Leah Hazard on changing career after having her first child

The Wintering Sessions with Katherine May:
Leah Hazard on changing career after having her first child

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While we take a rest over the summer, we’re sharing some remastered episodes from Season One, chosen by listeners. This week, I talk to Leah Hazard, NHS midwife extraordinaire and author of Hard Pushed, part memoir of Leah’s life on the labour ward, and part exploration of the current state of the profession.

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  Katherine May:

  Hi, I'm Katherine May. Welcome to The Wintering Sessions. I am speaking to you on a beautiful, cool morning. Thankfully, after days of intense heat, something broke in the middle of the night. We didn't get a storm. We got some thunder and lightning, a few drops of rain, nothing much to speak of, but when I woke up this morning, the air was cool, and I went and sat outside until I got goosebumps. It was heaven.

  I'm really rubbish in the heat. I come from a family of heat lovers. I am a heat hater. I just cannot regulate my own body temperature, but today there's this amazing wind blowing. You might be able to hear it a little bit around the mic. Ah, it feels a little bit like a hot hand dryer, but there's something refreshing about it too. It's lovely. It's so weird how micro-seasonal we are, how we're affected on a moment by moment basis by just one or two days of weather. By the end of yesterday, I felt done. I felt like I couldn't cope with anything much at all, and I was emotional and self-pitying, and it just seemed devastating, and today everything seems okay again. Everything seems manageable, although clearly we have, as a world, an awful lot of work to do to try and push back against these incredibly hot days.

  So, I'm on the beach. I've just been walking along the tide line, listening to the trickle of water that drains off the beach when the tide's low. It's such a tiny sound. I love to stand and just listen to it just carefully for a little while. It's beneath everything else. It feels like a secret. There are some good parts of summer. I'm not entirely against it as a concept. I just like the cool bits, that's all, the shade.

  So, today we have our second re-up episode from season one, remastered and presented for your delectation and pleasure because I think lots of people missed some of those season one episodes. Lots of you have come later which is great, hello, welcome, but there was some great stuff there. They're all my favorites really, but we asked our Patreons and our listeners who they might like to hear from again, and this was what was voted for.

  So, today, I'm sharing my conversation with the amazing Leah Hazard who is a writer, a midwife, and I've just been reading a proof copy of her new book, Womb, all about the uterus which is such, I was about to say a fertile subject area, ha ha ha ha, but it's such a fantastically interesting grounds to write about and I've learned so much, but also I'm just loving the way she writes as I did in all her previous work that I've read. So, you can count me as a fan, but actually, one of the lovely things that might not be obvious about The Wintering Session is that some of my guests have become friends after we spoke and Leah's one of them. She's one of the good guys in this world, and I love to have a little chat with her, although we've never met in person. That's the COVID world for you. We keep saying that one day we will actually get together in a room and talk to each other face to face which would just be a miracle, but maybe next year.

  Anyway, I commend this episode to you. I loved recording it. I love listening back to it, and I think it just has such a lot to say about how we grow and change, and how we know when we can't take anymore. See what you think. I'll see you a bit later.

  Today, I'm excited to welcome Leah Hazard, the best-selling author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife's Story, and practicing NHS midwife. It's really great to speak to you, Leah.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, it's great to speak to you too. Thank you so much for having me.

  Katherine May:

  Well, I'm really delighted to. We've been chatting for a very long time, haven't we, and it's really nice to hear your voice.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, definitely.

  Katherine May:

  We were just discussing that Leah's accent is Scottish Connecticut which is quite a fascinating mix there.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's a bit niche. It's quite unusual, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  It's good to have your own [inaudible 00:06:11] there.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I guess so, yes.

  Katherine May:

  So, I came across you, Leah, when I read your book Hard Pushed which interestingly, I read just after I'd read Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, okay.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it was quite an interesting contrast because I'd read This is Going to Hurt in the week that my husband was in hospital with a ruptured appendix, and I'd actually found it immensely comforting because I felt, I was listening to it on audio book driving to and from the hospital, and I felt like it put me in contact with the people who were behind the scenes who, if I'm honest, I was completely frustrated with at the time, the nurses and doctors who didn't seem to be making him much better. He was suffering a lot, and I would've been much more angry had I not been able to listen to that.

  Leah Hazard:

  No, that's good.

  Katherine May:

  But in the weeks that followed, a kind of nother tide washed over me, and that was my feminist consciousness reemerging because I actually had quite a hard time when I was pregnant and giving birth and I felt like women's voices were absent from that book in a way that I don't expect you to reply to because I know you're [inaudible 00:07:19].

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  But when I read your book, I punched the air because it was still such great storytelling, so warm and funny and moving, but also, you are a kick-arse advocate for women in the maternity ward. Is that fair to say?

  Leah Hazard:

  Thank you. I mean, I wouldn't be the best person to answer that, but I hope so. I think that's the job of every midwife really, and certainly people have asked me about that book, and I have read it, and maybe that's where I should leave it. No, I mean, I can understand why some people have really enjoyed it and why it's been a huge success, and I can also understand why some people have been upset by it and have felt that maybe another voice was needed. So, I'm pleased if I can provide that voice or another voice, and yeah, I think it's really important in anything I write to demonstrate respect for women, and that doesn't mean that we have to be worthy all the time and very sort of virtue signaling and all the rest, but we can have a laugh, but we have to be respectful and mindful of who's at the center of that story, and it's women. So, yeah, I hope that's come through.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, and I think it really does come through. I think that from the other side, people are fascinated by midwives because you are present at one of the most dramatic and yet entirely normal moments of human life, but when I say normal, it's different for everybody every time, and I think that there's this sense that you guys kind of look into a space that most of us don't really understand, even if we've been in it.

  Leah Hazard:

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's completely true, and it strikes me all the time, and it should strike me all the time. When I'm with a woman who's laboring or who's having issues in pregnancy, for whatever reason, I kind of have to stop myself sometimes and think, "What, they let me do this? This is really intimate and visceral and special and risky." I don't just mean physically risky. I mean emotionally risky, and yeah, it's a huge privilege to be in that role. So, I'm very grateful for that.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. It would be hard not to mention at the moment that we are still in the middle of lockdown. I suspect we will be in some kind of lockdown or some kind of pandemic alertness when this podcast goes out, unless something changes very dramatically, and I think it would be remiss of me not to ask you about how you're finding it at the moment. Is it becoming business as normal or does everything still feel very strange?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yes and no. At the beginning, by which I mean sort of middle of March to end of March, we were anticipating this huge tsunami of sick women because we were looking at what was happening in the rest of Europe and even starting to happen down in London, and we thought, "Right, okay." I'm up in Glasgow, and we thought, "Okay, this is coming and this is going to be horrific." And every day in the hospital, things were changing in terms of there was talk of reorganizing wards and new pathways and protocols. It did become very quiet for a couple of weeks in the triage department where I work because the only women coming in were women who really needed to come in. There wasn't so much of the kind of worried well and all the other. Probably a good part of our business is people who actually are completely fine.

  And then, yes, we have had some sick women, not as many as we feared, but some, but on the whole, no, the workload, the sort of quality and quantity of what we're seeing now is right up to where it was, so very, very busy. So, my last shift was Friday night, and it was just myself and another midwife in the ward as it always is at night in triage, and I think we had eight or nine women in labor, and maybe another five or six women with different things that they were coming in with.

