Category: Parenting

The big ‘thing’ about parenting is that we’re not really supposed to talk about it too much. Start sharing your own experience and one mother will think they’re doing it all wrong, the other thinks you’re being judgemental! We seem to have permission to moan about how tiring it is and how tough it can feel, but we can’t engage in any real discussion without treading on very thin and treacherous ice.  Well, at least, that’s how it feels to me.

And I feel so sad about that because all of us are carrying such beautiful nuggets of wisdom; we are all having these amazing, unique experiences that have the promise to impart gifts of love, healing, knowledge, surrender, joy to ourselves and each other. Too often, hidden behind our fear of doing it wrong and burdened with the overwhelm of advice, we retreat and stop listening to each other.

However, I believe that once we understand our own philosophy, the one that works alongside the beat of our heart; that makes sense; sates the endless questioning, then we have the potential to listen to everyone and simply cherry pick the wisdom that suits our choices.  We can then hear each other without fear of judgement and sit quietly welcoming those nuggets and letting the rest flow past.

For me it was truly crystallised when I finally (3 years after becoming a parent) read ‘The Continuum Concept‘ by Jean Liedloff. As with any book that I have read, it is not ‘the answer’ but it put into words where I knew I was already heading and validated my instincts that I had been struggling to follow.  Most importantly it gave me an internal place to check my choices against… let me extrapolate.

Firstly, in very simple terms Jean Leidloff studied ‘stone-age’ tribes in South America, i.e. those that have had very little interaction with modern society and are still living in self-contained pockets of the Amazon. What she found most striking was that the babies and young children seemed to be so much calmer, happier and more contented than westernised children. She offers a wealth of advice and explanation in her book, which I do recommend reading, including secure attachment, on demand breastfeeding, cosleeping, but fundamentally she brings it back to Nature, animal instincts.

Nature. That is my philosophy. I really believe in the perfection of nature, I look around in awe at how things grow and propagate, how creatures forage, nurture and survive. I look at myself and how a child grew inside my belly from the smallest of specks to the most perfect of creatures. I am blown away by nature and, in my opinion, nature rocks.

So when I question – would this be right for my baby/child? I take a moment to consider how it might look in an unadulterated environment deep in the Amazon, how other mammals behave and what nature might have intended. When I read that mammals feed their young till they’re a 3rd of their adult size, I no longer worried about the stigma of feeding a 4 year old; when I consider how to treat my children’s sickness, I remind myself how brilliant the body is at handling ailments and I allow it to flow rather than suppress; when I wonder how best to ‘discipline’ my littles, I consider the tribes respect for their children; when I set boundaries, I think about whether it is important for their natural development or simply to ease my day.

Now it is no longer a question of how do I raise my children, but how do I support myself, and them, in honouring the natural way.

Feminism brought material equality but enforced a suppression of one of our most vital and vibrant energies – that of the mother. Feminism has had its time and I’m grateful to all those women who fought for our future, now we must shift again.

Moons ago, matriarchal societies were common place; woman was respected and honoured for all of her strengths, not least her extraordinary gift of growing, birthing and raising our children. Pendulums have swung and times have changed and right now we are at a place where we don’t seem to respect each other or even ourselves as mothers.

I recently read an article citing that we must live and let live, each to their own, birth how we want, natural or c- section, it is an individual’s choice. Yet such a crucial element has been missed from this. Bearing children is a rite of passage, the experience provides us and our children with tools a plenty; faith, courage, strength, ecstasy, joy, challenge, beauty, to name a few. It is every woman’s right to live and experience these rites of passage as they were designed. By ‘accepting’ epidurals, c-sections, suctions etc as a choice rather than an absolute necessity for the smallest fraction of the population, we are disempowering ourselves and each other. We are telling each other that we are not strong enough, good enough, brave enough, natural enough.

We were born with the capacity to birth our future generations and yet by the time we reach our due dates we are filled with doubt and fears and we allow our patriarchal society to tell us that we can only do this with lots and lots of (predominately male) help.

Step back into your power woman.

Reclaim your wisdom, your strength and your courage.

