There are massive discrepancies between the straight sized Halloween ranges and the Plus Size Halloween ranges. I can only assume that they think us fat women don’t like Halloween, and as you can see from my username and general interests they are totally righ… oh no, wait. Wrong. Totally, mindblowingly wrong. As soon as the date rolled around to October the 1st my timeline (of predominantly plus size women) went nuts for Halloween, it was like someone had opened the floodgates. Or the elevator doors..

Take Boohoo for example, there are 24 items in sizes 4-16, and only 3 (!!!) in sizes 18-24. Three. I feel so spoilt. So Boohoo, you are not on my wishlist. Possibly on my hex list.

New Look fares slightly better (to be fair, they couldn’t be worse, could they?) with 144 items in sizes 6-16 and 53 in sizes 18-30, but still, that’s almost 3 times as many in the straight size range.

ASOS looked really promising if I included size 16 in the plus size range rather than straight size, but if I sort it with 18 as the lowest plus size (which is the size they say their Curve range starts at) it looks better than the previous two, but still really crap. 72 items in 2-16 and 42 items in 18-28.

And if I decide to go look under their Curve range? A grand total of 11.

So what filled my dark little heart with joy only to shatter it?

Boohoo first, I saw this stunning skirt in their promotional email and thought it’d be a perfect edition to my wardrobe, so I eagerly clicked and…

<sighs>

Nevermind then.

The velvet dress with the lace sleeves is just so perfect, and god knows plus size women look amazing in velvet. Just go look at the new Scarlett & Jo collection for Yours clothing!

On New Look I was spoilt for choice.. well, if I was slim.

Just look at all that gorgeous black lace and that gorgeous slinky sequin dress! Just beautiful! But nope, not allowed.

ASOS now, who always seem to bring out the most gorgeous Halloween clothing, I’m still gutted I missed their ghost dress last year! How disappointed am I that none of these gorgeous items are available in plus sizes! Especially that excellent bat dress!

The post What I would have spent: Halloween edition appeared first on MurderOfGoths.

Best Plus Size Blogger

Pamper and Curves

Fuller Figure Fuller Bust

What Laura Loves

Lolly Likes Fatshion

Best New Plus Size Blogger

Lottie L’Amour

Ms Lindsay M

Curves N Curls

Fat Girl For Life

Secret Plus Size Goddess

Best Plus Size Instagram

@justbreyourcurvyself

@mslindsaym

@calliethorpe

@lollylikesfatshion

Best Plus Size Twitter

@debzjs

@lottie_lamour

@kathroooon

@vanierdanielle

Best Plus Size YouTube

Leah XL

Loey Lane

It’s Em Channel

Natty Nikki

Best Plus Size Model

Tess Holliday

Olivia Campbell

Bye Bye Bailey

Sam Roswell

Best Plus Size Activist

Debz

Ms Lindsay M

Virgie Tovar

Miss Kathryn’s Misstakes

The post The Curvee Awards – Meet the Nominations appeared first on MurderOfGoths.

In this one I’m going to talk about how health visitors need to drastically improve their training, and how social services need to quit pretending they are there to support families when they evidently aren’t.

In the previous post I explained the referrals we’d had, the lack of support and where we’d got to with child in need meetings. Ending with them threatening “further action” due to “non-engagement with professionals”, despite evidence that we were more than happy to engage with professionals – just not them.

Since I wrote that post we have spoken to the social worker’s manager, and to the paediatric consultant.

Social worker’s manager first, apparently if we don’t go to these voluntary child in need meetings then they will immediately put us on the child protection register.

Voluntary?

I’m thinking we should be providing social services and health visitors with dictionaries!

How on earth is it voluntary if your only choice is that or punishment. Bearing in mind they’ve said themselves that there are no child safeguarding issues. How on earth can they justify this except as them having a tantrum because we’ve not caved in for them? If there are no safeguarding concerns, and we are willing and happy to engage with professionals, how can they say that non-engagement with them is a safeguarding concern? Seeing as they themselves have no ability to provide medication, initiate medical investigation, or offer any form of practical support? All they would be in this is a middle man between us and actual professionals who can help us, all we want to do is cut out the middle man and the bureaucracy. Given I have to juggle spoons all the time, it is beneficial to my physical health to simplify, not complicate, what I have to do. They might claim that they’d be somehow cutting out the work for us, but we’d still have to go to the same health appointments etc, just with these meetings on top to make sure we had gone to the appointments. What a waste of time and spoons.

But of course, we actually get no choice and have to go along to this “voluntary” meeting. Should I go armed with a dictionary?

On to the paediatric consultant, this was interesting.

