Month: August 2016

Dear Mamas Episode 5 transcript: Are we done having kids?

On By Holly WalkerIn Podcast

In February 2016, Emily Writes and I started a parenting podcast called Dear Mamas. Our manifesto is no bullshit, no judgement, and we hope to build friendship, support and community. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or Stitcher, or listen on Emily’s blog. I’ll be posting transcripts of each episode here for anyone who’s unable to listen.

In this episode we explore how to know when you’ve had your last child. Holly is agonising over whether to have a second, Emily is pretty sure she’s done at two, but you never know… so we ask our friend Andrea (@MsBeeton) who has twelve (yes twelve!) children, why she kept having kids and how she knew she was finally done.

In the process, she breaks every stereotype we thought we had about people with large families, graciously endures our wide-eyed questioning, and we hold hands and agree it’s different for everyone and we’re all doing just fine. Huge and heartfelt thanks to @mamamuriel for the epic transcript.

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Review: The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

On By Holly WalkerIn Books

This review first appeared on The Spinoff on 4 August 2016.

There’s something inevitable, natural even, about the way victims of sexual abuse can end up being blamed for what’s happened to them. Sometimes it’s so overt and egregious that we’ll all be outraged – like the Canadian judge who in 2014 asked an alleged rape victim why she couldn’t just keep her knees shut – but the rest of the time, it can feel normal, embedded in the very language, “the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things. As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.” This idea, and Australian writer Charlotte Wood’s rage about it, is the fuel for her fifth novel, The Natural Way of Things, which won Australia’s big new prize for women writers, the Stella Prize, earlier this year.

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