  Katherine May:

  Plenty.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's busy, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  Plenty to be doing with. That's actually a really great point to talk about how you became a midwife because you weren't always, were you? You had a whole career before this.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I had a sort of mini career. I had the beginnings of a career. I worked in telly which was as surprising to me as it was to anybody else. So, I was a researcher for sort of arts and factual programming and documentaries at BBC Scotland, and I worked for an independent company for a while as well, and when I had my first daughters, she's now 17, I took some time off, and then I came back part-time, and I could see very quickly that I would hit the glass ceiling very fast and that the only women who seemed to succeed in telly at that time were women who either didn't have children or had clearly made a conscious decision not to spend very much time at home, and really to be at work at all hours and really available all the time, and that wasn't really for me.

  At the same time, I'd had this huge life-changing experience of being pregnant and giving birth, and it kind of blew my world apart in a way. Nothing about it was anything I had prepared for or anticipated, and I think any woman who becomes a mother will say that that kind of draws your priorities into quite sharp relief and changes how you feel about things, but for me, it was really, I don't want to say like an identity crisis, but it was an identity challenge for sure.

  Katherine May:

  So, talk me through that time. I mean, I guess media jobs are full of people who are ambitious and have always wanted to be in them, you know?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  And therefore, are often willing to make whatever sacrifices it takes. And so, you're back in that world with a tiny baby and kind of thinking, "How an earth do I confront this? What do I do?"

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. Well, I think a big part of it for me was that the birth to begin with didn't go the way I had expected or was told it would happen. Silly me. I had long labor and then I had an emergency section, and that was obviously really difficult in terms of recovery, and breastfeeding didn't work, and I wasn't loving every minute of my life as I kind of thought maybe I would. Loved my baby obviously, and wouldn't change that for the world, but I just felt a bit kind of exploded. My time wasn't my own. My body was completely different, and at the same time, as the sort of weeks and months went on, I was meeting other women who had had babies, whether we'd been in antenatal classes together or met them through other groups and things, and everybody that I met seemed to have had an awful time, and I just thought, "Why is it like this? We were not sold this experience. This was not what we were told about."

  So, and I really started to think, "Oh, surely there's some way this can change. Can I change it? Is there some way that this can be made better?" And I did actually at that time start to think about retraining, but I had just gone through four years of university in America and a year of master's degree studies in the UK, and the thought of going back to sit in a classroom and being told what to do, it just was not on. That was not the time in my life to be doing that. So, I did go back to work and then I realized, no, this was not for me.

  So, I did think about midwifery, but I then found out about doulas. For anyone listening, who doesn't know what a doula is, it's just like a birth partner really, and I thought, "Yeah, that's something I could do and I can work it around my family."

  Katherine May:

  How interesting.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. So, it's just a lay birth partner. It's like a cheerleader for pregnant and birthing people. It's just emotional and practical support. It's completely non-clinical. It's a very old role, although we're calling it something different now. Yeah, so I did some training around that, and I was a doula for six years supporting women in home births and hospital births, and doing some postnatal support as well.

  Katherine May:

  Wow.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, that was kind of-

  Katherine May:

  It's like a halfway house almost of becoming a midwife. It's probably quite a good early preparation, I suppose. You get used to being in that space.

  Leah Hazard:

  It was, yeah. You get used to being in that space. You have that fundamental respect for women and commitment to advocating for women without any of the clinical responsibility which sometimes I look at and think, "Hmm, that was nice." But ultimately, with that, I did get to the point where I thought, "No, I want the whole package. I want to be able to provide all the care." And I had another child, so I decided, yeah, that maybe now is the time to go back to school. So, that's what I did, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  So, how old were your children when you retrained because that must have been really tricky?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it was pretty horrendous at the start, to be honest. It was a crazy thing to do. I get emails all the time and messages and things from women saying, "Oh, I've got two young children. Should I go back and retrain?" And I'm like, "Hmm, yeah, that sounds great." So, it was 10 years ago this year that I started training, so my kids would've been seven and three.

  Katherine May:

  Wow.

  Leah Hazard:

  I'm not going to lie, that was hard. That was really challenging because they just knew me as somebody who was around most of the time. I was on call for births from time to time, but mostly that was when they were sleeping or times when I could sort of melt away without too much disruption. So, yeah, it was a huge adjustment for all of us, but we got there in the end.

  Katherine May:

  Wow. I mean, I guess it's the kind of job I'd be too scared to do because I am terrified of, I don't know, doing the wrong thing which is why I hide behind a desk and write, and I still get terrified even then.

  Leah Hazard:

  I'm pretty scared of that too though, to be fair.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, I think probably having a healthy respect for that is good, but I imagine that those first years when you're a trained midwife and you're practicing on your own as being quite tense actually. Is that just me projecting that idea onto it or is that how it is?

  Leah Hazard:

  No, not at all, absolutely terrifying. I think when you're a student, and most midwifery degrees are three years, you sort of do develop some confidence, of course, and you need to over the three years, and then the fear becomes real just when you're about to qualify and you think, "Oh, I'm about to be thrown out of the nest and now it's me," and then you do. One day, you're just chucked in a room with a woman, as simple as that, and it's like, "Right, okay, you do it. Off you go."

  Katherine May:

  Off you go. I can't imagine the fear. I didn't train as a teacher. I did the on the job learning route, the graduate training program to become a secondary teacher. And so, there was I, I think I was 24, and what happens when you do that is the first day you go into a classroom and you teach, and you've had no training or experience whatsoever, and I can remember that moment of standing in the staff room and my legs not wanting to walk me to my first class.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I can imagine.

  Katherine May:

  I was so scared because I taught sixth form. I was so conscious of how old they were and how close to my age they were, and they knew that, and they were ever so nice to me, but after a week, they said, "We knew you were new because when you wrote your name on the board, it was enormous."

  Leah Hazard:

  Rookie mistake, Katherine.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it's obviously really obvious. But yeah, so I can only imagine what it must be like for something that's much more life and death than teaching some A level student psychology.

  Leah Hazard:

  It's scary, and I think also it just depends what the working culture is like around you. Yeah, I mean all hospitals and birth centers and things are different, but the place where I work does have an element of sort of macho, although it's all women, sort of tough talk, it's quite intimidating, or at least it can be to a newly qualified midwife, and your face has to fit and your behavior has to tow a certain line, and it really is like living on another planet. As soon as you go through that sort of air lock of the hospital doors, you're in the zone. You're in another place. I'm seven years qualified this year, I still kind of think, "Mm, will I fit in at some point?" I know I can do the job, and I have a great team that I work with, and we all support each other, but that's, I think, as scary as the actual clinical side of it.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, I think the thing that you most want when you're the person giving birth is to look at your midwife and to see certainty and confidence because I mean, I suppose it must be different for women who have multiple children, but I've only done it once, and I just wanted someone to tell me what to do because I had no clue, and I had deliberately avoided the books because I thought, I just didn't think they'd help, and I still, I'm not sure that was the wrong decision actually.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, well, they didn't do me any favors, so you probably did the right thing. But yeah, it's interesting. Every woman has a different way of responding to that challenge. So, some women do want that really kind of firm hand and tell me what to do, what would you do, what should I do now. Some women don't want to communicate at all really, and that's completely fine.

  Katherine May:

  Oh really? That's fascinating.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, for sure. Uh-huh. And for some, you just sort of feel your way through it together, and you really have to develop a knack for sussing out very quickly what that woman's needs are, and sometimes you do it and sometimes you can't, and that's okay. You can only try your best.

  Katherine May:

  Do you get sworn at a lot?

  Leah Hazard:

  Sometimes. Very seldom. It's usually the guys that are on the sharp end of the swearing. But now, I have to say, at the minute, and I think this is the case for most units around the UK, men aren't actually allowed in our department.

  Katherine May:

  Right, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  And I'm not really going to go into whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's much calmer, and there's much less swearing, I will say. So, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  Interesting. Are women kind of coming out the other end of it commenting on what it was like without their... Or partner, sorry, I shouldn't say husband. That's a terrible thing to say really in 2020.