They weighed our daughter, plotted her weight in her red book and said she was actually not too low a weight. Her weight was right on course with how it was when she was released from hospital, she could definitely do with gaining more weight, but her weight gain was actually steady and positive.

So why the confusion and panic?

Because the health visitors have been plotting it wrong. According to their calculations our daughter is below the 0.4th centile. If they’d have done it correctly though it would have shown she was actually between the 0.4th and 2nd centile. While this is below what she was at birth, it is the same line she’s been on since we got her out of hospital, so she is gaining at a steady rate, and isn’t a cause for concern.

As for why they were plotting it wrong? They were ignoring guidance that says that babies born at under 32 weeks gestation should have their weight plotted against their corrected rather than actual age. If you didn’t know this about preemies, you always go by two different ages for them. Their actual age – based on when they were actually born, and their corrected age – based on when they should have been born. So in my daughter’s case –
Actual age = 20 months
Corrected age = 17.5 months

Babies born after 32 weeks, but pre-term, stop having their corrected age taken into account when they turn one. This means a drop in their centile at that point, as they are essentially losing up to 8 weeks. But babies born before 32 weeks need to have their corrected age taken into account for longer as they take longer to catch up with other kids – unsurprisingly.

All of this panic about us not doing enough for her could have been averted if they’d actually been trained properly in how to handle premature babies at weigh ins.

At no point since her hospital admittance has our daughter actually dipped dangerously low with her weight, she’s made good progress all along.

I feel like I should apologise to the paediatrician too, we’ve been so worried by everyone else’s panic over her weight that we thought he was being negligent in not investigating more thoroughly, when actually he was looking at it more clearly than the others and seeing there was nothing to panic over.

Bet we still have to go to this meeting, but at least now we have his backing too. He’s planning on calling them and explaining everything, and has given us information to show the health visitors at weigh ins from now on.

The post Social Services vs. actual support Pt. 2 appeared first on MurderOfGoths.

We have been referred to Social Services, this isn’t the first time, and I’m fed up of dealing with them.

This is our fourth dealing with social services, which I’m sure will instantly brand us awful parents in some people’s eyes. But we’re not, obviously I would say that, so bear with me.

Our first dealing with them was voluntary, my son was due to be born any day and my mother had just died, I’d suffered a horrific pregnancy which had meant that I’d spent a huge amount of time in hospital on IV drips (my experience of hyperemesis), I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope with a tiny baby and my grief. So I asked for help. Our social worker was an angel, and we were quickly out from under their care with nothing but positive feedback on our parenting.

Things changed when our daughter was born, she was born 10 week premature and straight into Special Care for the first 7 weeks of her life. She spent a large part of that time in an incubator, hooked up to monitors to make sure she kept breathing/her heart rate didn’t drop. It was hard, really hard. Not only had the pregnancy been as hard as the first, it had also been a traumatic birth (caesarean and the local anaesthetic didn’t work) but it is extremely hard emotionally to have a baby in SCBU. We were under a lot of stress, and we got referred to social services because the staff at the hospital wanted to get us some extra help. At the same time we were trying to access help from the mental health crisis team, which never materialised. So while we weren’t overly impressed at being referred without being given a choice, we could understand it, and our previous experience was positive so we shrugged and got on with it.

Our experience this time was very different though, our first contact this time was a member of the SCBU telling us Social Services had just called the unit and demanded we call them back urgently. So we did, my husband phoned and was immediately told that evading social services was an offence. Evading them? How could we be evading them? We’d had no phone calls, no voicemails, no post.. no contact at all. We suspect that they’d been calling a wrong number all along, but this was never admitted to. Obviously things weren’t off to a great start, then they got worse, they demanded that we see them on a day they chose, at our house, and wouldn’t give us a specific time. Normally not a problem, but we had a child in SCBU. We didn’t want to have to wait in the house until they decided to turn up. We’d got ourselves into a routine, as much as we could, that allowed us to spend as much time as possible with both children, not an easy task when our son was only allowed into SCBU for a set few hours a day, and we were still trying to keep his nursery routine going. Eg. when he was in nursery we’d try to be at the hospital so that he wasn’t losing more time with us. We also had to factor in travel time, as the SCBU wasn’t in the town we lived in, which ate into time with both children. And of course the consultants at SCBU were only around at certain times, so if we wanted updates or to ask questions we had to be at the unit at the same time. It was a difficult balancing act at the best of times, and exhausting. Asking us to disrupt that with no room for manoeuvre was insensitive to our families needs.

We asked if we could compromise and meet at the hospital, so that we weren’t wasting time just waiting for them to arrive, but this request was denied. Not only denied, but we were told that if we didn’t cooperate then things would “be taken further”. Kind of a terrifying thing to hear from a social worker. We ended up going over that social worker’s head to insist that we could at least get an idea of a time, and we also asked for a different social worker, but we still ended up having to spend a day away from our daughter.

