As someone that grew up in the Spice Girls era it is of no surprise that supporting women became deeply important to me. I didn’t stand in a rainy playground in the north of England screaming my lungs out to Wannabe for the idea of Girl Power not to nestle itself within the fabric of my mindset, and whilst I did think I knew most things at age 11 it wasn’t until I experienced a breakup, a birth and then parenthood that I started to understand what the Spice Girls were trying to get at when they said “Girl Power.”

If you ever had the pleasure of being alongside a friend as they navigated being dumped in the early 00’s you will understand there is no weight heavier than the limp, melancholy soul of someone updating their MSN messenger status to Taking Back Sunday lyrics whilst crying over someone that has not yet developed their prefrontal cortex. It does indeed take Girl Power to lift them up. Witnessing this power is something that stuck with me for the rest of my life and I was utterly grateful, and later mortified about having needed but knowing that I had a group of girls surrounding me, forcing me to remember who I was, wiping away my smudged eyeliner and making sure my space buns were always straight if I were to bump into the ex in town was a support like no other.

In case you find yourself a time machine and end up needing to support your friend through a 00’s break up some things that were really successful in my dump recovery were:

• Being left an entire blink 182 song on my answering machine
• Sleepovers at my friends house watching films that scared me so much I no longer cared about being dumped and instead feared only the candyman entering my room through my mirror
• Buying a new studded belt
• Dying my hair a disgusting colour that I would still be trying to get out 7 years later

I’d like to pretend that after my first breakup I was absolutely fine at cracking on with them (and there were many to follow) however the poor souls in my friendship group had to relive this cycle multiple times throughout my life plus various other events until I got to my next point – giving birth.

Giving birth. You can watch and read absolutely everything there is to offer but there is nothing that will prepare you for giving birth. I think that’s mostly because it’s totally different for everyone that experiences it so absolutely no one can confidently tell you what it will be like, even the annoying people that pop up out of the woodwork like a shit haunted mansion walk through experience to spook you with tales of their wild 70’s birth experience.

After the birth of my first child I couldn’t understand how the hell we weren’t talking about our birth stories all the time? It was the most insane experience of my life and yet to this day I reckon I have told more people about the time I queued 3 hours at Alton Towers for Nemesis, strapped in and then freaked out and got off, than I have told my birth stories.

My biggest learning from my first birth was:

• Women are absolutely phenomenal and no one talks about it enough.

This was also the same learning from my second and also third birth. It got stronger every time.

My births have always been unique and powerful experiences for me, there is no time in my life that I have listened to and trusted myself more than whilst giving birth. All the other elements of self doubt and generally mean thoughts I have toward myself dissipate and my true self pops into my head like “Right, let’s get stuck in and stop fucking about, you and I both know that you can’t be doubting yourself now, save that for when the baby arrives”

The mental resilience it takes to become and then be pregnant followed by preparing for a birth in whatever form it comes is no small feat, it’s all encompassing, it creeps its way into every element of your day. When I gave birth to my third child, that night I felt like a universe had come out of my body and the weight of it had lifted from my soul. 9 months of worrying about the position I had slept in, the air I had breathed, the way I had moved my body, the things I had eaten, all evaporated from me and I finally felt light again. The only thing heavier than the responsibility of trying to and then being pregnant is lifting up that dumped teenager I mentioned earlier.

Finally, if growing human life wasn’t enough to make me understand the meaning of Girl Power then parenting certainly was. After I had my first daughter I was smacked in the face with an absolute humdinger of Post Natal Anxiety, (you can read about it here) I never told anyone about it for a while until I got to a point where it was unavoidable, mostly because my rituals seeped out into public situations but also because as I spoke about it I began to feel safer. As I wrote about what I had experienced other women reached out to me to let me know they had felt the same and my god it felt good. It felt like a secret society of women that had all experienced something so unique to each of us yet so universal. We had all had natural reactions to this life altering experience and now we were being told we were depressed and anxious which perhaps we were but how could we not be? We were experiencing the most intense endurance sport, carrying mental weights that no one had mentioned in the contract and worst of all, we had no one to talk to about it because we didn’t think it was normal. That “Girl Power” we were raised with was just a finely tuned trait we had built into us to not complain or make a scene.

As years passed I continued to encounter more and more women that had experienced these reactions to all aspects of creating life and I began to realise that it wasn’t “Girl Power” it was just “Power”. A power to keep going when we desperately wanted to stop, a power to survive whilst thinking thousands of thoughts about the logistics of family life every day, power to image the most horrific things because our maternal instinct kicked in and wanted to keep us alert to danger all whilst we made an unexpected visitor a cup of tea and apologising for our hand towel having toothpaste on it because our kids will always, always wipe their toothpaste face on the hand towel no matter how many times you tell them not to (why?)

I am in constant awe of women and what they endure without saying a word, from the moment we hit puberty we train ourselves to come apart quietly without disruption, to make up excuses as to why we aren’t quite ourselves as our body renews each month. We tell our stories a couple of times and then move on so as not to bore people. We behave as though we aren’t born from magic and that our capabilities aren’t absolutely astounding when they are. We are absolutely fucking magical.

If I could travel back in that time machine and meet myself in that rainy school playground i’d tell myself “Oh my god, I cannot believe you’re going to cry so much over that boy. How cringe.” and then I would make sure that the little 11 year old girl knew exactly how powerful she was and would be, both as a girl and a woman.