Recently I had the privilege of watching a series of videos showing encounters between primary caregivers and their children (aged 0-5...

Conveying a practical sense of the mother/child ‘us’ - the relationship that holds mother and child together - is often most easily...

As I sit here attempting to give form to my musings and questions around mothering, I compete for warmth with my son who, yet again, is...

Our TV has a screen saver that rotates a collection of family photos. I often see an image come up of my son in my partner’s arms the day...

No one can quite define what a perfect mother would look like and yet we’re haunted daily by the feeling that whatever that perfection is, w

Nothing can prepare you for the first time you hold your child in your arms. Even if you’ve had three children before you can’t prepare...

2020 has been a year of separations. Many of us have had extended periods of physical distancing and when we do meet others, our faces...

As mothers we watch our children grow and we know that both intentionally and inadvertently we contribute to the ways in which they...

The quote above is from a mother called Kitty who didn’t shy away from talking about the moments when the last thing she wanted to do was ho

“Momma, I love you. I can’t do nothing”

You might wonder why I’d write about a phrase that on the surface appears to tell people to ‘just chill out’.

Holding your teenager in different ways. Keeping the offer for affection open.

I remember her hands.

When I first began researching holding, I looked up ‘mother holding child’ on the internet, I particularly wanted to see what images...

So, you’re not an artist, you don’t have oil paints, you have three children under 5 years of age, you have painful arthritis, you have...

There are many valuable ways to explore holding. We could have created a questionnaire and given it to a large random selection of...

For many parents, an upside of the terrible virus currently re-shaping our world is that we get to spend more time with our children. A...

All participants shared stories of holding, both verbal and visual, through their drawings, collage, installations and explorations....

Along with a sense of purpose experienced during holding, participants felt that they deliberately expanded what they were capable of in...

Three mothers and I explored maternal holding experiences by delving into memories of holding our children. For Kitty, Rosanna, Leni and...