Then we got criticised for not having the flat ready for the new baby (she was 10 weeks early! Of course we weren’t prepared!), for living in a cramped one bed flat (This flat, just to clarify, would be the one we were in after escaping a violent landlord and homelessness), and for the flat being a bit chaotic (can’t imagine why housework wasn’t being high on our To Do list at that point). We were never offered any actual support though. And the case got closed.

A year later, our daughter was very ill. We’d spent the previous year begging for help, she’d been vomiting constantly, struggling to gain weight, losing weight, and was in obvious distress all the time. We’d been dismissed over and over again, told it was a bug, a phase, just reflux.. anything that meant no further investigation. And our daughter had got worse and worse while health professionals passed the buck. We even ended up calling paramedics because she went blue. Even that just meant a few hours spent at A&E, only to be sent home with no further investigation. But we kept fighting and she finally got admitted to hospital, where the response was pretty much, “oh yes, that isn’t right is it?”.

I think we’d have been angry except we were too relieved.

Now my son was lactose intolerant as a baby and I was lactose intolerant as a baby, so one of the first things we wanted to rule out with our daughter’s vomiting was lactose intolerance. But were told, repeatedly, not to take her off cows milk formula due to her being premature. Eventually we got so fed up of them not even considering it, that we took her off the cows milk. While the vomiting didn’t stop entirely then, it did lessen. Especially if we only gave her small amounts at a time, her stomach seemed to struggle with larger quantities. But wouldn’t tolerate even small amounts of cows milk. She was around 3-4 months old when we did this, by the time we got her admitted into hospital she’d been free of cows milk for about 8 months.

One day a consultant came in to look at her. After getting her name wrong, the consultant then commented that “it’s obviously milk that’s the problem, take her off it and the vomiting should stop” and then went to leave. Uh, no. We were, understandably, deeply unimpressed with this consultant. We totally understood that they saw a lot of patients, and were really busy, but to be so ill informed was abysmal! I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that we complained about this, we didn’t expect the consequences though.

This consultant then began to quiz us on our mental health, both my husband and I have long term mental health issues. Mental health issues, I should add, that we were getting treatment for and were proactive about. For example, we knew that our daughter’s inpatient stay was taking a toll on us so had spoken to our doctor about adjusting our dosages, and were also seeing counsellors who were aware of the circumstances.

Next thing we know we’ve been referred to social services, to “make sure [our daughter]’s weight loss is biological”. They were actually suggesting we were causing it!

Furious doesn’t cover how we felt. After all the begging and the tears and the sleepless nights (you don’t want to know how often we crept to the side of her cot to check she was still breathing) to be so let down by so many health care professionals and then have them insinuate that we had been causing it all along? Fuck that.

Again social services picked at us. This time we’d moved to a bigger house, it wasn’t cramped, it was tidy. There were a few unpacked boxes from the move, which (given we had a small high needs baby) shouldn’t have surprised anyone. But it was seen as a “cause for concern”, but again they left us with no actual help or support, just additional stress at an already stressful time.

The last two times they told us they were just there to support us, to help our children. This support never materialised.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me

Since the inpatient stay our daughter has improved, the vomiting has stopped thanks to feeding her with special food, but recently she started refusing it. Either turning away or spitting it our, no matter what we mix it with. Instead she much prefers to it basically anything else. So she’s been moved to a high calorie supplement that we add in to her normal food. So much easier! There was a period where we were switching from one to the other, stuck waiting on calls back from the dietician and paediatrician, which resulted in weight loss, but the weight gain had started again on the new stuff. Though, as it had always been, never quite as good as we’d have preferred.

She’s a tiny thing, she’s 20 months now (18 corrected) but wears 6-9 month clothes, and doesn’t have the chubbiness you expect in a child her age. However she eats like a horse, seriously, she will eat anything you put in front of her (except baked beans apparently), often eat seconds, and steal off any plates where there is food left. Getting food into her is no problem at all, getting weight to stay on her is though. It isn’t affecting her development though, she’s doing brilliantly, better than her brother at the same age, especially when you compare her corrected age! She’s full of energy, so she’s obviously getting enough food.

Our son has no issues either, though he is a far fussier eater than her. Doesn’t eat anywhere near as much as she does, but puts on weight fine.

Obviously it is still hard work worrying about her health, though this bit feels a lot easier than everything else we’ve been through with her. No need to check on her while she’s sleeping now.