Support your kindred spirits whose birth stories fall below their hopes and dreams and use them to learn how to ensure that your story and that of your sisters and daughters are ones of deep knowing and power. That you hold the spirit of woman in your womb as you birth.

‘Live and let live’ is a beautiful adage when held poetically and lightly but not when it excuses the disastrous place we are at with our birth stories today. Not when it removes the support network of knowledge and wisdom from our peers and elders. Not when mothers and babies are dying from intervention after intervention. We know how to birth.

We are women and we are mothers. Whether we choose to bring our own children into this world, or not, our personal mother energy is a vitally intrinsic part of who we are. How we express it can change the world.

Kindness and compassion, courage and wisdom, let’s bring these to our birthing places, to our work places, to our schools and to our homes. Find your circle of women, sit and remember your ancestors, remember who you are.

You are a WOMAN.

 
(Apologies to all the men reading this, you are, of course, a Man….)

It is with increasing distress that I see and hear of more and more families and individuals being persecuted for choosing not to vaccinate themselves and their children. I use ‘persecuted’, a powerful word, with intent. In my eyes, it is no different to the paediatrician who was hunted out by locals thinking he was a paedophile. The media hype and ignorance behind these verbal and emotional attacks are horrifying. Naming parents as ‘negligent’ and ‘murderers’ because of their personal choices is just not OK.

Although I have never hidden our family’s vaccine status and have shared numerous articles via social networks, I have yet to sit down and lay it on the table. The time has come.

I was brought up and educated in a highly scientific style; logic and evidence were absolutely paramount to any conflict of opinion, there was certainly no space for anything ‘wishy washy’. I am grateful for this upbringing and the tools it has given me to examine scenarios that I face in life, I have a questioning and enquiring mind as a result. It is with this energy that I came to question the idea of vaccines. From a logical perspective, I had totally bought into the vaccine theory – stimulate the immune system with a small dose of virus, create immunity and hey presto, no need to live through the actual disease. It made absolute sense. What didn’t make sense to me was injecting new born or 8 week old babies with anything. I think nature is awesome, it doesn’t make mistakes, so I see no reason to interrupt that incredible survival technique that it has created to allow our human race and animal kingdom to propagate so successfully. So I opted for natural, drug free home births for my children, on demand and full term breastfeeding and no unnecessary interventions (including vaccines) until further notice….

So that was it, I was just going to delay, wait until their systems were a little stronger, wait until they really needed ‘protecting’, because whilst I was breastfeeding, they had the best protection money could buy – well actually it’s free….

But I wanted to be sure, of course I didn’t want to endanger my children, expose them unnecessarily etc etc. So the research begin. Four years later, I am still researching and reading and listening every single day, but I am on a completely different path to what I expected and here’s why:

1) Creating Immunity – our bodies create immunity through a series of complex steps. Paramount to this is how the viruses enter our system. In nature we inhale or ingest and our first stage immune response starts in the nasal passages. It is a gentle but effective process (nature rocks!). When we inject, penetrate our natural defenses (skin) we create an unnatural immune response, it goes into hyper-drive, skips some vital steps and causes an overstimulated reaction. Whilst this system (injection) can, though not always, create antibodies, they are not a sign of immunity but merely a sign of immune system reaction.

2)Toxins – the first vaccines created were just the virus and a bit of ‘housing’ for the virus (egg for example). Nothing happened. Realising that the immune system did not react to this, the scientists decided to aggravate the immune system, to give it a kick start. This meant including ‘poison’ in the injections. Over the years that has included mercury, formaldehyde, aluminum and a whole host of other things. Some have been so instantaneously toxic, they have been removed, other have stayed. Evidence suggests that they do just that, they stay in your system and build up to super toxic levels. On top of which we have preservatives to keep the vaccine ‘fresh’ and/or antibiotics to ‘prevent bacterial contamination during manufacturing’ like the MMR (neomycin). Take a look at the insert for any vaccine and check the full list of ingredients. One scientist is the field of vaccine research told me that they simply included egg white and virus – this is not the case.

