Holding the Baby: Milk, sweat and tears from the frontline of motherhood

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My favourite person on the politics of parenthood. Read it and feel comforted, cheered and galvanized (even when your brain and body are melting).' Pandora Sykes Every woman will experience the panic years in some way between her mid-twenties and early-forties. Heartening, eye-opening, hilarious. I'm glad Nell has given this weird time a term we can all use'. - Emma Gannon The history of ‘lazy parenting’• Since the 90s, helicopter parenting has been used to describe adults who hover near their children, ever-ready to move obstacles and smooth the path ahead (in the early 00s, universities in the USA said these parents were unable to stop hovering even once their kids had left home – calling them to wake them up for lectures, for example).

The baby I’ve been bringing up is now five. He can chop carrots and name different types of beetle and do up the velcro on his shoes. I have written more than 130 columns about the wild, endless, everyday wonder of being a parent. And I still have so, so much more to say. Because there is still so, so much to do. And enjoy. And rail against. And learn. What you learn will vary, of course. And it will probably be different depending on whether you are a birth parent, an adoptive parent, a co-parent, a single parent, an older parent, a parent with paid work, a religious parent, a parent of twins, of a newborn, a parent who has experienced pregnancy loss, a parent with a car, a disabled parent, a parent with a dishwasher, or a parent who uses the phrase “the days are long but the months are short.” I have been some of those things, and I have written about my experience not just to try and communicate it to other people but to try and understand it myself. So, several thousand flannels, tantrums, rashes, and kisses later, here is what I’ve learned. Language has brought me more joy than I expected If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Nell Frizzell has written for The Guardian, VICE, The Telegraph, Elle, Grazia, The Pool, The Observer, Buzzfeed, Refinery29, Red, Time Out and is a Vogue columnist. She is best known for features and columns on gender, culture, art and politics, including a recent Guardian piece on childbirth that was shared over 10,000 times, a dispatch from The Jungle refugee camp in Calais for VICE, advice on breastfeeding in public and many, many pieces on wild swimming. Nell has also featured several times on BBC Radio4’s Woman’s Hour, Shortcuts and as a guest on Radio 5 Live, BBC London and (surprisingly often) on BBC Radio Ulster. As well as journalism, Nell has written and performed comedy (at Green Man and Machynlleth Comedy Festival as well as various comedy nights in London), works as a lifeguard at the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath, is a seamstress and occasionally recreates famous portraits in her front room for her blog http://goppeldangers.tumblr.com/.Think you’ve spotted a pattern in when your baby is tired? Think you’ve worked out what they’ll eat? Think you’ve formed a routine? Think you know them now? Well, make hay while the sun shines, my friends, because it won’t last. Change, movement, momentum, addition, variation, transformation, variety, difference, and propulsion are the only absolute constant in your life now. Everything changes. And it will keep changing. It could be better Giving parents a break doesn’t just mean doing a bit of yoga and lying on the sofa and ignoring the piles in the sink. True, genuine release from the stress of raising small children means shared and equal parenting in whatever shape your family happens to be. It means mandatory paid parental leave. It means a child-friendly workplace culture. It means a functioning welfare state funded by taxation. It means safe and high-quality housing for everyone. It means accessible, subsidised childcare that pays its staff a living wage. It means access to green space and affordable healthy food and good public transport and mental health care and playgroups and children’s centres. It means funding and supporting the National Health Service. It means park benches and playgrounds and fully-funded schools and honest conversations with your peers. This book is incredible relatable and comforting... ‘Frizzell writes beautifully and poetically … making this an important read for all women’ - the Press Association Searingly honest, witty and moving. For anyone who knows what it's like to simultaneously want to weep with joy and throw your child out of the window, Frizzell is a very welcome voice in the conversation on motherhood'. - Vogue

Think you’ve spotted a pattern in when your baby is tired? Think you’ve worked out what they’ll eat? Think you’ve formed a routine? Think you know them now? Well, make hay while the sun shines, my friends, because it won’t last. Change, movement, momentum, addition, variation, transformation, variety, difference and propulsion are the only absolute constant in your life now. Everything changes. And it will keep changing. It could be better The Italian notion of sprezzatura – the conscious effort of making things look easy and nonchalant – is toxic in the world of new parents. Oh me? I just whipped up this sugar-free carrot cake. Oh them? I didn’t do anything; they just started sleeping through the night. Oh the house? I just have these sixteen different handmade boxes where I sort their clothes and toys, so it’s really easy, actually. Frizzell said: “This is the book I’ve wanted to write ever since I started thinking about writing books. The experience of becoming a parent is, by far, the most significant, most ridiculous, most confronting thing I’ve ever done. It is my Everest, my World Cup, my military coup. It is an experience beyond comprehension and yet probably the most universal human endeavour there is. With jokes, expert interviews, personal revelations and a genuine manifesto for change, it is the book that I needed when I felt eclipsed by early parenthood and the book I felt compelled to write, just as soon as my son had stopped trying to push raisins into my USB port. In the UK, for those of you who don’t know, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded 60 years after the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and still receives significantly less funding each year, through donations and legacies, than the pet charity. Perhaps this apparent preference shouldn’t be surprising. After all, domesticated animals are far, far less dependent on you for physical, emotional or psychological support than babies and children. They don’t hit you with years of hormonal fury during toddlerhood and adolescence, don’t learn to talk, don’t develop challenging political views, fall in love with drug dealers or steal your record collection. Finally, if the pet in question is a total nightmare, it is possible to give it away, or take it to a shelter, with very little social stigma. The Panic Years made me laugh and it made me cry. There’s a rare tenderness to this book that comes from not having felt seen before. It’s for our generation, and Nell gets it. She understands and respects us'. - Rhiannon Cosslett