One of the things I haven’t mentioned before is that during our daughter’s first year our family doctor was off work for a long time, I do wonder if things would have happened sooner if she’d been around. This is the doctor who has been a huge help to me with both hyperemesis and hypermobility, taking me seriously when others hadn’t. Having her as our GP has been life changing in so many ways. I’d never have coped with the second pregnancy if it wasn’t for her, and I wouldn’t be doing my illustrations without her pushing for help with my joints. I owe her a lot.

So when social services got in contact to say we’d been referred again, we were horrified to hear it was a referral from her and that it was due to “safeguarding” concerns. Essentially they were concerned we were harming our children.

We went and spoke to her, turns out she had no safeguarding concerns. She was worried we were struggling and needed extra support, and as social services are meant to support struggling families it was a logical choice to ask them. She didn’t expect them to respond as they did.

At the time she spoke to them we were struggling to attend appointments as our car was dying a slow and painful death, so we’d had to cancel some last minute while we waited for the RAC to attend. One call was from the side of the M25, which is not a fun place to be with two small children. Eventually the car was declared to broken to fix and we had to buy a new car. If anyone knows me on social media you may remember how stressful this was for us, with my joint pain I find it difficult to even make it to the bus stop, so other transport methods were limited.

We arranged for them to come visit us at home, again.

Due to previous experience we asked one of our friends to be there, as support and as a witness.

Before they got there we scrubbed the house clean, knowing how picky they could be we wore ourselves out doing so. I definitely overdid it, pushing my body way beyond it’s limits.

They arrived and started in with their questions, all the sorts of questions you’d expect (daughter’s medical history, how the kids were developing, how we felt we were coping) until we got to a conversation about what support we had in place in terms of family. I replied with a list of relatives, I’m lucky to have a large and loving family. I mentioned my dad, my brother, my aunts and uncles, my cousins.. their response? “Your mother can’t be bothered then?”

Let that sink in for a moment.

It was definitely in the notes that my mother was dead. But even if they hadn’t read the notes, why on earth was their assumption that the omission of my mother meant a family spat rather than a bereavement? Why would you do that unless you’d already got a picture in your head of a Jeremy Kyle-esque dysfunctional family? They’d come in to this with preconceptions, based on nothing at all.

Not only that, but they snapped at my son when he didn’t instantly respond to them. He’s 3. He was playing with a toy. And he’s shy with strangers – especially when the strangers presence in the house is making his parents anxious. He’s an observant and sensitive little boy. And they snapped at him when he didn’t jump to attention.

They asked to see the children’s bedroom, so I took them up. My son had lined his toy cars up on the bed that morning, his cuddly toys were snuggled up in their pop up tent ready for cuddles. Various other younger toys were on the floor ready to be played with by our daughter. On top of the chest of drawers were a few boxes of toys, tidied away ready to be swapped out when they got bored of the ones they were currently playing with. So the social worker walks in and says, “hmm, they have a lot of toys don’t they?”. I laugh and point out they are the first children born to my generation of my family, the first grandchildren for either of our parents, they are well loved and well spoilt. I also point out the system of swapping boxes of toys instead of having all toys out all the time. “Hmm” she says. Then tells me we need a plan to get rid of some of the toys. Pointing out we already do regularly clear out toys that they’ve grown out of (to charity) or broken (to the bin), with a big clearance planned soon to make room for the inevitable Christmas presents, was just not good enough. We needed to do more apparently.

We wave goodbye, figuring if the most they can complain about is the number of toys then we are safe.

We’d arranged to see the health visitor afterwards, figuring we could do with a friendly face! We were relieved to see her, she weighed and measured the children, played with them, commented on how well they were doing, commiserated on what social services were putting us through, commented that it was all very unnecessary, and agreed with us when we said all the hassle could have been avoided if we’d just been spoken to by the GP first.

Imagine our surprise when we get a 30 page document back which talked about us being “neglectful” towards our children! Especially when it says things like, “parents display no concern for [daughter]’s well-being”. What the actual fuck?! Several times the health visitor is quoted as having said this about us, about me in particular. So my husband calls her up to confirm that’s what she’d said, especially after what she’d said when she saw us!

Turns out she wasn’t misquoted. The woman who’d said to our face that she had no concerns and thought we were doing well, went behind our backs to say we didn’t care about our children’s health?! She said, “if it was my child I’d have been more upset”. I’ve written a post solely about this, because it enraged me so much. I also want to add that my husband has show roughly the same level of upset as me, but hasn’t been singled out as not worried. Can I say internalised misogyny? As the mother I’m expected to be this emotional mess, without any regard for circumstance? Sod that.

The report also included gems like, “the kitchen was viewed to have unclean crockery and utensils on the draining board”. I don’t know about anyone else, but we generally use our draining board for storage of items that are recently washed and are drip drying. Especially useful when washing and drying causes me joint pain! I’ve never used the draining board to store dirty items, that would be weird.

