My mother passed away when I was 20. I had my first son when I was 31. These are my thoughts on mothering without her.

Dear Mum, Today's your birthday... AND Mother's Day... fancy that. I can't believe you did this too. That you once held me in your arms when I was a baby. That you went through the excitement and anticipation of pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, the crazy rollercoaster of becoming a mother. Did you also feel your identity shift? Did you feel your priorities change? Did you see the world with new eyes? Did you really love me THIS much? I have so many questions. I was your dau

Don't fall victim to diet culture. But don't fall victim to ANTI-DIET CULTURE either. Yeah we get it. There is a really icky kind of diet culture, one that tells you to do really stupid fucking things like only drink juice for a week, or cabbage soup, or only meat literally forever (wtaf). Or that encourages you to jump around your living room everyday at 5am like a bird having a colonic irrigation. A very 1990s approach that glorifies getting skinny over everything else - in

I've been thinking about this a lot... the body positivity message is that it's ok to be overweight, obese and even morbidly obese. Indeed, they argue that these terms are completely fat phobic and steeped in patriarchal western norms. I beg to differ. In the same breath they are saying that it's ok to eat THOUSANDS of calories more than you actually need to survive. Many of these people also are quite vocal about consumerism, capitalism and the environment. I'm sure there's

One of the things I love about Judaism is the way they handle death. Hear me out… When my mum died when I was 20, we were rushed out of the room. Out of sight out of mind. Everyone promptly started to fill us with alcohol and distract us from what had happened. I was young, had no experience with death, and didn’t have the fortitude or confidence to go against the grain. The funeral was formal. We were distanced from everything about the death and person we were burning. An e

I'm going to commit heresy right now by questioning feminism - but have you ever noticed that feminism never talks about motherhood? I heard a fun fact the other day (I can't prove it's true): only 3% of academic papers on feminism contain the word “motherhood”, or address it at all. And yet 99% of women are mothers. Doesn’t that seem strange to you? The most influential feminists of the second wave, Germain Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, never had children. Think about that for

Whether or not it's popular or politically correct today to say, women have 3 major life phases that are distinguished by our reproductive stage: Maiden. Mother. Matriarch. It appears to me that we live in a culture that worships, attributes status to and is obsessed with the Maiden. And no longer attributes any sort of meaning to the Mother or the Matriarch. Rather it overlooks and even despises them both, seeing them as nothing more than distraction, ageing, being used up a

A (not cheesy, I promise) letter to my pre-children, Maiden self for the "We Are Mothers" Podcast. (I will share the recording once it's released) If you want to be notified when the podcast is out, or if you want to read other essays about motherhood in the modern age, subscribe to my emails. Dear Jen, I know you're fucking terrified. That you're totally unprepared. I wish I could tell you it's going to be easy, that it'll come naturally. But you've literally got no idea wha