I have had the privilege the last 2 days to talk at my old school DSG, about grief and loss. I felt really honoured to be able to interact with these amazing young woman in their most formative years. Too many of them have already faced grief and loss, or had to support friends who are grieving. As I said to them, I so wish that I could protect them from the pain of loss and grief, but I know that I can’t so I hope that in this way I am able to have a bit of an…

I was lucky enough to be asked to write something for Fair Lady on how to help the grieving. I only had 1500 words so it was pretty tough to condense everything I wanted to say into that word count, but here it is. Please take the time to buy a copy of Fair Lady or to read it here. Hopefully it can help some of you.   Fair Lady article

It was the first anniversary of our Thomas’ birth and death last week, and wow, it was tough! It was tough for all the “normal” reasons but something which made it even harder was that I felt almost completely alone. Very few people, family and friends alike, remembered the significance of the day, until I posted something on this blog, and while I shouldn’t find this hard, I did. I want to scream from the rooftops “he existed, he was real, he was my baby, he lived!” but I know that to almost everybody he wasn’t real. They never physically…

  I have always been a big fan of Sheryl Sandberg and loved her book Lean In. Her second book which has just been released is called Option B. It’s brilliant! A very personal account of her experiences from losing her husband, but also an excellent grief handbook. It gives really useful tools in terms of how to deal with grief on every level – personally, with your kids, from a work perspective and how to enable and help those that are grieving. What she highlights so well, is that while losing a husband/child/loved one is one of the worst…

That dreaded word..Shhh, don’t say it too loud, someone might hear and think you are crazy. THERAPY. PSYCHOLOGIST. PSYCHIATRIST. There are very few people who are able to stand up proudly and announce that they are having or have had therapy. And when you hear someone is in therapy, you generally can’t help but wonder what is “wrong” with them. What do they have issues with that they can’t solve on their own? What has messed them up? Why on earth would they be depressed? For some reason there is still a massive stigma around therapy, psychologists and psychiatrists and…

For those of you that may have missed it, here is the interview I did with Belinda Mountain. Thank you for the opportunity, I so appreciate it!   http://www.makingmountains.co.za/2017/03/02/meet-mom-simone/ In Simone’s words: On the afternoon of 15 September 2015 our lives changed forever. Our beautiful, perfect daughter Isabella, 7 ½ months old, died tragically. “Belsie” asphyxiated on her own vomit in her cot and help was too late to bring her back. On the morning of 4 May 2016, our son Thomas was born prematurely at 26 weeks and 3 days. We had much hope for his survival but he only…

  “Although our world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it,” Helen Keller.   Resilience – it’s a subject I have spent so much time thinking about and reading about. What makes some people more resilient than others? Is it life experience that shapes resilience? Or is it your approach to life that drives resilience? What makes some people able to pick themselves up and carry on whereas others can fall into a deep depression without being able see the wood from the trees, any light at all? Is it about being a glass…