They outright lied about our son’s diet too, claiming we said we only give him soft foods because he is a fussy eater. What we actually said was that he is a fussy eater, who used to refuse to chew food when he was little, but we’d persevered and his eating was much better – though he could still be picky.

There were omissions too, they failed to include our responses to the missed appointments, they failed to include us having to push for treatment (eg. no mention of us taking her to A&E), they didn’t acknowledge that we take our daughter out to places where she can play with other children. Everything in the report was written as though we just didn’t make any effort. Even when they acknowledged things we do, it was written in ways that suggested that we’d had to be told to do it. For example “parents acknowledged the need for reading with the children”. We acknowledged it? That sentence to me suggests we weren’t reading with the children until these saintly social workers told us we should, which is rubbish.

It was telling that there was little to no positive comments, aside from those from our son’s nursery. We suspect these were only in as they couldn’t be twisted into anything negative and they couldn’t omit them entirely. So there was a single sentence saying “nursery have no concerns.”

These are just a select few quotes, we filled three A4 pages with corrections!

They recommended a child in need meeting, so we decided to go along and show willing. Not that this was an easy process, they called me to say we had an appointment booked on X date. When I said I’d need to check if my husband was working they told me I’d have to come alone if he was, and if I couldn’t get child care I had to bring the children, I was not allowed to rearrange. Turns out the date they wanted was a day my husband was doing an assessment critical to his new business, in a different town, which meant we had plans to be out of town for the day. We tried calling them – no calls back, emailing them – no response, writing them letters – no response, in the end my husband enlisted the help of a solicitor, within five minutes of the solicitor’s email they’d phoned us to rearrange. Funny that. It was a relief on the day when we arrived there to see some familiar friendly faces, including our GP and a worker from our son’s nursery.

It all started off very nice, the social workers kept saying what great parents we were and how they had no safeguarding concerns, a dramatic departure from the report. It felt very much like they were doing this for the benefit of the others at the meeting. Like they were trying to show that they were being supportive of us, and all our concerns about them were just paranoia.

Things got a bit more interesting though when they asked for the health visitors concerns about us. Two things to note. Firstly she’s the one who keeps saying we are unconcerned. Secondly I’d taken my daughter to be weighed a couple of days before, the health visitor weighed her and told me her weight was “stable”.

So the health visitor says, “well, [daughter] has lost some weight at the last weigh in..”.

Wait wait wait… lost weight? But she definitely said “stable”. We stopped her to point out she hadn’t said anything about weight loss. Her response was that when she said “stable” she meant there’d been a small amount of weight loss, disputing that stable meant a loss of weight caused the social worker to tell me off for not clarifying, at the time, if I’d not understood. I thought I had understood. Why on earth would I assume I hadn’t understood her when she said “stable”? I’m not often in the habit of questioning if people are using the same definitions of words in common usage in the English language, surely I’m not at fault for assuming she was using words as they were intended to be used? Apparently so. Because the social worker said, “well there are faults on both sides”. No, no there aren’t. If we are being accused of not being concerned about our daughter’s health then those accusing us best not be withholding information from us! They then delivered their coup de grâce, “was it written in the red book?” The smug look on the HV’s face was deeply aggravating, of course she had, and of course I hadn’t looked in there because I had trusted her. More fool me. From now on I know to mistrust them and double check they are using the same version of the English language as I am.

Now they want us to come along to regular meetings to check up on us, they are claiming it’s to make sure that we aren’t being let down by health care professionals. We pointed out that we knew from talking to a solicitor that we aren’t legally required to do so, at which point they reluctantly conceded that it was voluntary, but that if we declined they would have to decide whether that constituted a safeguarding issue as it would show “unwillingness to cooperate with professionals”. So we’ve spoken to our gp who has suggested we don’t do the child in need plan, but instead be under her personal care, she’s even willing to do home visits to keep and eye on us. We have also arranged for a new health visitor, who we will be arranging regular visits with. Our son is still at nursery, our daughter starts in April. We are still seeing the paediatric consultant and the dietician, and the gp has suggested if they still do not investigate the struggles with weight then she will refer us to a new consultant.

I’m not sure anyone could describe this as failure to engage with professionals.

Except social services.

We’ve told them that this is our preferred option, and they have threatened us with “further action”.

This isn’t support. This has never been about support.

The post Social Services vs. actual support appeared first on MurderOfGoths.

What only a select few of you know is that I’ve been accused of being neglectful of her health. I wasn’t going to post about this yet, for fear of what I write being used against me, but keeping it locked up inside is tearing me apart.

Trigger warnings as there are going to be some distressing images of a premature baby in here.