For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. A must-read... sharp, funny, it chronicles all of the big decisions a woman is expected to make between the ages of 25-40: where to live, if they should marry, what to do with one's career. And that other biggie: to have a baby or not'. - Culture Whisper Tracing her own journey through social retreat, domestic incarceration and maternal guilt via murderous rage, Frizzell sets out to understand why we still treat early parenthood as an individual slog rather than a shared cultural responsibility. Drawing on the experience of others and the latest research, with wit and camaraderie Frizzell explores: In fact, it’s pretty unavoidable. After two years of stay and plays, rhyme times, playgroups and pantomimes, I can now belt out several rounds of “Zoom, zoom, zoom, we’re going to the moon” or “Old MacDonald” in a room full of people, without the tiniest worry that they can hear. Life with a toddler is like a karaoke bar, except you’re pretty much sober all the time and nobody tips. Describing loneliness will make you feel like you’ve just pulled up your T-shirt to show everybody a scar

There is a period of time during which a baby is utterly physically reliant on its parent or caregiver for survival. Some people call it the fourth trimester. Others call it a slice of pure hell. But of course, this period is not a trimester; it does not just last only three months. And it could be so much better...'

Nell Frizzell is a master. I particularly recommend this book to men… it is a visceral exploration of one young woman’s life that has immediately applicable lessons for us all. Vital reading. The Panic Years is also fun, funny, and warm. I love it dearly!’ A fresh, funny novel filled with truths about relationships and perfect details. I tore though it.’ - Amy Liptrot Transworld has bagged a “witty, reassuring and radically ambitious” memoir from The Panic Years author and Vogue columnist Nell Frizzell. Over the course of more than 130 columns, British Vogue’ s parenting columnist Nell Frizzell has analyzed and dissected the highs and lows of motherhood—interweaving deeply personal reflections on raising her son with calls for greater support for parents across the board. In her new book, Holding the Baby , she distills everything she’s learned into a moving memoir and manifesto for change. Here, she reflects on her greatest revelations from five years as a mother.

Exhilarating, infuriating, urgent and human ... an excellent journalistic investigation. I think this book is required reading for the child free, as it will help us to understand and support the choices of all parents.' Daisy Buchanan

You might not smell “that baby smell”…

What I’m not so good at – and what I think is a big ask of new parents – is then pretending on top of all that to be completely chilled out. To pretend not to care when your house looks like the inside of a compost bin, when your toddler snatches a paintbrush off another child and starts to chew it, when the person you are meeting texts to say they’re running 15 minutes late so you have to entertain a small child in the street for quarter of an hour, when they get a rash, when the bus stop’s closed, when your child won’t eat or you run out of clean nappies. All that stuff is, to some degree at least, stressful. Acting like you don’t care, haven’t noticed or don’t mind, feels like just another layer of artifice to add onto the sediments of bullshit new parents have to deal with. Timely, honest, brave and funny calling for a new kind of conversation about love, work, and parentood' - the Daily Mail Frizzell’s compassionate, compulsive prose fizzes with imaginative humour and metaphor... I admire Frizzell’s bravery, candour and campaigning spirit. Her critique of a society where inadequate, outdated government policy and workplace culture perpetuate gender inequality is sure to spark crucial conversations.- the Evening Standard Holding the Baby is the sanest, most gorgeous thing on capitalism's poisonous effect on parenthood I've ever read. I was hooting and hollering by the manifesto at the end. Because it's Nell Frizzell it's funny and brisk and also because it's Nell Frizzell it's urgent and incisive. It opens your eyes to a vastly healthier and utterly beautiful way to support babies (and people who used to be babies.) I'm grateful for this book.' Rob Delaney In these essays we see the Pond from the perspectives of writers who have swum there. Esther Freud describes the life-affirming sensation of swimming through the seasons; Lou Stoppard pays tribute to the winter swimmers who break the ice; Margaret Drabble reflects on the golden Hampstead days of her youth; Sharlene Teo visits for the first time; and Nell Frizzell shares the view from her yellow lifeguard’s canoe.