Mummy Matters

‘We’ll meet at the pool,’ they said. ‘Bring your bathers.’

They were twenty-something mums. I was a forty-something mum with a ‘bonus baby’ (the baby you have when your other ones are big enough to tie their own shoelaces, run their own baths or even drive their own cars).

I used to be a twenty-something mum. I used to spend most of the summer at the pool with my other babies. Then, ‘forty-something’ meant kilos to me. With a bikini top nicely rounded out by lactating bosoms, I didn’t have a body image problem….

Advice, whether it is appropriate or not can create a serious obsession about the simplest things when it concerns your baby’s well-being, especially in the early months when your hormones are rampant and everyone else seems to want to share their opinion…

Attunement is a word that sounds like what it is - tuning in to your baby. The essential bit about attunement is that you need to always be doing a scan of yourself, trying to calm yourself and asking yourself, “Am I tuning in to me, or am I tuning in to my baby? Am I tuning in to advice I’ve had?”