  Leah Hazard:

  No, that's okay.

  Katherine May:

  But are women kind of saying about whether they wish they were there or whether they... Because my mother chose not to have my dad there when she gave birth, and I really did reflect on it when it came to my time because I kind of thought a bit of me just wants to get on with it on my own, you know?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I mean, it's difficult. I mean, ideally, women aren't in our department for too long because we really just assess them and give them some support before they go to labor ward, the partners can join them there. But yeah, I think it's very subjective. I think some women do seem grateful to just have the focus of the midwife, and there's no extraneous distraction or having to manage somebody else's fear, somebody else's expectation, but obviously, some partners are great. Maybe they've been laboring at home together for days before they've even come in, and the partner's been a great support, and then all of a sudden, that isn't there. So, it's interesting. It's going to be really interesting when this all, if this all ever settles down to see how people feel about that aspect of things, whether that will change.

  Katherine May:

  I think there's going to be so many reckonings, and I think we are going to be fascinated by it for years to come actually, and I think it will change us, but none of us know how yet it's still all floating up in the air. I'm endlessly reading about all these different experiences, and just hearing things from friends, terrible things, amazing things. It's such a huge moment in human history.

  Leah Hazard:

  I think it's really interesting, just to connect it back to your book, that a lot of people are looking at their experience just now and thinking, "Am I wintering? Am I enduring this really horrible thing?" And of course, some people are much more than you or I.

  Katherine May:

  Oh, absolutely, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  But some people are also asking themselves, "Do I kind of like it? Am I kind of enjoying parts of this or maybe learning things about myself?' So, if you have the privilege of perspective to be able to ask those questions, yeah, it's pretty interesting.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it is, it's this moment of pause, I think, where I always talk about, I don't know if everyone will relate to this piece, but the piece of art by Cornelia Parker, the exploded shed, and I remember going to see that when it was in the Turner Prize, I don't know, probably 20 years ago or more now, and you walk into a room, and you feel like time has stopped because there's just a shed that literally she had someone explode that she suspended all the pieces of it hanging in the air around you, and for me, it was an uncanny moment where I literally felt like I'd walked into stopped time.

  I think for me, I keep coming back to that as a metaphor for moments like this and those wintering moments as well which is that time has paused for a while. Nothing's happening, and in that space, our fears can completely overwhelm us, and they so often do, but also, we can reflect and think about changes we want to make. It's a sort of very revolutionary moment with both good and bad coming in, and I think that's where loads of stuff's happening at the moment, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. And I think as women and as mothers so often, I'm sure you probably like me have had times in your life where you've thought, "Oh god, I wish this would just stop." There's just too much to do, and we have to do homework, and cook dinners, and go to music lessons, and manage our own stuff, and get our own things done, and try and make some money, and I wish it would just stop, and now it's like, "Hmm, okay. It's all stopped. What can we make of this?"

  Katherine May:

  Let's watch the more Teen Titans go.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. Some of this stuff we've been doing is just kind of getting by day to day, and I think for the first month, apart from going to work as a midwife, on my days off, I just allowed myself to just vegetate and just had no expectations of myself or my family or trying to be productive really. I just let go, and actually-

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. It did feel like pressure's off in a lot of ways, I think, and that's really unusual for me. I normally feel very like I'm supposed to be getting out there and doing this and that, and there's nothing to do. There is absolutely nothing that can be done. I was about to say it's luxurious, but it's not even that. It just is. It's just a time when we are acting, making it up as we go along, and there's something about quality of that, that I'm quite liking if that's a terrible thing to say.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I feel so conflicted because obviously this is a crisis that we wouldn't wish on ourselves or anyone in any way.

  Katherine May:

  Oh goodness, no.

  Leah Hazard:

  Having looked after women who are ill and seeing the disruption of the world in general, I wish it wasn't happening, but at the same time, I kind of really like that all I need to do in a day is maybe I can get up early and do some writing if I'm up to it. If I'm not, fine. I can spend lots of time making nice food. I can eat lots of nice food. I don't have to run my kids around to a million and one classes. And then the days when I'm at work, I go to work. I help women. I come home.

  Katherine May:

  It's simpler.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I'm kind of liking that. And yesterday we went out and about in the sort of area where we live, and lockdown here has eased slightly, although not as much as where you are, and it was really, yeah, not quite-

  Katherine May:

  It truly has eased here, yeah, in Whitstable.

  Leah Hazard:

  Well, what was weird for me yesterday was there weren't sort of hoards of people, but there were lots of people out walking about and sort of queuing for coffees and things and lying out in the park, and kind of made me a little bit uncomfortable, and I kind of wanted to go back to how it was, and I know that's awful because that's not... The reason for why it was the way it was is not a good one.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it's terrible, but no, I know exactly what you mean, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  But I think that's why I've kind of stayed in the house all day today.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, I actually, I remember at the beginning of it, I felt really restricted and I thought, "What am I going to do without being able to go out at weekends and do this and that?" And now I think, "Well, what did we used to do at weekends?" I can't imagine what we were so busy with. I think I've quite happily jettisoned a lot of rushing around that I won't go back to now. I'm very glad to do it. Mm. So, back to you. Sorry, it's hard to have a conversation at the moment without going into pandemic talk.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, completely, completely. There, we've done it. We've nailed it now.

  Katherine May:

  I hope this will sound quaint in a year's time, and everyone will be out raving again. I don't know. I won't be, but then I never was in the first place.

  We'll be back to Remona in a minute, but I just wanted to take a short pause to tell you about a workshop I'm holding in Rockport, Maine, I know, American soil, on the 8th of August this year. I will be working with the brilliant Elissa Altman to deliver a day retreat, courtesy of Barnswallow Books, and the workshop is called On Comfort. It's a whole day to join us and explore what comfort, sustenance, and homecoming mean to you.

  So, I'll be working with the group first to explore feelings of being at home, of being comfortable and cozy, and how we can create an environment that makes us feel safe, and from which we can springboard into the work we need to do in the outside world. Elissa will be working to explore what food means, the idea of comfort food but reimagined. So, thinking about how we can truly sustain our minds and bodies through the act of cooking, preparing, and eating food which I know is such a complicated issue for so many of us. There will be a light lunch included, and at the end of the day, a lovely communal supper so we can all get together and break bread, or something else if you're gluten free. We know how it goes.

  There's a link in my bio to explore more about the workshops, but do take a look quickly because I know they're going to book up quickly. It's the only workshop I'm running on American soil this year and it's my first ever. So, if you can come, please do. I'd love to see you there. Okay, back to Remona.

  So, one of the things that comes across really strongly in your book is your engagement with the different women that you come across and meet, and their different stories and lives and hardships. How difficult is it for you to leave that behind when you come home? Does it prey on your mind, or are you able to have that separation?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it can be quite difficult. I mean, you were saying you have the fear of doing things wrong, and I think that's the fear that follows every midwife or every healthcare practitioner when they've left the hospital. There's always the nagging feeling of, oh, did I sign for that drug that I gave, or maybe I sent her to labor ward at the wrong time, or was that examination actually right, or maybe she was only two centimeters, and I thought she was eight centimeters, and I've done it all wrong, and I'm a horrible midwife. Everybody, I think, feels that way on their days off. But some women's stories obviously affect me on a deeper level, and some of those are the ones that I wrote about.

