Category Archives: Family

My husband died a year ago. Here’s what he taught us about life and love

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A year after her husband Joe Hammond’s death from motor neurone disease, his widow reflects on grief, parenting through loss, and survival

How do you decide upon a day to die? For my husband Joe and me, that meant finding out when the doctors we needed were available, then we took note of our two sons’ school holidays and, finally, we looked at the carer rota for that month. Who could we trust with Joe’s death as much as we had trusted them with his life?

The next step was a meeting with the relevant doctors; what incredible women they had been throughout our whole, surreal journey. They asked us how we imagined the process might unfold, during which Joe would receive a huge amount of morphine to sedate him enough that his ventilator could be removed. We were bemused. What were the options? Apparently, some people choose to watch television and the programme of choice is Countdown. This gave Joe and me the giggles. We said we thought we’d manage without more conundrums than we already had.

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Tim Dowling: I know what I weigh. Our new scales are wildly out

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I realise that the last time my fixed notion of what I weighed was affirmed by actual measurement was at a doctor’s appointment five years ago

On my third pass through the kitchen in the morning, I see a recently delivered box sitting on the floor. I consider the possibility that it might be for me. The package is addressed to my wife, but there’s still a slim chance I am the final intended recipient. I lift the box: it’s heavy. For the moment, I can take the investigation no further – my wife is not at home.

At some point in the afternoon, I look out the window of my office shed towards the house and see my wife standing in the kitchen. I cross the garden. My wife does not look up when I enter – she is staring intently at her feet. The box is on the table between us, empty.

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Everyday Covid mistakes we are all still making

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Can we do more as individuals to help slow the spread of coronavirus? We ask the experts

Covid-19 infections in the UK are reducing but remain stubbornly high, despite a month of lockdown measures. So could we be doing more as individuals to curb transmission of the virus? A virologist, a psychologist and a public health expert share their views on some of the Covid-19 mistakes that we are all still making.

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I enjoyed researching the bloody history of childbirth – then I had a baby | Anna North

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My new novel is about a midwife’s daughter in the old American west. The peril pregnant women underwent, then and now, became all too vivid once I became a parent

Childbirth in the 19th century was a dangerous affair. Women routinely came down with puerperal fever, an infection of the uterus that could lead to sepsis and death. Others suffered a postpartum haemorrhage: heavy bleeding that, if not stopped, could also claim their lives. Some experienced eclampsia, a condition in which skyrocketing blood pressure could cause fatal seizures. In 1900, six to nine women died for every 1,000 births, more than 30 times the rate today.

I learned these facts when I started researching my latest novel, Outlawed, an alternate history following a midwife’s daughter on the run across the American west in 1894. I needed a working understanding of obstetrics and gynaecology of the era to give it verisimilitude. So I read about the history of the C-section, which, at least in Europe, was generally a fatal procedure until about the 1880s, though there are reports of women surviving it as early as the second century CE. I learned about the discovery of egg cells, which was the subject of heated debate in the 1670s between the Dutch doctor Reinier de Graaf (who demonstrated their existence by dissecting rabbits shortly after mating) and his rival Jan Swammerdam (who liked to travel with a human uterus and other “items of genital anatomy”). I studied the composition of early baby formula, which, in 16th and 17th-century Europe, often consisted of bread soaked in milk, fed to infants from a “pap boat” that was unfortunately hard to clean and prone to accumulating bacteria.

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Tim Dowling: the cat has plenty to say. But why should I listen?

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‘Your English is poor,’ I tell him. ‘Your accent is atrocious’

My phone says it’s 7.50am, but the sky outside looks more like 4.15. Rain is striking the window in handfuls, like flung gravel. It has been raining all night, and it promises to rain all day, possibly for the rest of the month. I dress by the light of a reading lamp and close the bedroom door behind me.

“Hello?” says the cat from somewhere in the darkness below.

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How we met: ‘A fortune teller told me how I would meet my partner. She was right’

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Teachers Naomi and Huw Beynon, 41 and 49, met at a salsa class in 2005. They live with their children in Swansea

Naomi Lewis was nursing a broken heart at the start of 2005, after splitting up with her boyfriend a few months earlier. She had recently moved into a new flat in Swansea, alone, and befriended Saffron, a woman who lived above her in the building. “In January, Saffron went on a bad blind date to a salsa class,” she says. “Although there was no spark, she loved the dancing and begged me to go back with her. I’ve got two left feet and didn’t fancy it, but she persuaded me.”