3) Research – I like research, I like statistics and I like facts, but my brother has always shown me the way stats can be twisted, that compliant figures can be shown and unhelpful results hidden. Research needs to be very transparent and simple. In the vaccine world it isn’t. ALL drugs should undergo a ‘double blind placebo trial’ to ensure safety and efficacy (this means all parties, doctors & patients are unaware of what they are giving & receiving and that the placebo is an inert substance like saline solution in order to ensure there is a comparison to the ‘norm’). This is NOT done for vaccines, under the guise of ‘ethics’ – that exposure to these diseases is not ethical*, they have found a way not to test with a true placebo**. Except once…. In 1979, a large scale community-based double blind randomized controlled trial was carried out in Chingleput district of South India to evaluate the protective effect of BCG against bacillary forms of pumonary tuberculosis. From among 366,625 individuals registered, 281,161 persons were vaccinated with BCG or placebo by random allocation. The results showed that BCG did NOT offer any protection against adult forms of bacillary pulmonary tuberculosis. The BCG vaccine is not part of the vaccine schedule in the States.

I have also personally spoken to a number of scientific researcher who have all, independently, corroborated the fact that research across many industries is repeated and repeated until the desired result is found, then all the other research is discarded. This means they could trial a drug 100 times and only once have it show efficacy, yet they publish that one trial and bin the rest.  Transparent? No.

4) Natural Immunity – it works. It has done for thousands of years. We contract a disease and depending on our general health, express is strongly, mildly or not at all. We then have, more often than not, life long immunity. If the vaccines work to stimulate our immune system and create immunity, why do we need boosters? Or perhaps it’s just those antibodies that are stimulated, those small markers they may or may not mean immunity… where does that leave our protection against disease?

5) Self Limiting Disease – so I had totally bought into the ‘vaccines have removed disease from the face of the earth’. Nope. The data shows us that the diseases were already on their way out. Education in good health, sanitation, nutrition, fresh water and reducing over-crowded living had brought the diseases to their knees. They had already almost disappeared or were in their natural self limiting cycles. The graphs here show the decline of the diseases relative to the introduction of the vaccines. Take Scarlet Fever as an example, no vaccine for that, yet are we suffering global epidemics? What about smallpox? Again, virtually eradicated before the vaccine was even introduced. In fact, in the Philippines, where they had never had a single case of smallpox, they ran a vaccine drive and induced the world’s largest smallpox outbreak, killing hundreds. (And the town with one of the lowest smallpox mortality in Europe was Leicester, UK, who also had one fo the lowest rate of vaccination but had adopted methods of hygiene – see the Leicester Method.)

6) The Fear of Diseases – so I looked at each disease and whether or not I or my children would have to suffer or be left with life changing issues should we contract any of the diseases. And the answer was no. Look back at medical reporting just 50 years ago and measles, mumps, rubella etc are all described as mild childhood illness. Only the media has hyped them to a point of hysteria, printing emotive pictures and fear. As with ANY sickness, if you are in good health, emotionally and physically, you will process a disease without any serious side effects. If you are immune compromised the outcome can be different, but you should also not be taking vaccines (as indicated by the pharmaceutical companies) if you are immune compromised. What about Polio, Tetanus? Big fear around these diseases. Again all perfectly manageable, it doesn’t mean you won’t have discomfort but you will be OK. There is a great video by Suzanne Humphries, MD on her research on the Polio debate here. And Tetanus…. you can get tetanus as many times as applies to your life and exposure, ie immunity for tetanus does not exist; compounded by its rarity, for example, in the UK just one OAP dies every 2 years from tetanus infection despite over 500,000 children remaining unvaccinated (5% of the child population).

6)What is Dis-Ease? My relationship to dis-ease has shifted too. I now see it as a helpful rather than worrying thing. We are surrounded by pathogens, viruses, bacteria all the time but only when we are ‘susceptible’ will we express the sickness. This is our bodies using the tools of this world to detox, to use vomiting, diarrhoea, rashes, mucus to expel toxins and give our systems a cleanse. When illness turns up in our house, I welcome it and support it through the process, not suppressing symptoms but allowing the complete cycle to play out. We are stronger and healthier as a result of the sickness we have dealt with.