  I think there's this saying that every doctor has their own personal graveyard in their head because it's the patients they couldn't save, and I think that midwives carry a similar thing, not a graveyard, thankfully, but a little collection of women who have really touched them and made them question things, maybe we've connected with them, or maybe they've really challenged us in some way, and I definitely have that, and I definitely think of those women often. I think that's normal. I think that's healthy.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. I think that's human, actually. I think that's not a negative thing necessarily. I think if your work didn't leave a mark on you, it wouldn't seem right somehow.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. The trick is just not letting it overwhelm you, I guess, and there certainly have been times on days off when all I can think about is something that's happened during my last shift, and it really, really niggles me, but that is just part of being an adult in the world, I guess. We all have things. We all have to encounter other people in our work generally or just in our daily lives, and we all have upsets.

  Katherine May:

  It's sad but true. Yes, we do.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it is, yeah. I mean, I don't know, maybe for me, it's fair to say at times the stakes are maybe a little bit higher, but still, we all go through that in our own way, and the trick is just not to let it rankle, and to try and work it out somehow. So, I'm still learning about that.

  Katherine May:

  But there was a point that you wrote about where the stress began to really get to you, I think.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. I mean, as I sort of went through the first few years of my career, I work in a really busy hospital. We have about six and a half thousand births a year.

  Katherine May:

  That's an incredible number, isn't it?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's a lot of babies.

  Katherine May:

  That's a lot of day, isn't it?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's a lot of day and we don't always have the staffing levels that I would like. I think it's okay to say that. As a working midwife, quite often your own needs come way down the pecking order in terms of what has to get done that day and what can get done, and most of my career I've worked in its triage department which is very busy and fast-paced. I describe it as A&E for pregnant people so it's always changing, it's always acute which is part of what makes it interesting and exciting, but also sometimes what makes it impossible.

  So, yeah, I wrote about that sort of gradual feeling of pressure building, and I wrote about one particular night when it was a really busy shift, and the women just kept coming and coming and coming, and the hospital was full, and there were discussions about closing the hospital to new patients, and that wasn't done for one reason and another, and just became untenable, and I had what I now know, I can see it was a panic attack which probably sounds pretty boring and run of the mill to most people, but-

  Katherine May:

  They're never boring and run of the mill when you're having them though.

  Leah Hazard:

  No, they're not, and it was the first time at work that I just felt completely paralyzed, and that is deeply shameful for somebody who goes to work so she can help people and put herself last and always be competent and always be effective and efficient and safe, and I couldn't. There have been times before and since that night when I've been able to kind of pull myself back from that edge and kind of pull it together and just keep going, but I just couldn't that night, and I had to leave.

  Katherine May:

  But that's the problem with feelings when you're pushing them down. They just, at some point, will all come flooding up when you don't want them to.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and I guess I'd probably been doing that for a while on other occasions as well, and that's why on that night, I was not in control, and I had to go home. Yeah, I mean, the only word that keeps coming into my mind when I think about that is shame which is ridiculous rationally because I know I shouldn't be ashamed and I shouldn't be embarrassed and that's just normal, and I do all kinds of this other sort of advocacy around mental health to tell other people that it's fine, but I was not in that place on that night. It took a long time for me to accept that that was okay, and actually, looking back that night probably was kind of transformative in how I treat myself and look after myself.

  And then I did something really silly and I wrote about it, and told everyone that it happened, and that kind of maybe in a way diffused it a bit because at first, when I thought about writing the book, I thought, "Right, this is just going to be a book about women's stories and midwifery in general. It's not going to be about me because that's boring and nobody wants to hear that." But then the more I started writing, the more I thought, "No, I'm actually doing my colleagues an injustice if I'm not honest about the pressures we're all under because I'm certainly not the only person ever to have had a night like that."

  Katherine May:

  And I think it's hardest for carers and people who see themselves as the person that sorts out the problem. I think it's often hardest for people like you to acknowledge when you're suffering yourself. You want to be the person that carries on solving it. That's part of your identity somehow, and it's very undermining when you have to admit you can't cope.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, absolutely, because all of a sudden, all those skills, it doesn't matter if you can make up an IV pump of a really fancy antibiotic, it doesn't matter if you can suture somebody's perineum, or catch a baby, or guide someone through a 12-hour labor. It's totally irrelevant if you are then sat frozen on a chair in the tea room, unable to even chew your dinner. I mean, that's kind of where it was. Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  But I mean, I had to learn this myself. I didn't have that one moment of crisis, but by the time I got to have my autism diagnosis when I was 39, I had been through decades of panic attacks, anxiety, dropping out of major things in life, jobs, university, I tried to drop out university, they didn't let me, damn it, but I gave it a bloody good go, missing out on all sorts of experiences. What was really transformative for me was to be able to say, finally, after all those years, I couldn't cope with what life was throwing at me, and until then, I was so resistant to being able to say that because if I was modeling myself as a neurotypical person, then there was no reason why I shouldn't be coping with it. What was wrong with me? I mean, I'd literally been to counselors where I'd had a few months of talking to them. They finally leaned over and said, "Is there an abuse story here?"

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh no. Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  They were kind of waiting to find out what the hell was wrong with me.

  Leah Hazard:

  Like the big reveal.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, because I was acting like somebody who was carrying terrible trauma that hadn't happened, and so I was kind of a mystery, but having that moment of revelation has changed a lot for me. It doesn't mean to say that I cope perfectly with everything, but I've learned to let myself off the hook, and it kind of works actually. It kind of works to say, "Do you know what? This is just more input than you can cope with at the moment, and you need to go and sit down in a quiet room and recover yourself."

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, definitely. I'm sure if you had a friend who was feeling that way or your son was feeling that way, that would be the first thing you would say.

  Katherine May:

  Yes.

  Leah Hazard:

  You would be so kind to them and you'd say, "Right, this is too much for you. Why don't you just remove yourself from this or take a break or look at it in another way?" But I think for some of us, and again, I don't know if it's a woman thing or a mother thing-

  Katherine May:

  Or an overachiever thing.

  Leah Hazard:

  Or just an overachiever perfectionist thing, yeah, or all of the above. It takes a long time to think, "Oh, right. Maybe I can actually be nice to myself in that way too." It's really difficult, and there shouldn't be any shame attached to it, but there is, I think.

  Katherine May:

  Oh yeah. I think we all kind of carry that shame of those moments where we've not managed it, but we, I hope, all don't believe that other people should carry it. So, what did you change after that? What did you learn from that moment, and what adjustments have you made to help you to not get to the point where your head's about to explode in the future?

  Leah Hazard:

  I think again, it's a process and it's still unfolding. I think I'm much quicker to recognize now when I'm starting to feel like that, and the only thing to do is slow down, and now, it's not always possible in my workplace because if there are six women in the waiting room, all needing to be seen in that moment, it's not much you can do about that. But just slowing down incrementally is very seldom a dangerous thing to do and realizing that it's okay not to see all the women at once. It's okay to ask somebody else to maybe do something for you if they have a minute.

  It's actually quite important to make sure you eat and drink something and go to the toilet, and I know these are really daft sounding things, but it would be so easy to go through a 12-hour shift and not have a break, and just try and see every single person single-handedly who comes through the door. And also, just about on days off, recognizing that, checking in and realizing maybe I'm not feeling great, maybe I'm feeling quite anxious. Really, I should force myself to go for a walk or a run, or write something, even if it's not very good.

  Katherine May:

  Well, there's a probably other source of stress now that you're a publisher writer. It's not casual anymore.

  Leah Hazard:

  God, yeah, the dreaded second album. Here it comes. Yeah, so it's just about having better self-awareness, I think, because again, if that was happening to one of my children, I could see it a mile off, and I could say, "Oh, I don't think you look right in yourself. What is going on? How are you feeling? Slow down a bit." But in myself, stupidly, it's taken 42 years to learn those cues and to acknowledge them.

  Katherine May:

  They take long time, those lessons. And yeah, I'm exactly the same as you. If I saw somebody else ready to pop, I would say, "Are you getting enough sleep? Put yourself to bed early. Have a glass of water."