When they arrived, Saffron’s date from the previous week was there – and he had brought a friend. “I’d not long broken up with someone and I went with my friend Julian because it seemed like something to do on a Wednesday night,” says Huw Lewis. While Saffron told Naomi that Julian’s friend “was cute”, Naomi insisted Huw wasn’t her type. But after the class they got chatting and realised they had a lot in common. “We discovered we were both teachers and that both our parents were from the Welsh valleys,” remembers Naomi. Their personalities clicked; when Huw went to the toilet, Naomi told her friend she was going to marry him. “I must have had a special power,” laughs Huw. “I don’t think she’d even had a drink. When I started talking to her, I really liked her. She was quirky and interesting.”

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Covid restrictions on visits to detained children and parents are ‘cruel’, MPs told

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Prison, care home and mental health institution visit limitations failing to consider impact on family life, campaigners say

Children with parents in prison have been forgotten during lockdown, campaigners have told MPs.

The cross-party human rights committee is looking at the impact on the right to family life, with a focus on people in institutional settings including prisons, care homes and mental health facilities.

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Lupita: the powerful voice of one indigenous woman leading a movement

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Film-maker Monica Wise talks about making her documentary on Mexican indigenous resistance

Our latest Guardian documentary tells the story of Lupita, a courageous young Tzotzil-Maya woman​ ​at the forefront of a Mexican indigenous movement. Over twenty years after Lupita lost her family in the Acteal massacre in southern Mexico, she has become a spokesperson for her people​ and for a new generation of Mayan activists. She balances the demands of motherhood with her high-stakes efforts to re-educate and restore justice to the world. The film-maker Monica Wise talks to us about her experience making the film.

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‘From now on, I was in an LGBTQ+ family’: my husband came out as trans while I was on maternity leave

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I’d chosen an unconventional partner, and we both bristled at gender stereotypes. But I had sensed a distance between us, and it wasn’t just new parenthood

Today I sat on a bench facing the sea and sobbed my heart out. I don’t know if I will ever recover. This is a note on my phone, written on 9 November 2017.

I forgot about it for a couple of years, but I remember typing it as if it were yesterday. The gulls squawked and the sun dipped into the sea. I had been sitting there so long my hands were too cold to type. I put my phone into my coat pocket, and turned the buggy to face home.

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My mum lied to me about having an affair. How can I trust her?

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As long as you expect your mother to be someone different, you will get hurt, says Annalisa Barbieri

I am 29. When I was nine, I found a letter addressed to a man’s name I didn’t recognise. My parents were married. When I was 11, my dad told me my mum was having an affair that had begun before their marriage. He told me how she wouldn’t be there when he came home, and would disappear at weekends. Throughout my adolescence, this man would call the house and hang up, and send cards to my mum. My dad said she was a bad person and that her morals were all mixed up.

I tried to speak to her about it as I got older, but she would angrily deny it. After my parents divorced, she thought she would be with the other man, but this never happened. Twenty years later, she still refuses to admit anything is going on. But over the years, I have seen many messages showing her wanting to be with him.

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Crammed with my wife and adult kids into a tiny one-bed flat, I realised I loved my home

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In March, our house was a cold, rubble-strewn building site. As supply chains broke down, it became clear we wouldn’t be moving back any time soon


My wife is a goal-oriented person. When she learns, it is deliberate. For her, lockdown presented an opportunity, so she began learning Danish. I didn’t. I am deeply lazy: as I sit here writing, I am staring at an empty packet of Wotsits that has been sitting by my laptop for three hours; the bin is 6ft away. The notion of actively learning something seemed a bit needless. Why waste all that time when I could be doing nothing?

I did learn something, though. I learned that I love my home, which came as a surprise. I guess there is nothing quite like being trapped outside your house, as we were, to make you appreciate it rather more.

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Giving birth seemed to spell disaster for my mental health. Were my anxieties unfounded?

