – it’s normal! You’re fine!

I wasn’t fine. I couldn’t be fine. This could not be it. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t accept it – I actually felt like I couldn’t. If this was the rest of my life, I felt like I wasn’t even sure it was worth living. I’m not saying I was hiding in my room sharpening the razor blades, but I decided I had to try and do something about my health myself. 

As a start, I cut dairy out of my diet again (I’d nixed it to good digestive result before getting pregnant with Nico, but during said pregnancy I’d gone balls-to-the-wall on ice cream and remained there ever since). I figured that anything that helped my IBS was bound to help the tearing and bleeding – even if it was just by making my bowel motions more regular.

So I ate a tonne of fibre. I went back on probiotics. I started lifting weights with a personal trainer twice a week and working even harder on our diets at home. At this point though, I thought our diets were already pretty good. I love to cook, and in trying (and totally, utterly failing) to lose the baby weight after Luca was born, I’d got pretty militant about what we were all eating. I made sourdough, home-cooked the vast majority of our meals, and got organic veggies delivered.

Cutting out dairy, it turned out, did help. It helped a lot. The itching subsided enough to stop me feeling like I was going to go insane. I mostly stopped bleeding when I pooped, and the agonising pain that had wracked me after a bowel motion went away. It still hurt, but nothing like it had. (There was a period where I’d had to lie down for half an hour or so after every BM, clutching the sides of the bed and heavy breathing through the pain.)

I’m a natural skeptic, but since removing dairy had been so helpful, I decided to go to a naturopath to see if there was any further advice she could give me. I had one appointment, where she said I needed to cut out dairy, gluten, meat, and all grains for three weeks and replace half my meals with smoothies made from a protein powder she managed to sell me for a truly ridiculous sum. She tried very hard not to call it a cleanse. I left with a pile of very expensive supplements and no idea why I was meant to take any of them, or how they were meant to help. 

Now, at this point, you need to know that my four-year-old takes after me. Every second word out of his mouth is “why?”. He needs to understand why he’s being asked to do something before he’s willing to do it. His sense of fairness and justice is very, very tied up in not only understanding how things work but why they work that way. At our first parent-teacher meeting, his preschool teacher told us that he’s a perfect student as long as A) he’s told why something is happening, and B) that reason feels both logical and just to him.

I can relate, kid. I call it my “problem with authority”, but it’s frequently more a problem with stupidity. I can’t abide doing things that don’t seem to have a purpose, or where the purpose doesn’t make sense. “Just because” has never cut it for me, even if I sometimes wish it would cut it with my toddler.

So a few days later, I asked the naturopath to call me. I really needed to understand why she was recommending what she was recommending. She couldn’t explain it to me – in fact, she barely even tried – so I didn’t do the cleanse.

There goes that idea, I thought. But later, I was telling my cousin about it and she said, “oh my god, you need to meet Shelley.”

Shelley was something called a “functional nutritionist”. She’d helped my cousin, who has celiac disease, get healthy when she got pregnant with her first child. In fact, she’d got her so healthy that it had caused her ongoing issues – her son had been born so plump and hale that when he later dropped into being the skinny string bean he was genetically destined to be, her Plunket lady became convinced he was malnourished and kept making her take him to the hospital for monitoring.

I left my first appointment with Shelley thinking maybe I was in love. Not only could she explain all the whys to me, but she was convinced that we could not only stop but reverse the lichen. She also wasn’t interested in only solving that problem, or even solving the hormonal problem I thought was underlying it – she wanted to go all the way back to my digestive issues and solve those too.

As she explained it, the lichen was caused by inflammation. My body was attacking its own tissues in a way it wasn’t meant to. But, unlike the other medical professionals I’d seen, she wanted to understand why the inflammation was happening. Your body doesn’t just start misfiring in a vacuum. Something has happened inside you to cause a malfunction, and that malfunction has built up over time. Your cells haven’t repaired themselves properly. And eventually, that malfunction manifests itself somewhere – on your skin, as a tumour, as fatigue or brain fog or depression, or numerous other symptoms.

