Keeping in touch
An update from summer in Cornwall and the underwater world of maternity leave
There’s no AB testing a baby. There’s no mvp, pre-releases or bug fixes. You get one shot and the early years are some of the most important in its lifespan. So it makes sense I hold onto this job as long as I’m able to, and put everything I have into doing the best I can, even in some pretty challenging conditions.
Hello friends!
It’s a common practice in the UK for employees to be offered a number of ‘keeping in touch’ days while on their maternity leave. Known as KIT days, these check-ins are chances to share how things are going before you discuss any return-to-work plans. So, as my son passes his ten-month-milestone with the crown of another tooth erupting from anenome-pink gums, I wanted to share a little update from the underwater timewarp that is new motherhood.
It’s safe to say my second experience of bringing new life into the world is night-and-day different from the first time round (or "first tour” as
calls it in her new book Maternity Service). Many of you will know, our daughter was born during Covid lockdown, and our transition into being first-time parents during a pandemic felt uniquely impacted by figuring it all out on our own in an environment of anxiety and isolation—albeit within local bubble of equally bewildered new-parent friends.One of the practices which helped me process and get through that experience was writing, in the form of jotted notes and half-poems at first, and later longer nonfiction prose and a poetry pamphlet I’ve talked about here.
Those bleary months after my daughter had left my body and started to exist as her own agent in the world were some of the most creatively freeing I have ever experienced too. Perhaps it’s something to do with the huge energy transfer of giving birth—a surge of rapid bodily change in mere minutes resulting in a psychedelic re-wiring of the neuropathways which make you you. Words and ideas poured out of my brain in a torrent, and I could only do my best to keep up with writing as much of them down as possible.
Some mothers say having a baby killed their beloved reading habit, but I found the opposite to be true. During my pregnancy and postpartum in 2020 I found myself to be reading more than ever (mostly during nightfeeds), across a wide breadth of genres, siphoning off any useful ideas into my own art. I had secretly hoped this would all happen again with my second child, though I was mainly looking forward to just not being in lockdown and hoping for a healthy baby, and had both my notebook and pen, and reading material, ready.
My friend described the early months of having a baby as the feeling that your canoe has just capsized and you’ve been plunged underwater. She likened it to her training at her canoe club when she was eleven. They would prepare for any tumbles by rolling and going underwater while still sitting in the canoe. She remembers just suddenly finding herself upside down, as if she’d blacked out, and blinking her eyes open to a totally different world. This is what it was likely for me going from pregnancy to postpartum. There is this submerged feeling—and then seeing a completely new world which is like the Upside Down of Stranger Things (though not nearly as sinister). It’s like the moon card in tarot—a shadow realm of dreams and fears and the wild unknown1. It’s an alternate reality which bears some semblance to the other, but is somehow completely and utterly different, strange, interesting, magical, lonely, curious, anxious, freeing, and seems to also be a new timescale which is pliant, hopeful, while also uncertain and full of self-doubt. Once again as I sunk into that upside-down world, and my old friend anxiety intensified, I turned to poetry and journaling. Just like heartbreak and adolescence, I found my matrescence can be a place for my inner artist to thrive.
Now, ten months in and I only just feel like someone has flipped my canoe back up with me still sitting in it (I guess, now also holding a baby?). I’ve brought up some notes and papers from that underwater world and I’m working them into a second pamphlet of poetry, a fiction work, a new novel, as well as nonfiction prose. There’s no doubt caregiving is hard work. But creatively, it feels prolific.2
At the start of 2025, while I was still very much in the swampy feeling of sleep deprivation I decided to join an online writing workshop run by Catrin Kemp called the
3. I was in a cohort of women, all of us with small babies, for eight weeks, meeting once a week for an hour to explore our experience of mothering through reading and writing, at this transitional time in our lives. This time together was so inspiring intellectually, it felt like a secret life I got to dream about in moments which might otherwise have been tiring or mundane, and I’ve been writing copiously in the small pockets of time offered to me while nursing and nurturing my son since, my brain hungry for discovering this writing self.We read together too—Toni Morrison, Rufi Thorpe, Naomi Stadlen, Angela Garbes, Jenny Offill, Anne Enright and more—and many writers I hadn’t come across before. We also had the incredible privilege of hearing directly from various mother-writers who came to co-run the workshop with Catrin to offer their insights and coaching including Liz Berry and Chitra Ramaswamy.
By the time the workshop course had finished I had already signed up to another once- a-week evening course with Broken Sleep Books, to continue this exploration of learning the craft to shape my underwater notes. The irony being that my son still wasn’t really sleeping in the evenings, and nursing pretty regularly, but both courses were super flexible in allowing you to dial into the zoom live if you could, or catch up later with recordings and reading material if you couldn’t. With Broken Sleep, Aaron took us through a prospectus of form, experimentation, imagery, editing and more—with an incredible lineup of teachers from
to , Stu McPherson and James Byrne.Everything is still in draft mode and quite shakeable at this stage (I’m determined to follow James Byrne’s excellent teaching on editing and editing and editing)… is a poem ever really finished? I’ve shared some shitty-first-drafts on Instagram—ones I’m no longer working on, and saving the others for some serious edits and submissions:
Of course my main work has been that of a caregiver: feeding, holding, rocking, and more. It would be disingenuous not to recognise that 98% of my time has been all consumed with this earth-work: many hours of nap walks, hospital trips, nursery rhymes, body healing… and so much more.