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I feared isolation, sleep deprivation and an end to the activities that had been keeping me well. I never expected to be filled with such love and wonder

I hadn’t expected to have a baby. But when I turned out to be wrong about that, I found myself expecting the whole thing to be a disaster. It wasn’t just that people tend to be rather negative about what early parenthood entails, focusing on the sleepless nights and endless nappy changes. It was also because I had a mental illness that I thought would make it impossible for me to cope at all, let alone enjoy motherhood. Neither had I expected to be giving birth in the middle of a pandemic, in which I would be cut off from much of my support network.

In the three years since I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, as a result of a serious trauma in my personal life, I had spent a great deal of time trying to work out how to manage my illness. I planned my weeks around activities that research told me would help mend my mind a little. I knew that cold-water swimming, for instance, appears to help us control the fight-or-flight instinct that often goes so awry in mental illness. I knew that running could encourage the body to produce chemicals that lift the mood. I had discovered that birdwatching and looking for wild flowers were much more effective for me than mindfulness apps, with their calls to sit in silence in a room. I had just written a book about the healing power of outdoor pursuits and was starting to feel mildly in control of my life.

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Experience: I fell in love in an Uber

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I jumped in the cab to find a tall handsome stranger sitting in the back

It was a beautiful spring day in Manhattan in May 2016. The air was crisp and the skies were blue, so I decided to walk across town to meet a friend for lunch. I had gone only a few blocks when what felt like a tornado hit: my light coat was no match for the heavy rain; my hair blew in 10 directions, and garbage hit me in the face. I tried to hail a cab, but there weren’t any. Uber prices were surging, so I decided to take a punt on an UberPool (you could end up travelling with a stranger, but there’s a discount). I hoped nobody would get in to join me on the short trip.

The cab pulled around the corner immediately. I jumped in to find a tall, handsome stranger sitting in the back. My heart started to race. I casually glanced in his direction before smoothly sitting down beside him (or so I thought; if you ask him about it now, he says I straight up stared at him).

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Silent night: ‘In our family carols are a ritual celebration – this year the music stopped’

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For Sian Prior, 2020 feels like the year the carols nearly died. But perhaps there are new ways to keep the song alive

The purists would say I shouldn’t sing Christmas carols. Heathens have no right to be warbling about mangers, angels and holy nights. Strictly speaking, those tunes belong to the faithful, not to atheists like me. But on Christmas Day you will usually find me hovering beside the piano, waiting impatiently for the carolling to begin.

My mother will play the accompaniment, my sister will sing the melody, I’ll find a harmony and my brother will take the bassline. We four non-believers will regale the rest of the family with We Three Kings and none of us will care what the purists think.

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My older brother makes me feel stupid and I can’t laugh it off

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It might be worth looking at why it’s so easy for him to make you feel like an idiot, says Annalisa Barbieri

I am a 40-year-old woman who has been talked down to and patronised by my older brother my entire life. He often speaks to me as though he assumes I don’t understand simple things, and when I try to communicate to him that I do understand, he doesn’t seem to listen. I looked up to him when I was a child, so there’s this loud voice inside my head that says: “He’s speaking to you like you are an idiot, therefore you must be an idiot,” and my self-confidence is dented more every time.

This makes no sense because I have a good life. But I’m forever beating myself up. He seems to have the power to make me feel worthless.

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This year, for the first time, I won’t go home for Christmas. Will my family ties loosen for good?

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Flying visits to Northern Ireland kept me connected. FaceTime, Zoom and my niece’s drawings arriving by post are no substitute

I have never missed Christmas at home, though I have lived elsewhere for more than 20 years. This year, I will break that run. The festive travel window means that I could fly back to Northern Ireland from London. But my father is elderly and our neighbourhood on the border has been relatively untouched by Covid-19 until recently, so it doesn’t feel the safest plan. Instead, I’ll be in London. It will mark a year since I’ve been home; the longest I’ve ever been away.

With a flight time of under an hour, on a ticket often cheaper than a night out, I normally go home many times a year. It means I never have to miss a big night out; if it’s an emergency, I can be back in a matter of hours. Being home often feels crucial to my sense of self.