She traced a path backwards for me. The lichen was the most visible end point of a chain that began with my digestive system. Light after light switched on. I couldn’t believe that there was this incredibly obvious solution just sitting here, and that no one was talking about it. Look after your body, and it will do what it’s meant to. We weren’t subduing my symptoms or changing anything in my body – we were just supporting it to find its own way back to health. 

And, to my wonder and surprise, it did.

The new normal

The size of the change that’s been wrought in me staggers me daily. But I don’t know how to talk about it, because it seems both so flimsy and obvious (eat vegetables!), and considering the way we think about medical issues in this modern world, so incredibly unlikely (eat vegetables!). We helped my digestive system work better, took out foods it turned out I was intolerant to, added a few supplements to support things that hadn’t been functioning well… and it changed my life.

My lichen sclerosus is not only symptom-free (except for one day a month around my period, and if I accidentally eat gluten, dairy, oats or corn), but I’m having regular, totally PMS-free periods every 28 days for the first time in my life. I’m not allergic to wine, or my cat, or the pollen outside. I hadn’t even realised I’d always had an issue with post-nasal drip until it stopped.

For the first time since I turned 12, I’m free of IBS. I have a bowel movement every morning after I wake up, and it’s never painful or crampy or surprising. I don’t get constipated or suffer from regular diarrhea. I’m not so bloated I could be 8 months pregnant after every second meal.

I sleep well and wake up feeling good. For the first time I can ever remember, I have actual, real live energy. I’m excited to do things, and my brain feels like it’s firing on every cylinder. I’m not depressed or fatigued or foggy. I’m not living with a constant hum of vague anxiety in the back of my head.

My nails are strong. My skin is clear. When everyone else gets sick, I often don’t – or at least I get less sick, and I get better faster.

What am I taking to effect this massive, life-affecting change? I still take a couple of NAC every day, but other than that: nothing. I avoid dairy, gluten, oats and corn. I’m careful about vegetable oils and sugar. I go for a walk every day and try to meditate at least a few times a week. I go to bed early. That’s really about it. My entire life changed, and all I had to do was give up KFC. I don’t know how to explain it to people without sounding ridiculous.

I tell friends about this and they say “but what do you eat?” and “I couldn’t do it – it doesn’t sound worth giving up bread/pastry/cheese/pizza”.

All I can say is this:

I eat better than I ever have – and I love to eat. It was hard to get used to, it took a long time to fully adjust, and I went through all five stages of grief for every food I realised was causing my symptoms to flare up, but now, I don’t miss it. Genuinely. Would I like a piece of hot, crusty sourdough with butter? Yes. But instead I have some variation on eggs and bacon and mushrooms and avocado and kale for breakfast every morning, and I feel amazing after it. I eat soups and salads and stews and curries and tacos – I just make them myself, without gluten or dairy.

It helps that eating even a tiny crumb of butter makes me itch until I bleed and then feel exhausted and depressed for a week, but feeling strong and healthy and filled with energy is more than worth giving up the 10 minutes of bliss while the KFC was in my mouth (right before the stomach ache kicked in).

I think an awful lot of us have forgotten (or never known) what it feels like to actually be healthy. We’ve normalised things that just aren’t normal – bloating, headaches, constipation, feeling tired all the time, period pain, sore backs and knees, zits, skin issues and rashes, anxiety… 

We understand on a basic level that food, stress, sleep and exercise matter for our health, but we don’t understand how much, or how far our “normal” lives have strayed from what our bodies actually need.

I understood that my body needed vitamins and minerals, but I had no idea what those vitamins and minerals actually did, or how many I was getting in my diet. It turns out that if you eat a “standard” diet, it’s pretty much impossible for your body to get all the things it needs to keep your cells healthy. The breakdown will be slow and gradual, but over time you will start to break down. Those less lucky (like me) will break down faster and develop chronic or autoimmune diseases that will significantly affect their quality of life.

In our polarised world, there seem to be only two possible camps now – either you believe in science, and therefore surgery and pharmaceutical drugs are the only “real” ways to treat disease, and anything else is just the placebo effect or hippie nonsense; or you’re a full-on anti-vaxxer sharing conspiracy theories on facebook. 

