Nothing is working. It’s breaking my heart. I almost need my mom to come and hold me to sleep cause I’m so stressed. Help? Anyone??
— Serena Williams (@serenawilliams) December 17, 2017
It’s so hard when you feel completely out of your depth with a new baby. I made Babyhood because thats how i felt. And I couldn’t find the answers I was looking for anywhere. My mum had parented me in a completely different way and she couldn’t provide the answers. The books I looked around and found were full of strict schedules and making sure you let the baby know who was “boss”.
I heard babies crying in the street and felt compelled to answer their cries with agreement…”yes this world is not catering to the needs of babies!” We want to hush them down, placate them, silence their cries, but actually all they need is to be heard.
And Serena needs to be heard too, so desperate to be heard that she tweets her ten million followers and asks for help! The only problem is that each of the 10 million followers who want to offer advice have learned how to parent their small babies in a totally unique way, and no-one will be able to put Serena’s mind at rest. Instead I want to help her realise that she has the answers deep inside, intuitively. Her baby has never known another mother, and how Serena is as a mother is perfect to her baby, just like her baby is perfect to Serena (even with all the crying). We learn to be mothers at the same time our babies learn to be mothered and it is a unique journey for each of us.
Babyhood looks at this world from the view of a baby and helps us to wake up to their needs, as well as rest into our own abilities to meet those needs. Let’s start to realise that babies aren’t foreign aliens who we never learn to understand but instead they are intelligent beings who communicate with us in a multitude of ways that we learn from them.
One thing we have been doing for a very long time is having babies so it is locked into our genome somewhere, and just needs to be heard…
babyhood 