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, simple things.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, eat something. They're exactly the things that we skip when we are stressed. It's fascinating. We all need a mother following us around and sort of checking in, I think, sometimes, or we have to be our own one of those, unfortunately.

  Leah Hazard:

  We do. I mean, that's a whole other podcast for another day, to be honest, about who's been mothered and in what way and how that affects how we look after ourselves. But yeah, I've had to learn a bit of that and be kind to myself in that way.

  Katherine May:

  But I feel like for you, it has led to a kind of leadership in your field, not necessarily in the technicalities of being a midwife, but in that radical vulnerability and in being able to talk about the humanity behind that uniform and that role.

  Leah Hazard:

  I guess so. I mean, I think I'm a bit of an unlikely person, or in myself, I feel like an unlikely person to be a leader in that area, but I've seen so many colleagues and students struggle with these very same things, and we're working so hard in the NHS now and at all times, that again, not recognizing these things and sort of amplifying these concerns seems like a disservice to everybody else on my team. It's not really about me, but if I can share my experience and let the world know how hard we're all working and how sometimes it affects us, then I'm glad. I think that can only be a good thing.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it seems really important to me. So, finally, tell me about what you're working on next in those few minutes you can grab.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh god. Oh, okay. So, this is a world debut exclusive, almost.

  Katherine May:

  Yay. Whoa.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. So, as we were just saying before you pressed record, when lockdown hit, I was days away from selling my next big, exciting, non-fiction project, and this was like the big one. This was like jaws of my life. This was going to be the one that was going to make it, I felt. So, without giving too much away because maybe it'll happen at some point, it would've involved a lot of research and a lot of traveling and looking at sort of birth work around the world, but the one trip I did manage to do as part of my research before this all happened was I went to Sweden and I watched a uterus transplant.

  Katherine May:

  Wow.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it was absolutely fascinating, and I was getting into this whole world of womb transplants, and what they are, and how they work, and how women feel about them, or why they might have them, and what birth might look like in the future. And unfortunately, the book that was going to be a part of it looks like it might never happen, but at the same time, when I was kind of just stating that and starting to write it up and stuff, I had an idea for a novel about two sisters, one of whom gives her uterus to the other.

  Katherine May:

  Wow, that's a fascinating premise.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's pretty cool, and it happens. It has happened, and when I went to watch this particular transplant in Sweden in November, it was two sisters on the table as it were, and I thought, "Wow, that is pretty cool, and also pretty messed up in a lot of ways in terms of where that could take you if it all went wrong and if you didn't maybe psychologically manage that very well." So, that started off as the premise, and now it's become this thing.

  Katherine May:

  This monster.

  Leah Hazard:

  This monster, this novel. It's about what it means to be a sister, but also to be a mother. It's about women's relationships with their bodies. It's about Scotland, strangely enough. I've found myself researching all kinds of flora of Scottish islands in 11th century monasteries and all kinds of weird stuff where I never thought it would take me, but it's great. I'm actually, when I'm not hating what I write, I'm loving it. I'm loving the process of it.

  Katherine May:

  It's a part of the process, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so watch this space. I'm enjoying it and hoping to have it a bit less horrible in a few months time.

  Katherine May:

  Oh, well, that just sounds absolutely amazing, and I cannot wait to read it. I hope you get some good time to get on with it. [inaudible 00:45:28].

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, thank you.

  Katherine May:

  That's really exciting.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  Well, thank you for talking to me today. I am so, so delighted to actually speak to you, not in person because nothing can be in person.

  Leah Hazard:

  I know.

  Katherine May:

  I think that's the gift of this time that actually we can sidle up to each other and go, "Oh, I could Skype you. We don't have to be in the same city."

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, yeah, it's great. No, thank you so much. I know we were meant to meet in person the week that this all kicked off.

  Katherine May:

  I know.

  Leah Hazard:

  This is great. So, yeah, thank you so much for having me.

  Katherine May:

  It's really good. I'd just like to recommend your book yet again to the readers, Hard pushed, which I just love the moment I read it, and I'm sure loads and loads of other people will too, and indeed, loads and loads of people have already, and we'll look forward to your next work.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, hopefully, fingers crossed. Thank you so much.

  Katherine May:

  Thanks, Leah. Bye-bye.

  The day's warming up a bit here now. The white clouds that were covering the sky this morning are gradually burning off. There's a beautiful blue sky, but I think I'll be hiding indoors again come lunchtime. Probably for the best, but you know, I'm always talking about how to embrace the rhythms of the year in the winter, and it's true of the summer too. It's maybe not so much part of our culture to talk about how difficult the summer can be, how interminable it can feel, how, although it has kind of luxury associated with it, holidays and sitting outside pubs and restaurants drinking rose, it's also a very difficult time for lots of people. I think it's a time when it feels out of place to be sad, to be grieving, to be anxious, to be depressed, to be recovering from something that's happened to us. I don't think summer and summer culture welcomes that, and so that can be really hard.

  I think for some of us, the way that there's a natural pause in the year here, because even if we're not on holiday, often the people we work with or that we know are, everything can feel very disrupted, and I don't really cope very well with that disruption. It breaks up my routines. It makes everything seem slow and complicated, and I often get really frustrated with myself because like every other human being, I have to slow down a bit in the heat. I don't get as much done, and I don't always clock why that is. I just get frustrated that my to-do list isn't going down, but these things have their natural break, and it'll come, that moment of acceptance, that moment of, ah, screw it actually. But honestly, we do have to surrender to the constant change that's happening across the year.

  I'm going to be in America for Lammas this year. Lammas is the sort of residual pagan festival that happens around about the beginning of August, the 1st of August, which in traditional culture, including in church culture, Church of England culture, it's a derivation of Loaf Mass. It's a time when we mark the beginning of the harvest. We're perhaps more familiar with the harvest festivals that we all attended at school maybe, or is that just me. I went to a country primary that marked the end of the harvest, but Lammas is the beginning of the harvest period. It's a time when the grain is ripe, a time when we think about gathering that in, before it is eaten by the mice.

  And last year I baked my first Lammas loaf which is a wheatsheaf-shaped loaf that is traditional in some parts of England this time of year. You can have a look at it on my Instagram feed. And so, this year, I'm going to bake mine early, and I'm still going to bake it because it's another lovely way to mark this turn in the year and actually to process some of the difficulties that come at this point.

  Anyway, I hope you're enjoying summer or at least surviving it wherever you are in the world. I want to say a massive thank you to Leah Hazard for the interview she gave a while ago, but for letting us rebroadcast it. Thank you to the Patreons who I've been having really interesting discussions with lately about how our community's about to change for the better, I hope. I'll let you all know about that soon. Thank you to Meghan and producer Buddy who look after this podcast so well, keep it running, and I have been working really hard on its reinvention for the next season. I'm hoping to share more with you soon. Take care, everyone. Bye.

  Katherine May:

  Hi, I'm Katherine May. Welcome to The Wintering Sessions. I am speaking to you on a beautiful, cool morning. Thankfully, after days of intense heat, something broke in the middle of the night. We didn't get a storm. We got some thunder and lightning, a few drops of rain, nothing much to speak of, but when I woke up this morning, the air was cool, and I went and sat outside until I got goosebumps. It was heaven.

  I'm really rubbish in the heat. I come from a family of heat lovers. I am a heat hater. I just cannot regulate my own body temperature, but today there's this amazing wind blowing. You might be able to hear it a little bit around the mic. Ah, it feels a little bit like a hot hand dryer, but there's something refreshing about it too. It's lovely. It's so weird how micro-seasonal we are, how we're affected on a moment by moment basis by just one or two days of weather. By the end of yesterday, I felt done. I felt like I couldn't cope with anything much at all, and I was emotional and self-pitying, and it just seemed devastating, and today everything seems okay again. Everything seems manageable, although clearly we have, as a world, an awful lot of work to do to try and push back against these incredibly hot days.