To cover the issue of Herd Immunity, whilst we’re on the topic, let’s look at what that should mean – ‘A population where the majority are vaccinated creating a cocoon of disease free bodies to protect the vulnerable.’ It doesn’t exist. My generation, and those of my parents, did not receive the full raft of vaccines available today, nor did we receive the boosters (deemed unnecessary in our day, before they discovered the vaccines ‘wear off’). Therefore we are technically ‘not immune’, there is no cocoon of immune population. Anyone see the epidemics of diseases anywhere? Not I. But I do see that wild polio has self limited in India, yet vaccine induced Polio is on the up and killing people. (“In 2011, there were an extra 47,500 new cases of NPAFP [in India]. Clinically indistinguishable from polio paralysis but twice as deadly, the incidence of NPAFP was directly proportional to doses of oral polio received.”) I do see children with vaccine damage. I do see an unprecedented surge in auto immune disorders and in cancer.

So what I found after all my research, including a raft of peer reviewed medical studies (see just one list of resources here), was that I couldn’t find a reason TO vaccinate. I followed the logic and the common sense and it led me here.

And one last question… if vaccines do work, why are you all so afraid of us that don’t vaccinate? Aren’t you protected?

Am I a murderer?

Not I.

————-

With unending gratitude to Anna Watson for fact checking, support, inspiration and most importantly establishing Arnica, UK Parents’ Support Network.  Also to Heidi Stevenson at Gaia Health for her indepth research and wisdom. There are a multitude of resources out there, but to start the ball rolling I also highly recommend The Informed Parent  and the film, The Greater Good.

* Many in the unvaccinated community are happy to stand and have even asked to be included in trials as a comparison to vaccinated status. They have been declined. However an independent study in Germany of over 17,000 (much larger than many pharmaceutical clinical trials) indicates that unvaccinated children are 500 times healthier than vaccinated children

** Placebo’s used in current trials are comparator vaccines, this means that the results show toxic load compared to toxic load with the variation being the virus it holds. These are not acceptable tests and end up creating a false concept that certain numbers and types of side-effects are acceptable.

There’s a theme going on, a thread that runs through all the issues that are behind the funk we human’s are sitting in right now. And it is the ‘Quick Fix’.

It doesn’t matter what subject I explore, whether it’s parenting, health, education, community, work-life et al, the energetic blocks to these systems are solutions that have no longevity.

Starting with an aspect of parenting, which is the foundation stone of where our future generations lead us, I always like to consider what an uncluttered and uninterfered tribal principle would be to any of the issues or choices that arise. (Inspired by Jean Liedloff, The Continuum Concept). As a simple overview, one block that we’ve hit is that our children are not ‘sleeping through the night’ and we are left exhausted. Quick Fix – Sleep Training. What happens in nature? Co-sleeping, full time parenting, on-demand breastfeeding. The studies show us that high levels of stress in babies and infants cause permanent emotional & developmental issues in the brain. Sleep training is a damaging solution, so instead let’s look wider, how can we recreate community support? How can we re-educate families on the basic needs of our babies? Do we need to be reminded that it is our job, whether a stay at home mum or career high flier, it is still our RESPONSIBILITY to nurture and support our babies to adulthood.

 ‘if you don’t get up for your children when they are young, you will get up for them when you are old’  Jewish Proverb

Healthcare – let’s look at the expanding pockets of chronic sickness in the world and no, they are not in 3rd world countries. Or course we can continue to help our global neighbours to good water and good nutrition, but let’s not pretend we’ve got this healthcare thing sorted. Our cancer and autoimmune disorder rates are soaring. Iatrogenic deaths, those caused by the medical system, are in the top 5, sometimes even top place, in the western world. Infant mortality and postnatal deaths are on the increase in the USA and UK. We are trying to FIX our health with toxic drugs, unresearched vaccines and short-sighted vision. Health is holistic, it’s not a ‘hippy’ phrase, we are more than the sum of bones, muscles & flesh. We are complex individuals where our emotions play a huge part in our health. We had a flashbulb moment of realising how important good sanitation, nutrition and familial support are to our daily health, but we are quickly forgetting these simple saviours, in favour of pumping ourselves full of toxins.