But there’s a middle path. Science is amazing and we’ve learned things that have saved countless lives, but we’ve learned mostly how to treat the symptoms of disease. If I get hit by a bus or have a heart attack, I’m going to be deeply grateful for medical science. But medical science doesn’t have all the answers yet, and the focus on diagnosing and treating diseases lets a lot of us down, a lot of the time. 

I have a friend who went to her doctor with a rash covering her entire body, periods so heavy she could barely leave the house, constant exhaustion, constipation and depression – and because her blood tests were all “within range” she was told there was nothing wrong with her.

Another friend went to the same naturopath I mentioned above, did the “cleanse” and her heavy periods resolved. But she didn’t learn anything or come away with any permanent changes to her lifestyle – she finished her four weeks and went straight back to her old life. I saw her six months or so later and asked if she was still feeling better. She cheerfully told me all her issues had come back, so her doctor was booking her in for a hysterectomy. 

They were removing an organ from her body rather than figure out what was causing the problem – and I felt like I was the only person in the room who thought this was insane! Especially because, since removing her uterus won’t solve whatever imbalance is happening, she’s likely to find herself a year down the track with new symptoms elsewhere in her body. 

Your organs don’t operate in a vacuum. Everything is connected to everything else. 

And everything starts with what you’re putting in – your body literally makes itself out of what you put into it. It takes the fats and amino acids and vitamins and minerals from your food and creates literally everything that makes you you. And if it’s not getting enough, or it can’t absorb what it’s getting, or it’s under too much stress (from illness or inflammation or actual stress), it will start prioritising what it keeps running and what it lets start to fail. It’s that simple and that complicated.

How am I so sure? Because I got so into this stuff after seeing the change in my own life and health that I’m now part way through a diploma in nutritional therapy. This is a real thing, and there’s a whole world out there of doctors and medical professionals practising what’s called “functional medicine”. This is the future, and it is the goods.

So this is me, reintroducing myself to you – and outing myself as a freshly-minted health nut. 

Told you it was bad.

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Uncategorized

Green thumbs?

My touchpoint for happiness has always been my grandparent’s house. It’s my lodestone, my central point. My spiritual hearth. It’s the place where I was happiest and my mind was quietest. It held all the things I thought made a good life — the sound of the wind in the pines, sun-warmed veggies and fruit picked off trees, lambs being born over the fence. The pool where I spent so much of my time and the armchair where I spent the rest, stack of library books at hand.

Sometimes little things come to me — the smell of the bunk room, with its generations of sporting equipment tucked into dusty corners behind old plastic sun chairs and shelves of homemade preserves. The bottles of soda kept in the bottom of the cupboard that could be fished out on special occasions. I can feel the snick of the key releasing the door (it had no handle and I never saw the key put away) and the way the hum of the upright freezer permeated everything in that small space.

I have perfect mental muscle memory of letting myself out the front door on dusky summer evenings and padding barefoot across the patio, down the two concrete steps, over the little ridge where the path curved and across the prickly sun-crisped grass to fetch the ice cream from the freezer. The house would smell like warm lights and roast lamb and pudding, and the tree above the bunk room door would hang over my head, laden with the red berries that had passed into family lore after a childhood dare led to an emergency doctor visit.

I don’t need my own collection of dilapidated homemade sheds and outhouses in which to store sporting goods and extra food, but I’ve always felt like I wanted my adult self to recreate the way I felt there. And I’ve always felt that that would require land and animals and plants. Making fruit from my own jam, a lunch table consisting of a bowl of fresh produce, a loaf of bread and a knife.

I’ve rarely considered that childhood me didn’t actually do any of the gardening or baking — I watched my grandparents do it, usually out of my peripheral vision while I lazed in the grass or the pool or on the couch. I also missed, in my child’s way, the work of it all — the days of de-stoning and stirring and boiling and canning. The baskets and buckets of plums and apricots and tomatoes that became my winter breakfasts and the ketchup I lavished on every meal.

This is a very long way of saying that I’m worried I don’t actually like gardening. Now that we have the land, and the babies are big enough to allow some time to start clearing and weeding and growing, I’m realising it’s… frustrating. It’s an excellent exercise in control, or the lack thereof — once you’ve done all the things you can do, you really just have to watch and wait.