  So, I'm on the beach. I've just been walking along the tide line, listening to the trickle of water that drains off the beach when the tide's low. It's such a tiny sound. I love to stand and just listen to it just carefully for a little while. It's beneath everything else. It feels like a secret. There are some good parts of summer. I'm not entirely against it as a concept. I just like the cool bits, that's all, the shade.

  So, today we have our second re-up episode from season one, remastered and presented for your delectation and pleasure because I think lots of people missed some of those season one episodes. Lots of you have come later which is great, hello, welcome, but there was some great stuff there. They're all my favorites really, but we asked our Patreons and our listeners who they might like to hear from again, and this was what was voted for.

  So, today, I'm sharing my conversation with the amazing Leah Hazard who is a writer, a midwife, and I've just been reading a proof copy of her new book, Womb, all about the uterus which is such, I was about to say a fertile subject area, ha ha ha ha, but it's such a fantastically interesting grounds to write about and I've learned so much, but also I'm just loving the way she writes as I did in all her previous work that I've read. So, you can count me as a fan, but actually, one of the lovely things that might not be obvious about The Wintering Session is that some of my guests have become friends after we spoke and Leah's one of them. She's one of the good guys in this world, and I love to have a little chat with her, although we've never met in person. That's the COVID world for you. We keep saying that one day we will actually get together in a room and talk to each other face to face which would just be a miracle, but maybe next year.

  Anyway, I commend this episode to you. I loved recording it. I love listening back to it, and I think it just has such a lot to say about how we grow and change, and how we know when we can't take anymore. See what you think. I'll see you a bit later.

  Today, I'm excited to welcome Leah Hazard, the best-selling author of Hard Pushed: A Midwife's Story, and practicing NHS midwife. It's really great to speak to you, Leah.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, it's great to speak to you too. Thank you so much for having me.

  Katherine May:

  Well, I'm really delighted to. We've been chatting for a very long time, haven't we, and it's really nice to hear your voice.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, definitely.

  Katherine May:

  We were just discussing that Leah's accent is Scottish Connecticut which is quite a fascinating mix there.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's a bit niche. It's quite unusual, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  It's good to have your own [inaudible 00:06:11] there.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I guess so, yes.

  Katherine May:

  So, I came across you, Leah, when I read your book Hard Pushed which interestingly, I read just after I'd read Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, okay.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it was quite an interesting contrast because I'd read This is Going to Hurt in the week that my husband was in hospital with a ruptured appendix, and I'd actually found it immensely comforting because I felt, I was listening to it on audio book driving to and from the hospital, and I felt like it put me in contact with the people who were behind the scenes who, if I'm honest, I was completely frustrated with at the time, the nurses and doctors who didn't seem to be making him much better. He was suffering a lot, and I would've been much more angry had I not been able to listen to that.

  Leah Hazard:

  No, that's good.

  Katherine May:

  But in the weeks that followed, a kind of nother tide washed over me, and that was my feminist consciousness reemerging because I actually had quite a hard time when I was pregnant and giving birth and I felt like women's voices were absent from that book in a way that I don't expect you to reply to because I know you're [inaudible 00:07:19].

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  But when I read your book, I punched the air because it was still such great storytelling, so warm and funny and moving, but also, you are a kick-arse advocate for women in the maternity ward. Is that fair to say?

  Leah Hazard:

  Thank you. I mean, I wouldn't be the best person to answer that, but I hope so. I think that's the job of every midwife really, and certainly people have asked me about that book, and I have read it, and maybe that's where I should leave it. No, I mean, I can understand why some people have really enjoyed it and why it's been a huge success, and I can also understand why some people have been upset by it and have felt that maybe another voice was needed. So, I'm pleased if I can provide that voice or another voice, and yeah, I think it's really important in anything I write to demonstrate respect for women, and that doesn't mean that we have to be worthy all the time and very sort of virtue signaling and all the rest, but we can have a laugh, but we have to be respectful and mindful of who's at the center of that story, and it's women. So, yeah, I hope that's come through.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, and I think it really does come through. I think that from the other side, people are fascinated by midwives because you are present at one of the most dramatic and yet entirely normal moments of human life, but when I say normal, it's different for everybody every time, and I think that there's this sense that you guys kind of look into a space that most of us don't really understand, even if we've been in it.

  Leah Hazard:

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's completely true, and it strikes me all the time, and it should strike me all the time. When I'm with a woman who's laboring or who's having issues in pregnancy, for whatever reason, I kind of have to stop myself sometimes and think, "What, they let me do this? This is really intimate and visceral and special and risky." I don't just mean physically risky. I mean emotionally risky, and yeah, it's a huge privilege to be in that role. So, I'm very grateful for that.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. It would be hard not to mention at the moment that we are still in the middle of lockdown. I suspect we will be in some kind of lockdown or some kind of pandemic alertness when this podcast goes out, unless something changes very dramatically, and I think it would be remiss of me not to ask you about how you're finding it at the moment. Is it becoming business as normal or does everything still feel very strange?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yes and no. At the beginning, by which I mean sort of middle of March to end of March, we were anticipating this huge tsunami of sick women because we were looking at what was happening in the rest of Europe and even starting to happen down in London, and we thought, "Right, okay." I'm up in Glasgow, and we thought, "Okay, this is coming and this is going to be horrific." And every day in the hospital, things were changing in terms of there was talk of reorganizing wards and new pathways and protocols. It did become very quiet for a couple of weeks in the triage department where I work because the only women coming in were women who really needed to come in. There wasn't so much of the kind of worried well and all the other. Probably a good part of our business is people who actually are completely fine.

  And then, yes, we have had some sick women, not as many as we feared, but some, but on the whole, no, the workload, the sort of quality and quantity of what we're seeing now is right up to where it was, so very, very busy. So, my last shift was Friday night, and it was just myself and another midwife in the ward as it always is at night in triage, and I think we had eight or nine women in labor, and maybe another five or six women with different things that they were coming in with.

  Katherine May:

  Plenty.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's busy, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  Plenty to be doing with. That's actually a really great point to talk about how you became a midwife because you weren't always, were you? You had a whole career before this.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I had a sort of mini career. I had the beginnings of a career. I worked in telly which was as surprising to me as it was to anybody else. So, I was a researcher for sort of arts and factual programming and documentaries at BBC Scotland, and I worked for an independent company for a while as well, and when I had my first daughters, she's now 17, I took some time off, and then I came back part-time, and I could see very quickly that I would hit the glass ceiling very fast and that the only women who seemed to succeed in telly at that time were women who either didn't have children or had clearly made a conscious decision not to spend very much time at home, and really to be at work at all hours and really available all the time, and that wasn't really for me.

  At the same time, I'd had this huge life-changing experience of being pregnant and giving birth, and it kind of blew my world apart in a way. Nothing about it was anything I had prepared for or anticipated, and I think any woman who becomes a mother will say that that kind of draws your priorities into quite sharp relief and changes how you feel about things, but for me, it was really, I don't want to say like an identity crisis, but it was an identity challenge for sure.

  Katherine May:

  So, talk me through that time. I mean, I guess media jobs are full of people who are ambitious and have always wanted to be in them, you know?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  And therefore, are often willing to make whatever sacrifices it takes. And so, you're back in that world with a tiny baby and kind of thinking, "How an earth do I confront this? What do I do?"