Education – we have broken down education to the need to be able to read and write and are forcing it down the throats of our children before they are intellectually ready. Children desire to learn, it is innate and natural. If we foster their natural abilities, they will fly with passion, enthusiasm, wisdom and knowledge. Instead they are blinded by stats and assessments, literacy levels and competition and we are creating children who feel exhausted by life before they have entered adulthood.

Throw me a ‘that’s what’s wrong with our society’ issue and I’ll show you how we are treating it with cheap sticking plaster rather than encouraging forward thinking, peaceful resolution, inspiration, healing and health.

Everyone of these issues deserves and needs some real exploration time and I am almost in danger of being too ‘quick’ in this blog with my own explanation. But I want to ring some bells, make some noise, shout out loud. We have to get off this path of the quick fix, take a deep breath and go back to some serious basics. Get back to nutritious, home cooked and home grown foods. Get back to nurturing our young to be the best that they can be. Get back to finding space and time to breathe and think. What is the danger if we stop for a moment? What is the risk?

PAUSE.

BREATHE.

REDISCOVER.

Life is for living, not dying…

 

Today I went ‘postal’.

My eldest daughter hurt my youngest, in the endless tyranny of sibling development & relationship. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t dramatic, it was small and understated in fact, but I took it to a whole new level. The minutiae of the event is unnecessary to regurgitate but in reflection, in these moments where I wonder, will I ever learn to do this right? I look at what feelings trigger me to feel so mad.

And the words that form in my mind, over and over again, are ‘why can’t they just be reasonable’.

And I realise that so much of my anger, so much of making people Wrong (for that is what anger is) is my belief that they are being Unreasonable.

The absolute blessing and privilege of my children is that I know that they are of pure heart, so when I judge them, in this case, to be unreasonable, I know clearly, without murkiness, that it’s ‘my stuff’. In relationships with other adults, I can really justify why they aren’t reasonable. I can justify why my mother’s needs to express her thoughts are not reasonable; why my friend’s need to bring up her child differently to me are not reasonable; why my husband is so endlessly unreasonable….. But my children, I cannot hide from them, when I make them unreasonable, then I know it is I who needs to look within.

So I am tossing this word around my head – reasonable, reasonable, reasonable. And I am wondering why I am so fixated with it and, mostly, how have I managed to create myself and the judge and jury of what is reasonable? Why is my way the best way, in fact, the only way? Where did my standard of ‘reason’ come from? Part of the confusion around this lies with my belief that on so many occasions I offer the ‘voice of reason’, laying out a plethora of options to account for all manner of tastes and requirements, so having stretched myself wide, when someone dare suggest that their needs are even further out of that range…. PING….Snap… Postal…..

I am still mulling all these thoughts over and have yet to uncover and bring to light the tight and suffocating need to contain reason. All I do know is that my stretch for myself as I process this pathway is to allow myself and others to be unreasonable – in the very best possible way.

 

In recognising, owning and announcing the presence of my anger, I took my first step.

As I like to do, knowing that each problem we encounter has many roots and branches, I am taking a multi-pronged healing approach. My homeopath is supporting my energies and calm; whilst I am even more conscious of my nutrition and sleep (not easy with two little ones); but I knew that I needed more and dived into a book ‘The surprising purpose of anger’ which led me to the Centre for NonViolent Communication (www.cnvc.org). 

From there I traced a path, supported by internet strangers full of compassion and grace, to an NVC counsellor here in the UK who was able to come to my home and talk. Talk….

I have done some deep, powerful, shifting processes in my time that reached to my core wounds and brought them to light. This time, I just talked and cried. I shared with someone that I felt so surprisingly safe with because he understood, it was his expertise, he would not accept but nor would he judge. That was a key for me, I did not want anyone to excuse my anger, offer me reasons or justifications but, in the same breath, I wanted so desperately to be understood.

