The Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity approached me at the beginning of the year asking me to write something for them. As Mother’s Day was approaching, I decided to write something for the mothers keeping vigil at their child’s bedside in the hospital. It was written a year after Dominic’s 8 month long admission
My early memories of motherhood ranged from being amazed, and slightly repulsed, by how much baby sick it is possible to pool in your cleavage at one time and the apparent disregard that baby poos apparently have for gravity and claims of absorbability from nappy companies, as they stain your baby’s back, and your last clean babygrow, bright mustard yellow. After all, being a parent is a messy, dirty, exhausting and confusing job and you’re the one responsible for not screwing it up.
Home is where the heart is, or so the general consensus seems to be. In many ways I feel like I have come home now, everything has regained some kind of order, the cobwebs no longer have the larger share of the house and there has been a lot of culling of clothes and toys.
I haven't complained, once. Ok, take that sentence out of context and you would have Roger, certainly, raising his eyebrows. What I mean is, despite everything that happened, both from the dangerous to the incompetent and even stretching to the negligent while we were in Great Ormond Street, I never sat down and wrote a
The Child First and Always The Child. First and Always The Child First, And Always. The Child? First and Always? What makes a great medical institution great? Is it the doctors? Dedicated, caring, jutting of chin with a hint of the maverick about them? Perhaps it’s the nurses? Understanding, effortlessly selfless, wafting from