I came across HypnoBirthing when I was pregnant with my first baby boy in 2009. My husband introduced the idea, which I love! He heard about it from a work colleague who had sold the course to us. We looked forward to our weekly sessions in our HypnoBirthing Teachers lounge. Doing the classes brought us closer together as a couple, it changed our perception of birth and made us start to connect with our baby in a way that we hadn’t done before. We were going through a tough time, due to illness in the family and the course gave us the focus and distraction that we needed.

Matrescence - ever heard this word? It is likely that you haven’t, as ‘matrscence’ has not made it into our common vocabulary. The dictionary definition is ‘the process of becoming a mother’, coined by Dana Raphael, American Medical Anthropologist.

It is a time of my life that I can recall clearly, yet so much is a blur! I was tired, exhausted, out of my depth and to be honest, clueless about how to look after a newborn baby. I had no idea that you should never fall asleep on the sofa with your baby; I thought that sharing a bed with a newborn was a criminal offence; and controlled crying was the only way to teach a sleepless, boob monster to self soothe! We were in survival mode and doing the best that we knew how.