My daughter is this incredible little girl, she’s clever and funny and full of mischief. She loves giving kisses and cuddling her big brother. Developmentally you would not know she’s a preemie.

Physically though, she is tiny. She’s 20 months chronologically, 18 months corrected, and still fits into clothes age 6-9 months. You can see her ribs and she’s never really had that adorable baby chubbiness.

From her birth right up until her first birthday she vomited almost constantly, and we fought and fought to get her help. We were dismissed so many times, told it was just reflux and that she’d grow out of it, we tried all the reflux medications, the thickeners for her formula, you name it we tried it. She was already on special formula due to being prem, but she just couldn’t keep it down. We even tried weaning early. Eventually she got admitted to hospital with failure to thrive and finally we were taken seriously, she was taken off formula entirely, she had to be given drink in very small amounts and fed a special medicated porridge like food while on a milk free diet. And her weight started to improve, it was gradual, but it was happening.

Eventually she started to refuse the porridge like food though, being much keener on food she could chew and/or feed herself with. She’d turn away or just spit it straight back out. But she ate loads of everything else. She frequently finishes her meal and then eats a second helping, plus helping herself to her brother’s food. It’s always amusing to see people’s reactions when this tiny little thing manages to fit quite so much food in to her little body!

Still she struggles to gain weight.

So we’ve been referred to social services. Because people suspect we haven’t been feeding her.

One of the bits of feedback we’ve had is that I do not show enough concern for her health. I do not appear sufficiently upset.

So let’s get some perspective shall we?

My daughter is a cheerful, cheeky, intelligent and affectionate child. She is full of smiles and laughter. Her speech is progressing well, better than her brothers at the same age. She’s hitting all her milestones. She eats well, no mealtime battles with this little one. She sleeps through, though does tend to refuse sleep until late.

One year ago she screamed constantly, only stopping screaming to sleep or vomit, and she did more of the latter. She was going blue randomly.

Nearly two years ago she looked like this.

She weight 3lb 1oz, was jaundiced, almost fitted into the palm of my hand, couldn’t breath for herself, her heart occasionally slowed, and she had to have pre-digested food through a tube straight into her stomach.

Am I falling over myself with worry now?

No, because right now she is in a better physical condition than she has ever been. Yes I am still worried, of course I am, I’d rather she was as healthy as she possibly could be. But we’ve been through hell with her, and this is the easiest it’s ever been. I’m also aware that she is one of the luckier ones, there are many babies born later than her with far more problems.

How dare they sit in judgement.

And this is without all the other issues they’ve not taken into account, like the fact they are judging me based on the few times they’ve seen me face to face. All of those times I have been with my children, my son still asks if his sister is going back into hospital. What kind of mum would I be if I were to stand in front of my son and talk openly about how scared I am for his sister? He doesn’t need to hear that, he’s three, it’s been traumatic enough for him already.

I still have flashbacks to her birth, to the sound of the alarms in the SCBU, to the sight of her flesh turning grey when her heart rate dropped.

This part is a walk in the damned park.

The post Neglectful mother appeared first on MurderOfGoths.

Can you to think of someone who either inspired you or you wanted to dress like growing up, whether they were a real person or a fictional character? Feel free to name a few if a few come to mind.

I didn’t have much real life inspiration growing up. I had my mom who was pretty awesome, very strong, raised 4 kids on her own but I think we had some distance, emotionally when I started becoming more aware of myself and my body. But I did have my films, I was a massive Disney fan and fantasy fan, always always reading too. I mostly felt more connected to Belle from beauty and the beast, lily from legend and Harley Quinn from Batman.

I picked them because Belle is a book worm, loving, kind and most of all, didn’t judge someone on their appearance. She fell in love with someone who was the “beast” and I looked up to that. I wanted to model myself after her but also have someone never judge me on how I loooked, being a self concious teen that was a very important fact for me. Lily from legend was just plain gorgeous, those wild curls and when she is dressed up all gothy and dancing with the devil… I just wanted to have her appeal and courage! Now Harley Quinn, this is a weird one. I know that logically I shouldn’t like her, she’s mad as a hatter, in a relationship with someone who isn’t very nice but she’s cute, mad as a hatter and to be honest, very chaotic which I view myself as!

Do you still find them inspirational or interesting now you are older?

I think I find them even more inspirational, now I’m older and I can really see things clearly. I’ve never lost my love those girls and I still wish they were real people so I could meet them! Or be them…I actually think I’m a bit more inspired by Harley Quinn than I used to, I even collect Harley Quinn merch, art and the like!

Do you ever incorporate any of their style or traits in to your every day life?