I’m not a big fan of either.

I’m not sure if this is because I’m still not very good at gardening, or because our property has been such a frustrating mess for so long. It’s taken a lot of years to get good at baking and cooking and breadmaking, but the path felt easier — I always loved doing it, I’ve just been layering up skills until I could tell by touch whether my sourdough was ready and know how to turn the contents of my fridge into a delicious meal. Maybe I’ve started too big — my first garden is an overgrown quarter acre on a hill that no one’s given any care to in ten or twenty years.

I always kind of thought (foolishly, I realise, as soon as I stop to think about it) that gardening would be easy. It’s what the planet does, right? Put seed in soil, add water and sun. I forget that nature takes the path of least resistance, and nature is also slugs and caterpillars and weeds.

Gardening might be natural, but natural isn’t peaceful. It’s war. A never-ending tussle for land rights and supremacy. The plants we grow for food have been engineered over generations to be tasty and productive — but because of that, they’re also weak and fragile. They need us to coddle and protect them or they’ll be crushed by the hungry, scrappy might of the real nature that wants to steal their resources and devour them for its own.

But at the same time, they don’t need much of anything at all. The war is fought slowly, one weed at a time. Trying to hurry things along or plant in bad soil has lead to three years of dud harvests. My cauliflowers never grow; my lettuces and herbs all bolt straight to seed.

I know the solution, but the solution is time. Improve the soil. Build my compost. Grow less, with better care. Wait. Watch. Wait again.

My constant need to succeed, to achieve, isn’t coping very well with nature. Nature doesn’t give a shit about my timetable. Nature can’t be hurried or hacked or worked around with good communication and a post-it workshop. Nature is utterly indifferent to my ability to write convincingly.

I’m pretty sure that means I need to stick at it. If nothing else, we should all know where our food comes from; how much time and skill it takes to grow it well. It changes your relationship with the whole natural world, not just the things you eat. If it can teach me patience and care, it may even change my relationship with myself.

If my thumbs aren’t quite green yet, at least there’s dirt under my nails.

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Uncategorized

Round two (Luca’s birth story)

I had a cup of tea before I met my second child. A cup of tea and a piece of toast with jam. It was the best cup of tea and the best piece of toast I’ve ever had, even though the toast was hospital-cooked cold white bread and the tea was in a styrofoam mug with UHC milk from the little nook in the delivery ward.

I still feel slightly gobsmacked that I did it: that I stopped to have tea and toast, and then a shower, before I even saw my baby’s face properly. After he was born, all I saw was a grey triangle of squashed-looking face peeping out of a towel as he was rushed out of the theatre and up to the special care unit. Before that, he was a tiny lump on the other side of the room, hidden behind a huddle of midwives and doctors as I lay, sobbing, under glaring lights with my legs in stirrups while my body juddered and convulsed from shock.

Brazil didn’t know where to be, hovering behind the doctors and then coming back to squeeze my hand while the doctor set to work examining the damage they’d done to me in their haste to save my baby. “Wow,” the doc said, “look, there’s only a first degree tear!”

She went to get suturing supplies. “I feel like something bad happened to my haemorrhoids,” I told her. It didn’t hurt yet, but it felt like there was a cold breeze down there, like something that had been on the inside was now on the outside in a way it shouldn’t be.

She looked again. “Oh,” she said. “Ah.” Then, “well, the good news is if you ever have another baby, you can probably ask for an elective c-section.”

—

Back to the tea. They took my baby to special care once they got him breathing. Brazil went with them, I think, and I was stitched up and wheeled back up to postnatal, my limbs still jerking their violent and involuntary dance. I was covered in blood and sweat (and shit, probably), and I couldn’t stop crying. The whole thing felt surreal, like I was drunk or dreaming or underwater.

“He’s okay,” my midwife said. “He’s going to be fine. Let’s get you cleaned up, and you can go and see him. Do you need anything first?”

