Poem 6 – Resilience Resilience is not about being brave, or strong and it’s not about not falling apart. Rather it is the capacity to be afraid, to not know how you will get through this, to fall down and then to falteringly start to re-group and re-emerge, complete with scars. Resilience is about facing … More #National Fertility Awareness Week
Poem 5: Longing The Brazilians have a wonderful word that encapsulates all the ethereal qualities of longing: saudade. It is impossible to translate saudade into one single English word. Rather it is a mixture of homesickness, sense of loss, remembering and the bittersweet nature of longing. Waiting for the longed-for dream to come true can feel … More #National Fertility Awareness Week
Poem 4 – The Imagined Child The imagined child can be a strong presence in the mind of those of us who are trying to conceive or who ever wanted a child. That imagined child can embody both its and our potential, our dreams of a family, our desire to have something of us present … More #National Fertility Awareness Week
Poem 3: Advice! A bit of a rap-rant! Anyone going through any difficult time will know that friends, family and even complete strangers will want to ‘make things better’ for you. Their desire to find a solution may come from a loving place but it’s also a very human reaction to put a positive spin … More #Fertility Awareness Week
Poem 2 This poem describes how, whether you’re trying spontaneously or through treatment to conceive, your perception of time changes. The month has bracketed times like ‘fertile days’, ‘the dreaded two-week-wait’, ‘test day’. To others it might just be a Monday. To those trying to conceive the day will have a very specific number assigned … More #National Fertility Awareness Week
For each of us who has walked through the door of a fertility clinic it is a momentous moment that carries so many complex emotions. Embarking on the process of fertility treatment requires trust, resilience and hope. We walk through that door and into a world of numbers and percentages where the odds are much … More Day 1 of the Poemathon
Turning Creativity into a Sponsored Event Hello lovely friends It’s late Autumn – a time of luminous spiders’ webs and rich colours and here in the UK, National Fertility Awareness Week is nearly upon us. Between 30 October and 5 November, the media will be promoting fertility initiatives ranging from educating young people about … More National Fertility Awareness Week
On many levels this has proved a difficult post to write – technically, professionally and emotionally. It is tricky to write about something that wasn’t: a non-fictional person who never existed. I say ‘non-fictional’ because a child is created before it is conceived. I don’t know who said this (please let me know if … More The Presence of Absence: learning to live with my potential child
The next series of the Write to Create support group sessions starts on 7 October 2017, 10am-12pm. The sessions are aimed at providing support and new creative ways of exploring the difficult feelings and emotions associated with involuntary childlessness. The group is for anyone, male or female, of any age, who is childless through … More Support Group in Brighton
“A moment came not long after my niece was born that encapsulated the sense that joy and jealousy could both inhabit the same space.” JEALOUSY. There! I’ve put it in capitals because it is a very human response and it’s okay to say it out loud. But so often jealousy is an unwanted, shameful whisper … More Giving Jealousy a Hug: banishing the shame of jealousy in childlessness
Without Issue 