I’d like to say style wise, I definitely went the Goth princess way of Lily when I was younger, now I would say I’m less goth princess and more classy princess, like Belle. Not that you can’t be a classy goth princess! Personality wise, I try to be as kind as possible, even to those who are unkind to me, not judge people on how they look or even act to some points, having anxiety can really open your eyes to how people behave so I would like to say I’m a lot like Belle in that aspect. Plus, I’m still a work worm to the max. I was also very odd and weird like Harley while being as cute as a button.

If you could dress as them for a day would you?

Do I only get a day? Can’t I just live in princess gowns and dance with the devil? I think the answer is hell yes to that one! I’m cosplaying for the first time in October, which is a very big thing for me due to not having the self esteem and confidence to try! I’ve always been worried of ending up a meme of a fat cosplayer or something along those lines,s o a few months ago I thought..fuck it, I’m doing it and so I am! Come October, I will be walking around London as a fat ass Harley Quinn with a massive hammer…so yes, I would and will be dressing up as someone I found inspirational as a child for day.

If you want to see previous posts like this:

Hayley from Curves N Curls as Ursula

Georgina from She Might Be loved as Megara

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Can you to think of someone who either inspired you or you wanted to dress like growing up, whether they were a real person or a fictional character? Feel free to name a few if a few come to mind.

I was obsessed with The Little Mermaid growing up. Like all little girls I obviously loved Ariel (my hair is still a tribute to her) but I also adored Ursula. She was just so fierce and feisty, and while cruel she was certainly a woman in control. Nothing about her screamed victim and I loved that.

Why did you pick them?

Villains are always more interesting than heroines. They’ve got depth and character where heroines and heroes in traditional children’s stories are pretty one dimensional.

Do you still find them inspirational or interesting now you are older?

Even more so. Ursula was probably the first plus sized woman I came across who exuded confidence and sexuality. I can’t think of another animated figure like that off the top of my head. Sure she was bad, she had so much fun doing it. She oozed excess and I think that’s still a characteristic I find attractive today.

Do you ever incorporate any of their style or traits in to your every day life?

I have become more comfortable with my own sexiness and sexuality in recent years, and I think I am starting to have more of that awareness of my body that Ursula rocks. I am certainly not nearly as predatory as her, haha. But I wear things more fitted now than I did before and that’s very Ursula.

If you could dress as them for a day would you?

Hell yeah! Totally!

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There’s been multiple discussions recently in groups which are body positive safe spaces, places where diet and weight loss chat are banned, about why it’s banned. There are some people of the view that a body positive space should not only support all bodies, but allow all talk about what is happening to said bodies. It’s a superficial argument which misses so much, but it is apparently compelling enough that people keep clinging to it. This blog post isn’t to educate those people, those people do not want to be educated I’ve seen many eloquent and intelligent women try it! This is a personal post, partly because I need a way to get it off my chest, and partly because I kind of need others to know what’s going on and I’m finding it nearly impossible to talk to people directly about it. Also I guess there is always the chance someone else, feeling like me, will read this and know they aren’t alone.

Things are not good right now, I can’t talk about it all yet, rest assured I have an absolutely enormous rant just waiting to be unleashed, but I need to sit on it for now.

All you need to know is that things are way out of my control right now, and others are being deliberately critical of me as a person. I do not cope with lack of control at the best of times, I cope with it even less when it’s twinned with low self esteem. Every day I swing between wanting to fight onwards and prove them wrong, and just wanting to lie down and give up. I’ve come so close to shutting down this blog, stopping the illustrations, and going silent on social media. I can’t even guarantee I won’t right now, though I do know it’ll do me more harm than good in the long run, so I’m trying to keep perspective.

I have certain ways I cope with loss of control, they aren’t healthy ways. I have a history of self harm and of disordered eating.

I want to talk about the disordered eating here.

There’s the temptation to explain all eating disorders as being the result of a culture which idolises thinness, just look at the fuss that gets kicked up every time Fashion Week rolls around. While this worship of the waif like is harmful, for many different reasons, it’s not the only possible cause.

For me it’s always been about control. When things feel out of my control is soothing to find something I can control. Self harm was the obvious first port of call, and it served it’s purpose for a long time. Now though I have two small children and I do not want them to see that, they cannot grow up thinking that is normal or advisable. I cannot do that to them.

I also live in fear that if I should slip and fall back then people would use it against me. Not giving them that chance.

Restricting food though? Oh that’s far easier. I’m a size 18/20, if I start to drop weight who is going to flag that as a concern? No one, unless they know my history. I know from before that if you start to drop weight, no matter how rapidly, then all you hear is praise. You are treated like you’ve achieved something wonderful. I will note that none of my other achievements ever garnered me the praise that rapid weight loss did.

So I got the twin benefits of control and praise, who wouldn’t want those feelings? And of course the more you get the more you want, disordered eating essentially feeds itself (ironically).

