The Real Reason I Started F*** Mum Guilt

The story I can’t write without crying...

Breathing my way through the scans

After two heart- and soul-breaking miscarriages that honestly nearly broke me, in 2022 I fell naturally pregnant again. At the first scan, they told me they couldn’t see anything and sent me home with a terrifying leaflet about ectopic pregnancies. At the second scan, they could see something only they say two blobs. Twins. I still remember the tears in my husband’s eyes as we tried to process that after two losses we had two lives on their way.

The 12-week scan was a big deal. Heartbeats. We’d never got heartbeats before. My husband had Covid, so he waited in the car park with our dog as I bravely sat in the waiting room, watching women rush out in tears, chased by their partners helplessly trying to console them. I just tried to concentrate on my breathing. Just one breath in. Just one breath out.

I kept this up whilst I was on the examination table. I closed my eyes. Just one breath in. Just one breath out. I’d learned it’s best to block out the conversations between medical colleagues rather than try to interpret them. I’d been here before.

Then the sonographer called her boss over. Something was up. I tried harder to concentrate on my breath. “Try to relax,” they said.

Finally, the consultant came over, and after a while, flipped the screen around so I could see it. Whatever I was supposed to interpret from the grayscale swoosh was lost on me.

“We have heartbeats, but there are three.”

I honestly don’t know what happened next; I think I blacked out. I just remember staring up at the ceiling tiles whilst the sonographer repeatedly told me, “It’s time to put your knickers on now.”

Quick-fire Questions

I’ll try to deal with all the usual questions in a quick-fire round now (but if you have any more, please comment or ask me).

No, it wasn’t IVF.

No, there aren’t any twins or triplets in my family.

No, I didn’t get any extra government help.

Yes, I have two identicals and one non-identical

Yes, I’m tiny (I went from a size 6 to a size 14 whilst I was pregnant and am now around a 6-8)

Yes, it’s really hard.

Pregnancy after you’ve lost babies is terrifying. You cannot enjoy it as you are painfully aware that things can go wrong. Every scan could be your last. But amazingly, I made it through to 33 weeks + 5 days, which is pretty much as far as you can go with triplets.

(Pic: Frankie being placed on me for a moment)

I had a planned C-section in a room with 28 medics. I could stroke Rafa’s cheeks through the porthole window of his incubator as they wheeled him past, Frankie was placed on my chest for a moment, and then all 3 were whisked off to NICU. They needed oxygen support, and basically had not worked out how to live yet and did not appreciate being yanked out of their mum, thank you very much!

The next 5 weeks were a blur of hospital visits. Three doctors’ rounds every morning full of jargon and acronyms that meant nothing to me. I was treated like an idiot and wanted to say, “I do have an Oxford degree, you know!”. I had to clue myself up, advocate and make decisions on behalf of my boys. They fought like warriors. I knew they would.

(Pic: Me visiting Jerry in NICU, which required a spare wheelchair and a spare member of staff to take me from the maternity ward to NICU so didn’t happen enough)

Enter mum guilt

After 4 weeks, two of my triplets were ready to be discharged, but poor Jerry hadn’t even regained his birth weight. In fact, he’d slipped off the bottom of the growth chart (htf do negative percentiles work). They’d tried every combo of milks and meds to keep him fed. Nothing worked. It was getting desperate.

The hardest part about this time was deciding who needed me most: the two prem and poorly babies at home who needed feeding every 3 hours and were still seriously distressed about their early arrival or the one who was struggling to grow, the one who wasn’t sure if he wanted to be here with us in this life, but also the one being looked after by teams of specialists around the clock.

I’m welling up writing about this now because it’s an impossible choice for any mum. Whoever I was with, I felt guilty about not being with the other(s). If you’d have told me before I had my babies that there would ever be a situation where my baby would be so poorly, and I wouldn’t be keeping vigil day and night, I wouldn’t have believed you, but I couldn’t do it.

There was never enough mummy to go around

The mum guilt tormented me. I felt horrendous. Whatever choice I made wasn’t good enough. Then one day, whilst I was in hospital holding Jerry, he turned blue in my arms. I hit the panic button, and the room was instantly filled with a pack of medics barking questions at me. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t even nod. I couldn’t breathe. (I needed to take a break from writing this bit because I was crying. Deep breath). I’ve never actually been paralysed by terror before, but that, that was it.

So how could I leave him? What if I hadn’t been there to hit the panic button? How long would it have taken a nurse to notice? Why weren’t his monitors alarming? How could I do this motherhood? I couldn’t even keep all my babies safe and alive.

I was tormented by mum guilt. It toyed with me like a cat playing with a mouse that’s more fun half-alive than dead. It was an unwinnable situation. I could be at the hospital with Jerry, or at home with Rafa and Frankie.

And honestly, mum guilt just grew its campaign against me as the weeks went on, and it became more and more evident I just couldn’t keep on top of the demands of three babies as one mummy. At my lowest point, I felt I would never be good enough. They deserved better. I even told a GP I felt like I was failing them.Then, after one particularly low point, which I talk about at the very beginning of my TedX here, I fought back. I realised that it was mum guilt or me, and my kids needed me strong.

The mum guilt wasn’t helping. It didn’t give me the third boob I needed to feed all my babies at once. It just made me feel shit about doing my best. This bully had silently crept in the back door of my family home and had to go.

An amnesty became movement

It took a while to get brave enough to talk about it with other mums, but it turns out mum guilt is making a lot of us feel shit about doing our best. So I called mums together for a mum guilt amnesty. It was inspired by a knife amnesty box in my London neighbourhood. The amnesty box outside the police station was getting something dangerous out of our homes, out of our communities. I wanted to do the same.

Even now, the idea sounds whacky to me, but I did it. 70 mums signed up to get their guilt off their chest. I ended the session with a burning bowl ceremony where I put bits of paper with all the things mums were feeling guilty about in a ceremonial fire. I normally tone down my woo, but I was feeling called to set light to it!

That’s how I accidentally started the F*** Mum Guilt Movement and why it means so much to me. Why I’ve been writing and hosting events in snatches of stolen time while my babies slept, when even my husband questioned why I was putting so much into something I wasn’t getting paid for, and wouldn’t I rather just have a rest?

No, I can’t. This is burning within me. Mum guilt is making 95% of mums miserable. It’s time to stand up and fight back.

Can one person change a culture where mum guilt has become almost inevitable?

No. But I can bring us together. I can hand out the words and tools to fight it with, and we can stand strong, shoulder to shoulder, and say, “No, guilt, you are not welcome here. Get away from me and my family.”

If you’re ready to stand with us, join the movement by subscribing below.