My husband is up at 2 AM almost every day to work.

He brings me a coffee at 5 AM so I can get up and write before our son wakes up at 6:30 AM.

He spends time with our son when he wakes up and is with us at breakfast — which he sometimes makes us while I am with Andriel. He runs to meet us at lunchtime so he can be with us for even 15 minutes before the next call.

In between meetings, he pokes his head out of his office to say hi to us. He…

We all know what the dishevelled look is of a new mother — the tired shadow around her eyes; the weight-gain; the weight-loss; the messy hair bun; the sick stain on our sweaters.

We know what new mothers endure physically — the bleeding; the sleep-deprivation; the hair-loss; the hormone changes.

And we know the good things we feel as new mothers — the bursting love for our newborn baby to say the least.

But our identity?

Our Bodies Take a Hit, Our Minds Take a Pounding

I felt like my whole self had been hit with a wrecking ball and rebuilt by Picasso.

I was overwhelmingly excited. Every time I…

It was February 2010 — before Tinder. It was Salsa night at K-Bar, the University of Kent’s most vibrant place to go to on a Thursday night before hitting the best club in the city of Canterbury.

I was a student out with a few friends enjoying the night, not a care in the world. I had just finished dance practice and was full of energy for the night, pumped from the workout. Being young meant there was no such feeling as tiredness — I could dance the night away and still be up for lectures and function the next…

I have always cared for other people and worked hard to please them, down to a fault.

My biggest dream was to care for and love my children. When I found out I had PCOS and that it would be harder to conceive, I felt the first real pang of failure — my body wasn’t even properly functioning for the most basic thing the world gave people the power to do — reproduce.

The realisation that my body would ignore my efforts to keep a healthy weight and then conceive felt like a slap in the face by mother nature…

It was dinner time. We were talking about our day. The hubby had a busy day as usual, full of meetings, and I had just spent a chilled out day with our son. But we both agreed that we felt drained and that after putting our son to bed we would just chill.

And then, I don’t know why or where it came from, I heard myself say this:

“For as long as you like me, I know I deserve to be liked.”

Then I burst into tears.

Young Adulthood Was Easy

I wouldn’t have classified myself as a bookworm until I read the following statistic the other day:

In England, 31% of adults don’t read in their free time, rising to 46% of young people (aged 16 to 24). — Readingagency.org.uk

Fine, I get that some kids don’t read, and the technology that grows at the speed of light makes other things to do more appealing. But I still wrongly assumed that reading would at least make the cut in the top 5 or 10 of a “hobby-forming” listicle. It doesn’t — in fact, reading comes it at suggestion #21.

*shakes…

I recently wrote about how excited I was to admit to the world (or rather, to myself) that I am a writer, rather than an aspiring writer. I felt confident and finally free.

But I was foolishly not prepared for the next question that would prompt me to elaborate on that fact. I say foolishly because, why did I not envision answering the very next obvious question after “what do you do for a living?”

It’s not every day you hear someone say you’re a writer. Still – the first time I answered this question in a formal setting it…

We walk around with £500+ phones; use the latest technology for school and work; have super-fast Internet giving us access to the world… we are slowly increasing our need for things that didn’t even exist 5 minutes ago. Our liabilities are increasing, but our salaries can’t keep up.

Marketing for kids sucks to parents because, no matter how hard parents try, it is easy for big companies to influence and commercialise our kids into wanting the best and latest version of everything.

This article in Globalissues.org explains it well and summarises:

“Manipulation of imagery, fake news and more are so…