I hadn’t slept or eaten. I’d had a baby inside me and now he was outside and nowhere near me. I didn’t know who he was yet. We hadn’t met. He was supposed to go from my tummy to my chest and stay there, switching sides with my skin but staying part of me. Nico didn’t feel like a separate person for days, sometimes even for months. My legs continued to shake and my eyes continued to leak.

“Can I have my phone?” I asked. “And maybe something to eat?”

—

Let’s back up again.

Throughout this pregnancy, everyone assured me that second births are nothing like first births. They’re faster. They’re easier. Your body knows what to do. I was terrified of having to go through giving birth again, but I was pretty confident that this time would be better. I packed my hospital bag with one change of clothes. Positive thinking!, I’d thought positively. No week in hospital for us this time! We’d go in, have the baby, and be home when Nico woke up in the morning.

“I’m really sorry I told you it would be better this time,” my midwife said as I drank my tea. “Two bad births is really bad luck.”

—

This time did seem better, for quite a while. I’d been having contractions on and off for a few days, but they’d always vanish when I lay down to try and sleep. Finally, six days overdue, they started up and didn’t stop. There had been so many false alarms that when I told Brazil he needed to call my parents and let them know tonight was the night, he just kept reading his book. “Oh,” he finally said. “You mean now?”

Things happened as they’re meant to happen. It was painful and intense but manageable. I’d forgotten how much it hurts, but this time it felt like I was making progress, like the pain would lead us to a baby. We put Nico to bed. My parents arrived. I leaned on our bed and tried to breathe through the contractions until it was time to call my midwife, and then contracted my way down the path and into the car, and then out of the car and up to the delivery ward.

And then everything slowed down again. We passed a fun few hours alternating between the bed, the bath and the swiss ball, the contractions strong and regular but not getting any more of either. I mashed Brazil’s hand and forearm between mine in rhythm with the pain, like I could transfer it out of me if I squeezed hard enough. Sometime around 4am, I think, I hauled myself out of the bath and called a team meeting.

My midwife would check my dilation. If things had progressed, we’d keep going as we were. If they hadn’t, she’d break my waters and see if that sped things up — and we’d get the 20 minutes of monitoring required before having an epidural started, so that if nothing changed and we were in for another long haul, we’d be ready to go with some sweet, sweet relief.

—

I’d told anybody who’d listen that I wouldn’t wait for the epidural this time. I don’t need to try and be a hero, I’d said, paraphrasing a thing I saw on Twitter about how we don’t want anything about women to be natural until it’s causing them unimaginable pain.

But then it came to it, and… I just kept putting it off. The competitive perfectionist in me wanted to know if I could do it. And the idea that an epidural was a failure or an admission of weakness had buried itself too deep. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for it.

So I put it off. And put it off.

I have two thoughts about this. The first is that if I’d been even a few minutes earlier in giving in, I wouldn’t have had to feel what came after.

The other is that if I’d tried to tough it out, we might never have known how much distress Luca was in — or at least not until it was too late.

—

I was still only seven or eight centimetres dilated, so a nurse came and set up the fetal heart monitor, and we broke my waters. And then things got hazy.

Two things happened at once. The contractions went from crushing-Brazil’s-hand-and-breathing-through-it to screaming agony, and in the middle of each one my body would kind of hitch and I’d get this insanely strong involuntary pushing sensation, and then it would flip back. It was like I was in two stages of labour at the same time.

Second, everyone got really quiet and focused on the heart rate monitor. Luca’s heart rate was dropping precipitously with each contraction, and it wasn’t coming back up in between.

I could tell it was bad and that people (more and more of them all the time) were getting really concerned, but I couldn’t see the screen and I was in and out of these overpowering, all-consuming push-pull contractions.

My midwife did another examination. She called a nurse in to repeat it, and then another one. Luca, who’d been lying sideways for weeks, had finally turned — but the wrong way. He’d gone posterior — and then he’d tipped his head back, and now the hard ridge of his forehead was stuck against my cervix.

He was stuck, and he was in trouble.

—

What happened next was this: the emergency caesarian team were already performing an emergency caesarian. There was no one else who could do one, and no time to wait for them to finish.

“This baby has to come out right now,” my midwife kept saying to me. “We don’t have any time. I need you to push him out now.”

I wasn’t even fully dilated.