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‘Women feel they have no option but to give birth alone’: the rise of freebirthing

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As Covid infections rose, hospital felt like an increasingly dangerous place to have a baby. But is labouring without midwives or doctors the answer?

On the morning of 3 May, Victoria Johnson prepared to give birth at her home in the Highlands. One by one, her three children came downstairs to where she was labouring in a birthing pool surrounded by fairy lights, the curtains tightly shut against the outside world.

Suddenly, she felt an urge to get out of the pool. “I stood up and it felt as if the weight of the universe crashed from my head to my toes.” Her waters broke – “all over the carpet, which wasn’t ideal” – and the baby started to crown. “Everyone was there, including both grandmothers on video call,” she says. “Once the baby was out, my eight-year-old son came over and said, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ And that was everything.”

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Climate ‘apocalypse’ fears stopping people having children – study

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Survey of 600 people finds some parents regret having offspring for same reason

People worried about the climate crisis are deciding not to have children because of fears that their offspring would have to struggle through a climate apocalypse, according to the first academic study of the issue.

The researchers surveyed 600 people aged 27 to 45 who were already factoring climate concerns into their reproductive choices and found 96% were very or extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their potential future children in a climate-changed world. One 27-year-old woman said: “I feel like I can’t in good conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions.”

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The only thing most of us will be wearing this party season is slightly smarter pyjamas | Grace Dent

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‘I’ve given up trying to control anything now,’ I announced last Tuesday while breakfasting on a packet of jelly babies

Food has lost much of its meaning for me. Well, its meanings, to be more accurate. A typical late autumn of eating has its rhythms: shortly after decorative gourd season and past toffee apple weekend (both cancelled due to lurgy), many of us move seamlessly into pre-Christmas hoarding and restraint mode. The hoarding begins with a casually snaffled box of stollen slices or a little bag of Lindt chocolate Christmas tree decorations, chucked into the shopping basket “just to get things started”. Then a shufti around Marks & Spencer’s food hall, where the displays of shortbread in commemorative tin boxes (those nice ones your mother used for her sewing kit) always bring a sense of minor panic that holidays are comin’ and I am unprepared. Begin the lists, open the iCal, commence the slightly terse intra-family emails. Panic!

I do not have a yuletide shopping delivery slot. That dodgy shelf in my chiller will not survive a fortnight of festive season fridge Jenga, and a better woman than me would have made her own figgy pudding by now. But, as I say, the hoarding won’t happen this year. The big Dent jamboree is cancelled. And the restraint – which runs in parallel from about now to late December – is off, too. About now, I generally have in the diary at least two festive gatherings where I envision myself slinking in wearing some frock that will require me to be a bit hungry for at least 22 days and say things like, “No, I love running five miles pre-dawn dodging flashers – it centres me”, and, “Toast is too filling and carby. I’m so happy with this bircher muesli.” The only thing most of us will be wearing this party season is slightly smarter pyjamas.

Life is quite bizarre now that the usual run-up to New Year has been steam-rollered. How empty does late November feel without a low, bubbling, passive-aggressive email chain between siblings about how much room a nut roast takes up in an oven? I feel oddly bereft without any invites to a mock-Bavarian Christmas market where I can drink £8 glasses of glühwein and eat a reheated wurst on the waltzer while listening to David Guetta. This week I noticed the first of the “What to do with Christmas day leftovers” tips and tricks in the papers. The notion of having so many visitors that you might be caught with a glut of food already seems oddly archaic.

Buying, planning and hoping for things to run like clockwork is a mug’s game. The rules are that there are no rules. “I’ve given up trying to control anything now,” I announced last Tuesday while breakfasting on a packet of jelly babies. I think it was Tuesday. It may have been Thursday. The Gregorian calendar feels so meaningless these days. Anyway, each baby was so chunkily delicious, and their pudgy little lightly frosted bellies slid so soothingly down my throat, that they felt momentarily like love and order. This one lemon, yum yum. This one raspberry, schlurp. I rarely ate sweets before the pandemic, but now, in the blur of news about possible vaccines, permanent restaurant closures and the millions of wonderful hospitality workers who will no doubt need to retrain in cyber, they’re the only thing that piques my attention some days.

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