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. Well, I think a big part of it for me was that the birth to begin with didn't go the way I had expected or was told it would happen. Silly me. I had long labor and then I had an emergency section, and that was obviously really difficult in terms of recovery, and breastfeeding didn't work, and I wasn't loving every minute of my life as I kind of thought maybe I would. Loved my baby obviously, and wouldn't change that for the world, but I just felt a bit kind of exploded. My time wasn't my own. My body was completely different, and at the same time, as the sort of weeks and months went on, I was meeting other women who had had babies, whether we'd been in antenatal classes together or met them through other groups and things, and everybody that I met seemed to have had an awful time, and I just thought, "Why is it like this? We were not sold this experience. This was not what we were told about."

  So, and I really started to think, "Oh, surely there's some way this can change. Can I change it? Is there some way that this can be made better?" And I did actually at that time start to think about retraining, but I had just gone through four years of university in America and a year of master's degree studies in the UK, and the thought of going back to sit in a classroom and being told what to do, it just was not on. That was not the time in my life to be doing that. So, I did go back to work and then I realized, no, this was not for me.

  So, I did think about midwifery, but I then found out about doulas. For anyone listening, who doesn't know what a doula is, it's just like a birth partner really, and I thought, "Yeah, that's something I could do and I can work it around my family."

  Katherine May:

  How interesting.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. So, it's just a lay birth partner. It's like a cheerleader for pregnant and birthing people. It's just emotional and practical support. It's completely non-clinical. It's a very old role, although we're calling it something different now. Yeah, so I did some training around that, and I was a doula for six years supporting women in home births and hospital births, and doing some postnatal support as well.

  Katherine May:

  Wow.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, that was kind of-

  Katherine May:

  It's like a halfway house almost of becoming a midwife. It's probably quite a good early preparation, I suppose. You get used to being in that space.

  Leah Hazard:

  It was, yeah. You get used to being in that space. You have that fundamental respect for women and commitment to advocating for women without any of the clinical responsibility which sometimes I look at and think, "Hmm, that was nice." But ultimately, with that, I did get to the point where I thought, "No, I want the whole package. I want to be able to provide all the care." And I had another child, so I decided, yeah, that maybe now is the time to go back to school. So, that's what I did, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  So, how old were your children when you retrained because that must have been really tricky?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it was pretty horrendous at the start, to be honest. It was a crazy thing to do. I get emails all the time and messages and things from women saying, "Oh, I've got two young children. Should I go back and retrain?" And I'm like, "Hmm, yeah, that sounds great." So, it was 10 years ago this year that I started training, so my kids would've been seven and three.

  Katherine May:

  Wow.

  Leah Hazard:

  I'm not going to lie, that was hard. That was really challenging because they just knew me as somebody who was around most of the time. I was on call for births from time to time, but mostly that was when they were sleeping or times when I could sort of melt away without too much disruption. So, yeah, it was a huge adjustment for all of us, but we got there in the end.

  Katherine May:

  Wow. I mean, I guess it's the kind of job I'd be too scared to do because I am terrified of, I don't know, doing the wrong thing which is why I hide behind a desk and write, and I still get terrified even then.

  Leah Hazard:

  I'm pretty scared of that too though, to be fair.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, I think probably having a healthy respect for that is good, but I imagine that those first years when you're a trained midwife and you're practicing on your own as being quite tense actually. Is that just me projecting that idea onto it or is that how it is?

  Leah Hazard:

  No, not at all, absolutely terrifying. I think when you're a student, and most midwifery degrees are three years, you sort of do develop some confidence, of course, and you need to over the three years, and then the fear becomes real just when you're about to qualify and you think, "Oh, I'm about to be thrown out of the nest and now it's me," and then you do. One day, you're just chucked in a room with a woman, as simple as that, and it's like, "Right, okay, you do it. Off you go."

  Katherine May:

  Off you go. I can't imagine the fear. I didn't train as a teacher. I did the on the job learning route, the graduate training program to become a secondary teacher. And so, there was I, I think I was 24, and what happens when you do that is the first day you go into a classroom and you teach, and you've had no training or experience whatsoever, and I can remember that moment of standing in the staff room and my legs not wanting to walk me to my first class.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I can imagine.

  Katherine May:

  I was so scared because I taught sixth form. I was so conscious of how old they were and how close to my age they were, and they knew that, and they were ever so nice to me, but after a week, they said, "We knew you were new because when you wrote your name on the board, it was enormous."

  Leah Hazard:

  Rookie mistake, Katherine.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it's obviously really obvious. But yeah, so I can only imagine what it must be like for something that's much more life and death than teaching some A level student psychology.

  Leah Hazard:

  It's scary, and I think also it just depends what the working culture is like around you. Yeah, I mean all hospitals and birth centers and things are different, but the place where I work does have an element of sort of macho, although it's all women, sort of tough talk, it's quite intimidating, or at least it can be to a newly qualified midwife, and your face has to fit and your behavior has to tow a certain line, and it really is like living on another planet. As soon as you go through that sort of air lock of the hospital doors, you're in the zone. You're in another place. I'm seven years qualified this year, I still kind of think, "Mm, will I fit in at some point?" I know I can do the job, and I have a great team that I work with, and we all support each other, but that's, I think, as scary as the actual clinical side of it.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, I can only imagine. I mean, I think the thing that you most want when you're the person giving birth is to look at your midwife and to see certainty and confidence because I mean, I suppose it must be different for women who have multiple children, but I've only done it once, and I just wanted someone to tell me what to do because I had no clue, and I had deliberately avoided the books because I thought, I just didn't think they'd help, and I still, I'm not sure that was the wrong decision actually.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, well, they didn't do me any favors, so you probably did the right thing. But yeah, it's interesting. Every woman has a different way of responding to that challenge. So, some women do want that really kind of firm hand and tell me what to do, what would you do, what should I do now. Some women don't want to communicate at all really, and that's completely fine.

  Katherine May:

  Oh really? That's fascinating.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, for sure. Uh-huh. And for some, you just sort of feel your way through it together, and you really have to develop a knack for sussing out very quickly what that woman's needs are, and sometimes you do it and sometimes you can't, and that's okay. You can only try your best.

  Katherine May:

  Do you get sworn at a lot?

  Leah Hazard:

  Sometimes. Very seldom. It's usually the guys that are on the sharp end of the swearing. But now, I have to say, at the minute, and I think this is the case for most units around the UK, men aren't actually allowed in our department.

  Katherine May:

  Right, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  And I'm not really going to go into whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it's much calmer, and there's much less swearing, I will say. So, yeah.

  Katherine May:

  Interesting. Are women kind of coming out the other end of it commenting on what it was like without their... Or partner, sorry, I shouldn't say husband. That's a terrible thing to say really in 2020.

  Leah Hazard:

  No, that's okay.

  Katherine May:

  But are women kind of saying about whether they wish they were there or whether they... Because my mother chose not to have my dad there when she gave birth, and I really did reflect on it when it came to my time because I kind of thought a bit of me just wants to get on with it on my own, you know?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I mean, it's difficult. I mean, ideally, women aren't in our department for too long because we really just assess them and give them some support before they go to labor ward, the partners can join them there. But yeah, I think it's very subjective. I think some women do seem grateful to just have the focus of the midwife, and there's no extraneous distraction or having to manage somebody else's fear, somebody else's expectation, but obviously, some partners are great. Maybe they've been laboring at home together for days before they've even come in, and the partner's been a great support, and then all of a sudden, that isn't there. So, it's interesting. It's going to be really interesting when this all, if this all ever settles down to see how people feel about that aspect of things, whether that will change.

  Katherine May:

  I think there's going to be so many reckonings, and I think we are going to be fascinated by it for years to come actually, and I think it will change us, but none of us know how yet it's still all floating up in the air. I'm endlessly reading about all these different experiences, and just hearing things from friends, terrible things, amazing things. It's such a huge moment in human history.