My midwife and two nurses took turns reaching inside me and trying to physically shove what remained of my cervix behind the baby’s head. I expect that will be the most painful experience of my life. I certainly hope it will be.

With every contraction I just had to push and push and push, as hard as I could, with whatever I had. “You can do this,” my midwife told me. “You can do this because you have to. There’s no other way.”

I screamed. I cried. I shat myself.

The baby remained stuck. His heart rate dropped further.

They took my bed and ran me down to theatre, while I screamed and writhed my way through contractions in the hallway and the lift. They wheeled me into a huge white room, filled with people in scrubs and bright lights. My legs were locked into stirrups. An obstetrician ran in, a lovely older Sikh man in a colourful turban. I feel this rush of love for him every time I think about it, because he stopped at my head first and asked my name and told me it was going to be okay. (I think that’s what he did, anyway. All I actually remember is this sense of kindness, and an overwhelming gratitude that someone had remembered I was still a person, too.)

“I’m going to get these forceps,” he said, “and I’m going to pull and you’re going to push.” A nurse unpackaged the huge set of forceps, like salad tongs gone wrong, and handed them to him. “We’re going to do this right now, in one go. You need to give this push every single thing you have. This is our only shot.”

No one ever said “or your baby will die”. It sat there in the room, but nobody said it. I didn’t really process it until later.

While I drank my tea later that morning, my midwife said “usually they’d at least take the time to give you a local”.

They didn’t, though.

—

They pulled. I pushed. My baby came out. He was grey and floppy and he’d aspirated meconium. A swarm of people carried him away and left me lying on the table.

—

Luca was born at 6:45 in the morning, and I held him for the first time that evening. He started breathing on his own shortly after he was born, and he latched and fed the first time we tried. He had to stay in special care for five days of IV antibiotics due to the meconium, but he was strong and healthy and nothing else was wrong with him. We don’t know what happened to him during the birth, but there don’t seem to be any lasting effects.

He’s a healthy, happy, chunky baby.

I have an obstetrician follow-up this week to check the state of play in my ladybusiness, but it feels like I got off fairly lightly, considering. I went back to the gym this week and the only pain I’m in is the usual. I’ve had two rounds of gastro since he was born (thanks, sticky daycare fingers and completely fucked immune system) and other than discovering it’s possible to breastfeed while vomiting, my body and pelvic floor coped the way it always has. We haven’t even tried to have sex yet, both because we have TWO BABIES, ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING, and because I still feel like that area of my body is a war crime that should be cordoned off and left to grow weeds. I don’t know when that feeling will change — it still hadn’t really after Nico when I got pregnant with Luca (thanks, wine!).

—

I thought a lot during the election about whether the state of funding in our hospitals put my baby’s life at risk. Should there have been backup for c-sections? The hospital had no incubators free at first, and then his monitoring equipment was “the buggy one” that alarmed constantly for no reason because it was so old. After the birth I was put into a shared postnatal room because there was no other space, and I spent the first couple of nights separated by a curtain from a first-time mother and her screaming baby, while my baby slept down the hall in special care. The staff were trying so hard, and were so kind, but they were so obviously overstretched and overstressed.

The last nine years of cutting costs and corners in our public services are really showing, once you look under the hood.

—

So there it is: round two.

I’m both more and less cynical about the natural birth movement now. I still believe in empowering women to do what their bodies are designed to do. I read a book about the medical history of birth while camping out beside Luca’s incubator (Brazil made me stop reading especially gory facts aloud, but privately I thought it was probably small fry to anyone in that room. We’d all seen the kraken), which was a revelation in how many of the women who used to die in childbirth died because of shoddy medical practices rather than the process of birth.

But I also think women are on average older than they used to be, and fatter, and more sedentary. And less versed in experiencing both pain and loss of control.

There’s a very real risk that pushing women to give birth naturally makes them feel weak for asking for or getting pain relief, and ashamed of births that don’t go to plan and require intervention (which seems, anecdotally, to be most of them?). I know people who’ve had powerful, pain-free, empowering births, and I love that it’s possible. But are we risking making women feel like that’s usual, when in most cases it really isn’t?