Holding the Baby: Milk, sweat and tears from the frontline of motherhood

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Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Over the course of more than 130 columns, British Vogue’ s parenting columnist Nell Frizzell has analyzed and dissected the highs and lows of motherhood—interweaving deeply personal reflections on raising her son with calls for greater support for parents across the board. In her new book, Holding the Baby , she distills everything she’s learned into a moving memoir and manifesto for change. Here, she reflects on her greatest revelations from five years as a mother. Nell Frizzell is a master. I particularly recommend this book to men… it is a visceral exploration of one young woman’s life that has immediately applicable lessons for us all. Vital reading. The Panic Years is also fun, funny, and warm. I love it dearly!’ A blazing, brilliant read, combining style and message to powerful effect ... compassionate, convincing and funny.' Amy Liptrot

In the UK, for those of you who don’t know, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded 60 years after the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and still receives significantly less funding each year, through donations and legacies, than the pet charity. Perhaps this apparent preference shouldn’t be surprising. After all, domesticated animals are far, far less dependent on you for physical, emotional or psychological support than babies and children. They don’t hit you with years of hormonal fury during toddlerhood and adolescence, don’t learn to talk, don’t develop challenging political views, fall in love with drug dealers or steal your record collection. Finally, if the pet in question is a total nightmare, it is possible to give it away, or take it to a shelter, with very little social stigma. What I’m not so good at – and what I think is a big ask of new parents – is then pretending on top of all that to be completely chilled out. To pretend not to care when your house looks like the inside of a compost bin, when your toddler snatches a paintbrush off another child and starts to chew it, when the person you are meeting texts to say they’re running 15 minutes late so you have to entertain a small child in the street for quarter of an hour, when they get a rash, when the bus stop’s closed, when your child won’t eat or you run out of clean nappies. All that stuff is, to some degree at least, stressful. Acting like you don’t care, haven’t noticed or don’t mind, feels like just another layer of artifice to add onto the sediments of bullshit new parents have to deal with. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. The baby I’ve been bringing up is now five. He can chop carrots and name different types of beetle and do up the velcro on his shoes. I have written more than 130 columns about the wild, endless, everyday wonder of being a parent. And I still have so, so much more to say. Because there is still so, so much to do. And enjoy. And rail against. And learn. What you learn will vary, of course. And it will probably be different depending on whether you are a birth parent, an adoptive parent, a co-parent, a single parent, an older parent, a parent with paid work, a religious parent, a parent of twins, of a newborn, a parent who has experienced pregnancy loss, a parent with a car, a disabled parent, a parent with a dishwasher, or a parent who uses the phrase “the days are long but the months are short.” I have been some of those things, and I have written about my experience not just to try and communicate it to other people but to try and understand it myself. So, several thousand flannels, tantrums, rashes, and kisses later, here is what I’ve learned. Language has brought me more joy than I expected Every woman will experience the panic years in some way between her mid-twenties and early-forties.Giving parents a break doesn’t just mean doing a bit of yoga and lying on the sofa and ignoring the piles in the sink. True, genuine release from the stress of raising small children means shared and equal parenting in whatever shape your family happens to be. It means mandatory paid parental leave. It means a child-friendly workplace culture. It means a functioning welfare state funded by taxation. It means safe and high-quality housing for everyone. It means accessible, subsidised childcare that pays its staff a living wage. It means access to green space and affordable healthy food and good public transport and mental health care and playgroups and children’s centres. It means funding and supporting the National Health Service. It means park benches and playgrounds and fully-funded schools and honest conversations with your peers. Searingly honest, witty and moving. For anyone who knows what it's like to simultaneously want to weep with joy and throw your child out of the window, Frizzell is a very welcome voice in the conversation on motherhood'. - Vogue In these essays we see the Pond from the perspectives of writers who have swum there. Esther Freud describes the life-affirming sensation of swimming through the seasons; Lou Stoppard pays tribute to the winter swimmers who break the ice; Margaret Drabble reflects on the golden Hampstead days of her youth; Sharlene Teo visits for the first time; and Nell Frizzell shares the view from her yellow lifeguard’s canoe.

Frizzell said: “This is the book I’ve wanted to write ever since I started thinking about writing books. The experience of becoming a parent is, by far, the most significant, most ridiculous, most confronting thing I’ve ever done. It is my Everest, my World Cup, my military coup. It is an experience beyond comprehension and yet probably the most universal human endeavour there is. With jokes, expert interviews, personal revelations and a genuine manifesto for change, it is the book that I needed when I felt eclipsed by early parenthood and the book I felt compelled to write, just as soon as my son had stopped trying to push raisins into my USB port. But how to stay sane in such a maddening time? How to know who you are and what you might want from life? How to know if you're making the right decisions? Nell Frizzell’s thoughts on womanhood and motherhood are as informative as they are poetic. Writing that challenges and enlightens you just as much as it entertains and stimulates you is rare, this book confidently does both on an important and complicated topic for modern women' - Dolly Alderton I don’t know a single woman my age who hasn’t experienced the phenomenon that Nell articulates so bloody perfectly. Her writing is funny and beautiful and smart and I can’t tell you how necessary this book is!’ Think you’ve spotted a pattern in when your baby is tired? Think you’ve worked out what they’ll eat? Think you’ve formed a routine? Think you know them now? Well, make hay while the sun shines, my friends, because it won’t last. Change, movement, momentum, addition, variation, transformation, variety, difference, and propulsion are the only absolute constant in your life now. Everything changes. And it will keep changing. It could be betterThe Panic Years made me laugh and it made me cry. There’s a rare tenderness to this book that comes from not having felt seen before. It’s for our generation, and Nell gets it. She understands and respects us'. - Rhiannon Cosslett