Dear Maxine, How can I manage the mental load of motherhood? It’s one of aspects of motherhood I wasn’t prepared for: all the invisible stuff you do for your children – the planning, researching, organising. It’s exhausting. I find it hard to delegate as I don’t always trust it will be done as thoroughly as…
Dear Maxine, I struggle with being assertive and worry about it affecting my children. I have always feared confrontation and have never had assertiveness modelled to me growing up. Often, I feel like I will cry (or do cry) and feel panicked under such circumstances. As a result, I tend to avoid situations where confrontation…
Dear Maxine, With lockdown easing, I’m really pleased I can now have some freedom and go back to eating in restaurants and visiting cafes. However, I’m now terrified of taking my daughter to a restaurant. How will she behave? What if she has a tantrum? Or just gets a bit over-excited and starts to disturb…
Dear Maxine, I know this isn’t necessarily on the topic of ‘mum guilt’ or even parenting, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how I could make peace with my post-baby body. There are parts of my body that I used to be quite proud of and now they look totally different…
Dear Maxine, As lockdown eases, I’m feeling increasingly anxious about losing control of my baby. That may sound intense but she was born during lockdown and it’s only been me and her for this whole time. Now that more and more people are allowed to come into our lives and our home, I’m starting to…
Dear Maxine, My mum says she feels like she can’t talk to me about parenting because I take it as criticism and she’s not wrong, I do feel criticised when we speak about what I’m doing with my baby. This upsets my mum because she says she’s been looking forward to discussing parenting for years…
Why? Why would we want to notice our mum guilt? It already feels like too much. It’s painful and uncomfortable and we spend a lot of our lives trying to avoid it. So why am I suggesting it might be helpful to pay attention to it? The first thing that comes to my mind is…
What do you notice about your child’s play? Recently, I’ve been thinking about how they always push themselves to learn that little bit extra. Have you noticed this? Or maybe your child doesn’t do that. Maybe your child still plays with the toys they were playing with when they were 3 months old, in the…
Dear Maxine, Thank you for your post on finding playing with your children tedious, it really resonated with me. Do you have any advice on how to overcome the intense feelings of guilt I have when my child is playing on her own? It’s worst when I start doing something else. I feel most guilty…
Hi Maxine, I came across you Instagram and blog recently and I just wanted to let you know how much I love the content. So much of it aligns with how I want to parent my children. Do you have any plans to do any posts around ‘mum guilt’ of finding playing with your children…
