aka R’acquel

I prefer to keep a good distance away from politics but can see that i’ve been affected by facilitating a support network for mums.

Childbirth, starting a family ~ is a significant passage of experience for both men & women. I’ve seen all sorts of issues raised in the last 4.5 years. Collective input from people, reveals insights that governments can not possible have the access too unless they facilitate direct discourse with the public.

We saw the baby boom emerging. The childcare crisis was self evident due to input from women explaining how horrid it was to find a place which owned excessively long waiting queues. It took the Australian government a good 4-5 years to realise the things we saw that were happening in a single suburb which had the highest birth rate in Sydney around the period of 2003.

A large volume of women actively chose to delay childbirth for a good 7-10 years on average. This generated a knowledge-gap amongst people. A long period of time where women have not had the opportunity to engage in continued knowledge-transferal with issues surrounding motherhood. The mean age of a new mother now hovers around 32-35.

I suspect it’s going to take another 4-5 years for things to get to a level where there will be significant improvements in comparision to the decade which existed before it.

With more families on the rise, this places more weight on demand - so supply needs to adjust in order to meet it. Have seen things change for the better across the last 6 years due to the increase in demand.

Currently reviewing the archives and going through a process of “summarising” a vast slab of data that’s the equivalent of a few thousand novels which the support group has collected over the years. I found it confronting to see an old post of mine asking questions that live within this trail of thought. I’m still trying to come to terms with what it was that motivated me to ask those questions.

I then reflect on what it was that gave conception to the group. The sheer absurdity of “lack of knowledge”. To face “breastfeeding problems” when women have been doing this for how many thousands of years and to face such “lack of knoweldge” on how to counter the problems that do occur. So many thousands of experience - so wtf happened to the knowledge? Where did it all dissapear into?

Clearly a process of oral story telling that can never be captured by some Baby/Parenting manual written by a “single doctor”.

Women unecessarily stressing themselves out for not having babies that “sleep through” the entire night - where an industry has evolved to profit in the education of parents with the next latest “technique” to “cure” an issue which is very likely to take a good long 8-11months to “naturally” resolve itself in the first place anyway. That’s what i’ve found over the years.

Those who have taken up “services” to try and address the problem, claiming that it was the elixir to resolve the problem - I can not help but raise my eyebrows when i hear that the time-frame in which such rest was achieve, still lives within that rough brack of 8-11 months.

The real “cure” for sleep-deprivation in my opinion - is that it takes a small village to raise a child and people have fooled themselves into thinking that just the two parents alone, are adequate-enough for the task. Long lost is the spare grandparent, aunt or cousin who could take up a leg of the night-shift that could allow a mother and father to sleep without interruption to gain a single night of decent rest.

Anywayz… i really can’t go on indulging details at this point in time and this isn’t the space for it. I’m just note-taking.

Summarising - is quite an overwhelming experience at this level. How to condense a few thousand novels into the key ideas and insights that reveal themselves across a long period of time.

Oh…what i would have paid for a book that contained the experiences of motherhood dating back a few thousand years.