For me it was all about the quantifiables.

I wanted to be able to count how many hours between meals, even better if I could count days.

I wanted to be able to count how little I ate at each meal.

I wanted to count the numbers on the scale.

I wanted to count how many minutes I worked out for, or hours.

I kept spreadsheets and charts, constantly trying to outdo myself. I had to lose more than the day before, exercise more, eat less, and I needed to see the numbers.

I’d go looking for other people’s numbers so I could compare myself to them. If person A lost X in a week, I needed to lose X in a day. If person B exercised for Y minutes, I needed to double that. I was competing against myself, against everyone else. Programs like Supersize vs. Superskinny were my meal replacement, if the hunger pangs were getting hard to ignore I’d watch it and try to lose more than the plus size contestant, and weigh less than the skinny one.

I’d follow other’s weight loss journeys so I could beat them.

Obviously I started eating again, and I stopped exercising, so the weight came back (and then some). Recently I’ve been happy with that, still am in fact. But the cravings to restrict aren’t about losing weight as such. I don’t care about being smaller, I’m fine as I am. But oh I want the buzz that came from beating my own numbers.

Even at my most content that voice still niggles at me, even when I’m feeling on top of the world I still have to fight the demons down. I have to be careful what I’m exposed to because it’s so easy to get sucked back in. I deliberately avoid media that I know will add fuel to this feeling, I excuse myself from weight loss conversations, try to close my eyes and ears to the numbers. So it’s upset me a lot recently that at a time when I am feeling more vulnerable than usual people are intruding into spaces that should be safe with harmful conversations. It’s harder to just skip past when I feel like this.

Every day I have to fight my urge to not eat, I feel no desire to eat right now, just to restrict. I’m not doing it because I need to make sure I can look after my children and set a good example for them, but it’s tearing me apart.

I am not in a good place right now, and I need things to get better.

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Can you to think of someone who either inspired you or you wanted to dress like growing up, whether they were a real person or a fictional character? Feel free to name a few if a few come to mind.

Quick version as I’m in the airport, I love disney princess but the one who stood out most for me is Megara from Hercules. I love greek mythology as it is but I liked her most because she didn’t need a man, until she found the right one. She was independent, fixed her own problems and was sassy. I love her sense of humour.

Do you still find them inspirational or interesting now you are older?

Definitely still love her, I have pretty much the same mind set than I’ve been messed around by people and now I’ll get on with everything myself without anyone. Plus I’m sassy.

Do you ever incorporate any of their style or traits in to your every day life?

I love grecian styled maxi dresses and will grab one whenever I can.

If you could dress as them for a day would you?

Definitely dress as her all day every day, I even have for a disney fancy dress party!

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#Plusisequal? by Radfatfeminist

Lane Bryant’s #PlusIsEqual Campaign & Times Square Takeover Lead To Mixed Reactions by Alysse Dalessandro

#PlusIsEqual But I’m Not Sure I Understand The Equation by Virgie Tovar

Apparently though these are far too complex for Lane Bryant to understand.

Sorry, but this is going to take a few more than 140 characters, I’ll try to keep it simple though.

What should you do if you want to run a body positive campaign

(and not be accused of just capitalising on others hard work)

1. Show a range of bodies

This means that you need to show bodies which are varied, different sizes, shapes and colours. (You’d win even more points for showing disabled bodies too!)

Left: The Evans #StyleHasNoSizeCampaign
Right: CardifforniaGurl, Toodaloo Katie, A is for Abi, Pretty Big Butterflies, and Nerd About Town‘s response photo

Left: Lane Bryant’s #PlusIsEqual campaign
Right: Jes Baker’s #EmpowerAllBodies

2. If you are going to sell merchandise, sell it in relevant sizes

Difficult concept I know, but if your campaign specifically mentions representation of women up to a size 34 then you need to sell campaign clothing up to a size 34.

From @wannabeprincessuk on Instagram

And if you are doing a big celebration of your new campaign which is going to garner press attention and you’ve brought campaign t-shirts along for people to wear to show support for your campaign, they do kind of need to be in a range of sizes, otherwise it starts to look like you only want your campaign to be represented by straight size women.

From Virgie Tovar’s account of the #PlusIsEqual event

3. Try to use women who are representative of your average customer

If you get an opportunity to put plus size women in a mainstream show, take it! And no, I don’t mean the smallest plus size by fashion industry standards, try picking a size that actually represents your customer base. If the size model you are using is unlikely to buy from you (as they can buy from any other straight size store) then you aren’t being body positive.

From Evans #fashfest catwalk show

4. Listen instead of dismissing criticism

That’s a whole 4 suggestions, nothing difficult there. Give it a try.

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