Motherhood is simply a relationship you have with certain people. Motherhood is a contract. Whether you signed it before you manifested in the physical, or whether it is a contract you made when you gave birth, or adopted, or whatever, is irrelevant. A contract is a construct. Constructs are simply…

Pregnancy is a subversive experience where another being overthrows the existing system of your body, morphing it physically, emotionally and spiritually to the point of no return. Birthing babies through your body is visceral, wild, bloody, bold; the bravest, fiercest act a woman can perform. Birth takes you to the…

Come, gaze into the triangle between my legs. What do you see there? The anatomy speaks of furry furrows, glistening folds and secret nodes. Come deeper, behind the physical and what do you find? Ancient feelings of shame and disgust, carefully concealed by a feminist reclaiming. You can think your…

How long it took me to know myself again. I knew who I was at fifteen. The world hadn’t yet sullied me or distorted me with its intransigent theories and fixed expectations. At fifteen, I knew who I was. By thirty I had lost it. Before thirty I thought I…

This morning, Saturday, I awake around 6.30, although I don’t need to today. As I do every morning, I cast my awareness around the other bedrooms in the house to take a register of its occupants: my children. With fluctuating arrangements, I’m never certain who’s here. A warm feeling, the…

One I am cold. The autumn cool clamours beneath my skin, and I cannot get warm. I go into the living room, put on the fire, and pull a blanket over me, cuddling into myself for warmth, but I am simply placing cold on cold, entwining one chill arm with…

Leaves rain golden, yellow, brown on the trodden path. To the left, a small-town football pitch. Seagulls where there is no sea. On the right a field of frilly green fronds, planted in rows. The Icknield Way is an ancient trackway which runs from Norfolk to Wiltshire. My walk starts…

There’s a photo. I’m at a big family event, a wedding maybe, or a bar mitzvah. I’m around eleven years old, and I stand looking into the camera, jazz hands aloft, at the front of a heap of kids. …

If you read Education Part One, you’ll have clocked mine and my kids’ struggles with the school system. It didn’t start with my kids. I felt the same. Education, school, felt wrong. I got an education in ‘staying under the radar’. I did what I needed to do so I…