Welcoming in December

magic moments, an apology, and a promise

This is your monthly catch-up email showcasing everything that is coming up for Postpartum Matters CIC and The Women’s Health Hub in the month ahead. If you are passionate about our work, or if you want to keep up to date with events, do consider subscribing below.

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I am so hugely grateful to you for being here.

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Hi friends,

Happy December - I hope your first day of advent has been magical. Christmas, the religious stuff, family feuds and the rest aside, December is so filled with twinkly lights and magical moments. I feel that, in a world that is still so full of harm and hate, this year as much as any other, we need to lean into that magic if we’re privileged enough to have it surround us.

Today, I have found magic in pulling my youngest child around our snow covered village on a sled. I have found magic in baking gingerbread, the aromatic scent filling my home with love and warmth. I have found magic in my dog chasing snowballs and my eldest laughing and rolling around in the snow with their friend. There have been lots of hard parts to today, I’ve even cried and had a half exhausted overwhelmed meltdown. But still, the magic has been there.

icicles and and sunshine and tiny fingers in soft dough

December feels like a significant month. You can look forward and imagine yourself in five years time, decorating the tree with the same dusty ornaments, lighting the Christmas scented candle. You can look back and remember that December five years ago, exhausted and worn, where you packed your toddler into the back of a fiat punto with a six foot Christmas tree that was almost as long as the car.

I can remember hosting a 2023 vision board circle around my dining room table last December 23rd. I made everyone their own candle and we all contributed to a pot luck of food; we shared in our happy and not-so-happy moments of 2022 before creating our vision for the year ahead. I had tissue paper which had been lovingly wrapped by

Sarah Shotts

and shipped over the ocean from Arkansas to the UK which I then cut up to add the below quote to my 2023 vision.

She knew peace. She made boundaries. She came to terms with what her limitations were and turned them into… then she tried again. that while not everything turns out perfectly, it always turns out exactly as it should.

When I added that to my vision board, I was thinking about my lab work. I’m about halfway - and far too many years - through my PhD. I work in a busy molecular biology lab filled with bright lights and lots of noise and a lab coat that makes me too hot always. Since my autism diagnosis last November, I’ve felt unsure if I could make that environment work for me. Hence the above words feeling significant.

However, sitting here now, almost 12 months on, the words land all kinds of differently. Since receiving my disability support from my university, I have been able to attend the lab consistently since August. It’s not easy but it’s okay and the work is good. I feel good about it.

No, I read those words now and I see they are there on my board for other reasons.

Two years ago, I planted all of my anger and trauma around my postpartum care into the soil and it grew into this organisation. Nine months ago I cleared space for others to come in and hold it with me and we grew other beautiful things, far beyond my initial dreams. And now, heading into winter, it is crumbling all around me.

For nine months I have worked almost every single day. I have ran workshops - at least one a week - attended meetings, shown up on Instagram, Facebook, Substack and in private messages and back and forth emails. I have supported women through pregnancy and postpartum, I have held them through sickness and grief and I have tried so so incredibly hard to market it all so people can find us, whilst building up income streams to fund it. I won £10,000 to keep it all going and I have earnt thousands more pounds over the last few months, all by myself.

I’m tired.

I can’t quite yet talk about all the mess that has happened to bring me to this place now but the last few weeks have left me feeling hurt, let down and angry. I’ve also had support and care and love from the people who are always there to cheerlead me as well as beautiful new connections budding. If I come back to the initial dream it was to help others - whilst creating a career, an organisation, which can support my sensory needs too. So I must put it all down and let others come in and hold it and me, whilst I step back and rest and reform the vision into something more manageable to hold.

I made promises to you this month which I must break. The workload is too much for one person and so, in the absence of additional hands and the meeting of expectations, I must pull back. This will be my last newsletter of 2023 and I will sadly need to cancel our connection circle, which was scheduled for next week. I am so incredibly sorry, truly.

My promise to you though is that, with the putting down of the things and the clearing of the dead wood that isn’t serving me, I will be able to show up here, anew in January. I’m really excited for Substack in 2024.

Since bringing my newsletter here back in May, I have struggled to find my feet and my voice. Too much of it has been wrapped around the image of Postpartum Matters CIC, the business and the organisation and the outward face of The Women’s Health Hub. Instead of being focused on sharing my voice and my story and creating space for the seeds of community to grow, for you to join me around the virtual campfire.

This type of online community is where the magic is for me. I communicate far better in written words than spoken conversations and the energy I need to show up to hold a circle on Zoom in my pyjamas is far less than is needed for an in person workshop that includes an hours round trip in the car. And so this community here is where I want to place most of my energy going forward.

My goals for next year are

~Six-weekly Zoom circles for paid subscribers (you can read about them here)

~Monthly postpartum stories

~More opinion pieces like this one, which you all loved so much

I’ll also be acting as the poet-in-residence for Neurokind and sharing my own poetry over on my other publication, Blooming Sundays. You can read my most recent poem here - these poems help me express hard things when I’m not quite ready or able to form full sentences about them.

I have not known peace in 2023. But there is hope yet for the future.

All my love, into the New Year,

Zoe x