I haven’t returned to exercise in any meaningful way, I haven’t kept up with friendships, my relationships have taken a battering, and I’ve barely looked at the news or anything remotely realtime on social media. I know from experience this is all a natural part of the human reproductive process.
As a species we probably don’t give enough space, in a temporal sense, to bisecting oneself into two people. Whereas our documentation of the lifespans of plenty of other plant and animal species often gives great weight and significance to the process. I’m both aware of my status outside of the modern makers for productivity and contribution, and yet that I’m also contributing in the most productive way possible.
Making observations along the way allows me to drift through these days with a writer’s mind, making little notes about my son, or storing up lines of overheard conversations for my fiction. Writing and reading allows me to have this sense of distance and understand how what I am feeling plays into a broader narrative and discourse.
After that KIT update it makes sense to share a note about some changes in my other lines of work.
A couple of months ago I left my post at Substack as Managing Editor. I will be taking the rest of the summer to fully focus on my brood, as well as my own writing. This is an expansive time for me, as I didn’t get a very long maternity leave with my daughter during Covid, and I’ve never fully prioritised my own writing either. I’m dreaming and discovering what opportunities might be part of this next chapter leaning into my roles as a mother and artist, and I can’t wait to share with you more about my writing projects in due course. In my next KIT post, around the autumn, I plan to put out what other kind of work I might offer to select clients in my capacity as a writer and editor, so watch this space.
Part of this step change includes a shift in the types of posts and offering here on Tell Their Stories. So I’ve paused payments for new and existing paying subscribers briefly until I’m ready to make that change. You still have access the archive if you’re a previously paying subscriber, but please do just hit reply to my email if you would like to browse the back catalogue.
This is as good a moment as any to share how much I loved working at Substack, and had a flipping fantastic three years helping make a revolutionary new media landscape for writers and creators through my work. I feel very lucky to have worked with such talented people on an incredible platform, and I look forward to seeing it continue to shake things up in world, and will be cheering them all on from afar. Of course, I’ll enjoy going back to being a regular punter on Substack, experiencing life as a writer trying to make it work alongside my other favourite creators here. My brilliant former coworker
wrote this sparkling post on leaving her job at Substack and what she learned during her tenure—it’s worth a read.Making, carrying, and sustaining a new human life, then putting my entire mind and body into figuring out how the hell to raise and nurture it into a pretty decent member of society is probably the most important, thrilling, difficult and vital work I’ve ever done. It’s not lost on me that I’m in a privileged position to get to do this work, which many others are desperate to contribute to, and future generations are relying on me to get right. There’s no AB testing a baby. There’s no mvp, pre-releases or bug fixes. You get one shot and the early years are some of the most important in its lifespan. So it makes sense I hold onto this job as long as I’m able to, and put everything I have into doing the best I can, even in some pretty challenging conditions.
I’m looking forward to exploring this more with you as the summer days start to shorten again and the darkness draws in. If you’re a writing mother-writer like me, or an aspiring novellist, an artist of any kind, or someone trying to figure out how to build robust, deep, and meaningful communities around your passion or something you love in a pretty absurd world, you’re still in the right place.
I’ll be back here and showing up when I’m ready and have more to say. Feel free to say hey in the comments and let me know how you are, which will be a welcome interruption to small-scale but big-meaning world I’ve been occupying for the last ten months.
Until then,
what I’m reading 📚 //
My Kindle library is pretty eclectic right now but
’s Nightbitch got me through those newborn months, followed by Anne Enright’s Making Babies. On the motherhood/feminism front I’m currently jump-cutting between Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted, Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, and The Patriarchs by Angela Saini.In poetry, Talia Randall’s Eighty Two is a hot hot recommendation, and in paperback I’ve fully sunk my teeth into The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.
What I’m listening to 🎧 //
A fellow writer friend recently turned me onto Ester Perel’s Where Should We Begin. I also loved this episode of This Cultural Life with the choreographer Wayne McGregor, whose works I’ve always loved. Wayne talks about finding the language of movement first, and the form later, and this felt very pertinent. Also, on audiobook, Hark, by
, and A Bookshop of One’s Own, by Jane Cholmeley.what I’m watching 👀 //
My watchlist became pretty tame after the baby was born as it was all my shell-shocked nerves could handle. I love Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon on BBC iPlayer—there is something insanely cathartic about watching people throw out a lot of crap. I also need to massively plug Witches created by my fellow mother artist (and fellow first-time Covid mum) Elizabeth Sankey. It’s over on mubi and explores a raw and personal take on postpartum psychosis alongside the portrayal of witches in history and pop culture. When it comes to maternal mental health, this is really an important one.
Tell me your update and how you’ve been?
Interestingly (or not) the moon card always appears for me to represent my husband, the artist.
I always want to caveat this with an acknowledgement to all the mothers going through tough experiences right now. To salute Ali Wong: maternity leave is about having time to heal and hide our demolished ass bodies… I don’t want this to read like I’ve been skipping on clouds and unicorns writing every day while my son sleeps peacefully. Far from it, but I have found a solace in having the creative distance from some of the more challenging experiences which the writers mindset allows.
nicely done, Hannah 🙏🏼
How lovely to see you in the inbox! 💞💞