What I exposed, was the absolute terror I have of repeating the representation of anger I grew up with, the out of control, frightening and paralysing expressions of rage and ultimately the withdrawal of love. Yet the fear was manifesting. From the first time I had allowed my anger to be ‘out of control’, to shout without bounds, to slam doors with an energy that buzzed every nerve, I feared I had entered The Underworld, with no hope of return. The fear that I was not the person I wanted to be, the mother I hoped I could be, was creating the monster that I was becoming.

And I brought it to light….

And it stopped….

No, I am not without my anger, nor am I really close to the summit of my mountain as yet. But in recognising how much that fear was creating my reality, I regained my own ability to choose. I have seen that I am this person because how could I not be? That is simply the way I learned to express my own rage. Rather than denying it and pushing it down only to explode through my shame, I am owning it. And by owning it, I can sense it’s arrival without hiding and that gives me just those few extra seconds, those brief moments to choose to do it differently.

I have a lot of relearning to do, I huge amount of self awareness to create and a long path before my little girl truly feels safe with me again, but I am climbing.. up and up and up….

(A debt of gratitude to Daren DeWitt www.nvc-resolutions.co.uk)

I’m quite ‘good’ at being angry… in the sense that I don’t really ‘lose’ the plot. Even when shaking with rage, I have a certain element of control and don’t say things I don’t mean just to be spiteful. I learned a long time ago that those type of words can rarely be expunged. But most of all I learned to walk away… if the fire got too hot, to find a place for me to get some space, some thinking time, gather myself, analyse myself and come back with efforts to heal and resolve.

That doesn’t work with a toddler. If I walk away, not only is she frightened by my anger, she is abandoned by my leaving. For almost the first 3 years of parenting, I never had to visit my ‘angry’ place with my beautiful child. Then my gorgeous son arrived and brought with him a change in dynamic that has shocked me to my very core. I have visited darkness in myself that I hoped had healed and I have not been the mother I choose and wish to be.

My anger has flared when my eldest accidentally hurts my baby – a mother’s raw instinct kicking in? Yes, sometimes that is true. But it has also risen from the depths when my energies are low and both need me. I want to give them my time and my love and sometimes one of them has to wait. It hurts me to put their needs on hold, but my reaction hurts them the most. I have looked myself in the mirror and failed to recognise myself, but what I did see was my legacy…

I have realised and recognised this vein of anger as a thread running through my ancestral family, a coping mechanism, a ‘validated’ output. It is not acceptable to me but it is a habit hard learned and well worn into my psyche. It is going to take time, effort and pain to start to explore different ways to express when nerves are tight and jangling. Momentous waves of patience and compassion are required, not least for myself in order that I may have enough to pass onto my children.

What I acknowledge instantly is that, more often than not, if I can take a breath, pause and explore what is pressing that ‘button’, I really just want to cry. Cry because I’m tired, because my toddler is frustrated and I can’t find a way to help her, cry because it’s been a hard day. Crying was not OK for me growing up, crying was ‘manipulative’ and ‘weak’. My father sometimes cried and that was him being ‘manipulative’, so I believed, maybe it wasn’t…. My mother, I don’t remember seeing her cry but I do remember her being angry and I do think of her as ‘strong’. My grandmother, my grandfather… yes both angry but not ‘sad’. What has happened to sadness? It exists, it is natural, it is human, somehow it has been ‘wronged’.

Would my toddler be upset to see my cry? Yes, probably. But given a choice between Mama crying and explaining I’m tired (just as she does), Mama showing tears because she has tears too, Mama sitting down for a moment with a tissue and a sigh OR Mama cross, unaccepting of her feelings, pushing her away through the energy of my anger. I know which I choose and I know which is better for her in the long term.

Anger has a valid place in our lives, anger can save us from danger and can inspire us to fight injustice, but it is not valid for day-to-day parenting. I own that it is present in my life and in my house right now, but I am making a choice. I am choosing to cry and I am fighting that legacy that has hindered and inhibited my ancestors.

Send me blessings please, ooof, I can feel this mountain is going to be one hell of a climb.