In todays episode I had the joy of speaking with Catrin @mama_lleud, mother of 5 children and many animals all living nestled between the mountains and the sea in Eryri, North Wales. Catrin has raised her children at home, opting to home educate and somehow manages to also have been a birth worker since 2017 and now specialising in postpartum support and providing nutritious food boxes to local women in her community.

I learnt so much from this conversation with Catrin as she shares the starkly different accounts of her first birth as a single young mum at 19 with a practically non existent postpartum and lacking if any advice on postpartum boundaries or breastfeeding support. Comparing that to her subsequent births when she had the care and unwavering support of her husband and greater access to the internet where she learnt about doulas, and the home birth community, and postpartum care and different parenting styles ...each experience has been so different through as every child is so different and her most recent birth 9 months ago was a huge learning for Catrin when her baby was born quite poorly and needed a few weeks in intensive care hours away from their home which she found to be a very humbling experience of letting go of how things should or could have been and surrendering to the situation which is a lesson she has learnt again and again as a mother.

Catrin shares her experience of home educating her children up until very recently when her older girls have just started at a small local school. So much of this conversation i found fascinating and so insightful but with the postpartum in mind it was both the support of the home educating community that have provided such an important village for her but also the way she spoke about navigating the postpartum with other kids at home all the time and how important that was to her for them to see her in the postnatal period, see their dad care for her and how she was attending to her own needs. This education on how to mother and father, a lived expereince of the postpartum, has stuck with me since this conversation and i feel life changing for her children.

As you will hear there is a little bit of backround noise in this episode as Catrin was joined by her baby who was being looked after by her seven year old in the same room. I hope you enjoy all the extra giggles and squeaks so you can hear from Catrin authentically in her home surrounded by her children.

To learn more about Catrins work as a doula please visit https://mamalleuad.wixsite.com/doula or follow her on instagram @mama_lleuad