  Leah Hazard:

  I think it's really interesting, just to connect it back to your book, that a lot of people are looking at their experience just now and thinking, "Am I wintering? Am I enduring this really horrible thing?" And of course, some people are much more than you or I.

  Katherine May:

  Oh, absolutely, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  But some people are also asking themselves, "Do I kind of like it? Am I kind of enjoying parts of this or maybe learning things about myself?' So, if you have the privilege of perspective to be able to ask those questions, yeah, it's pretty interesting.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it is, it's this moment of pause, I think, where I always talk about, I don't know if everyone will relate to this piece, but the piece of art by Cornelia Parker, the exploded shed, and I remember going to see that when it was in the Turner Prize, I don't know, probably 20 years ago or more now, and you walk into a room, and you feel like time has stopped because there's just a shed that literally she had someone explode that she suspended all the pieces of it hanging in the air around you, and for me, it was an uncanny moment where I literally felt like I'd walked into stopped time.

  I think for me, I keep coming back to that as a metaphor for moments like this and those wintering moments as well which is that time has paused for a while. Nothing's happening, and in that space, our fears can completely overwhelm us, and they so often do, but also, we can reflect and think about changes we want to make. It's a sort of very revolutionary moment with both good and bad coming in, and I think that's where loads of stuff's happening at the moment, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. And I think as women and as mothers so often, I'm sure you probably like me have had times in your life where you've thought, "Oh god, I wish this would just stop." There's just too much to do, and we have to do homework, and cook dinners, and go to music lessons, and manage our own stuff, and get our own things done, and try and make some money, and I wish it would just stop, and now it's like, "Hmm, okay. It's all stopped. What can we make of this?"

  Katherine May:

  Let's watch the more Teen Titans go.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. Some of this stuff we've been doing is just kind of getting by day to day, and I think for the first month, apart from going to work as a midwife, on my days off, I just allowed myself to just vegetate and just had no expectations of myself or my family or trying to be productive really. I just let go, and actually-

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. It did feel like pressure's off in a lot of ways, I think, and that's really unusual for me. I normally feel very like I'm supposed to be getting out there and doing this and that, and there's nothing to do. There is absolutely nothing that can be done. I was about to say it's luxurious, but it's not even that. It just is. It's just a time when we are acting, making it up as we go along, and there's something about quality of that, that I'm quite liking if that's a terrible thing to say.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I feel so conflicted because obviously this is a crisis that we wouldn't wish on ourselves or anyone in any way.

  Katherine May:

  Oh goodness, no.

  Leah Hazard:

  Having looked after women who are ill and seeing the disruption of the world in general, I wish it wasn't happening, but at the same time, I kind of really like that all I need to do in a day is maybe I can get up early and do some writing if I'm up to it. If I'm not, fine. I can spend lots of time making nice food. I can eat lots of nice food. I don't have to run my kids around to a million and one classes. And then the days when I'm at work, I go to work. I help women. I come home.

  Katherine May:

  It's simpler.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, I'm kind of liking that. And yesterday we went out and about in the sort of area where we live, and lockdown here has eased slightly, although not as much as where you are, and it was really, yeah, not quite-

  Katherine May:

  It truly has eased here, yeah, in Whitstable.

  Leah Hazard:

  Well, what was weird for me yesterday was there weren't sort of hoards of people, but there were lots of people out walking about and sort of queuing for coffees and things and lying out in the park, and kind of made me a little bit uncomfortable, and I kind of wanted to go back to how it was, and I know that's awful because that's not... The reason for why it was the way it was is not a good one.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it's terrible, but no, I know exactly what you mean, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  But I think that's why I've kind of stayed in the house all day today.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, I actually, I remember at the beginning of it, I felt really restricted and I thought, "What am I going to do without being able to go out at weekends and do this and that?" And now I think, "Well, what did we used to do at weekends?" I can't imagine what we were so busy with. I think I've quite happily jettisoned a lot of rushing around that I won't go back to now. I'm very glad to do it. Mm. So, back to you. Sorry, it's hard to have a conversation at the moment without going into pandemic talk.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, completely, completely. There, we've done it. We've nailed it now.

  Katherine May:

  I hope this will sound quaint in a year's time, and everyone will be out raving again. I don't know. I won't be, but then I never was in the first place.

  We'll be back to Remona in a minute, but I just wanted to take a short pause to tell you about a workshop I'm holding in Rockport, Maine, I know, American soil, on the 8th of August this year. I will be working with the brilliant Elissa Altman to deliver a day retreat, courtesy of Barnswallow Books, and the workshop is called On Comfort. It's a whole day to join us and explore what comfort, sustenance, and homecoming mean to you.

  So, I'll be working with the group first to explore feelings of being at home, of being comfortable and cozy, and how we can create an environment that makes us feel safe, and from which we can springboard into the work we need to do in the outside world. Elissa will be working to explore what food means, the idea of comfort food but reimagined. So, thinking about how we can truly sustain our minds and bodies through the act of cooking, preparing, and eating food which I know is such a complicated issue for so many of us. There will be a light lunch included, and at the end of the day, a lovely communal supper so we can all get together and break bread, or something else if you're gluten free. We know how it goes.

  There's a link in my bio to explore more about the workshops, but do take a look quickly because I know they're going to book up quickly. It's the only workshop I'm running on American soil this year and it's my first ever. So, if you can come, please do. I'd love to see you there. Okay, back to Remona.

  So, one of the things that comes across really strongly in your book is your engagement with the different women that you come across and meet, and their different stories and lives and hardships. How difficult is it for you to leave that behind when you come home? Does it prey on your mind, or are you able to have that separation?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it can be quite difficult. I mean, you were saying you have the fear of doing things wrong, and I think that's the fear that follows every midwife or every healthcare practitioner when they've left the hospital. There's always the nagging feeling of, oh, did I sign for that drug that I gave, or maybe I sent her to labor ward at the wrong time, or was that examination actually right, or maybe she was only two centimeters, and I thought she was eight centimeters, and I've done it all wrong, and I'm a horrible midwife. Everybody, I think, feels that way on their days off. But some women's stories obviously affect me on a deeper level, and some of those are the ones that I wrote about.

  I think there's this saying that every doctor has their own personal graveyard in their head because it's the patients they couldn't save, and I think that midwives carry a similar thing, not a graveyard, thankfully, but a little collection of women who have really touched them and made them question things, maybe we've connected with them, or maybe they've really challenged us in some way, and I definitely have that, and I definitely think of those women often. I think that's normal. I think that's healthy.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah. I think that's human, actually. I think that's not a negative thing necessarily. I think if your work didn't leave a mark on you, it wouldn't seem right somehow.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. The trick is just not letting it overwhelm you, I guess, and there certainly have been times on days off when all I can think about is something that's happened during my last shift, and it really, really niggles me, but that is just part of being an adult in the world, I guess. We all have things. We all have to encounter other people in our work generally or just in our daily lives, and we all have upsets.

  Katherine May:

  It's sad but true. Yes, we do.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it is, yeah. I mean, I don't know, maybe for me, it's fair to say at times the stakes are maybe a little bit higher, but still, we all go through that in our own way, and the trick is just not to let it rankle, and to try and work it out somehow. So, I'm still learning about that.

  Katherine May:

  But there was a point that you wrote about where the stress began to really get to you, I think.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. I mean, as I sort of went through the first few years of my career, I work in a really busy hospital. We have about six and a half thousand births a year.

  Katherine May:

  That's an incredible number, isn't it?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's a lot of babies.

  Katherine May:

  That's a lot of day, isn't it?

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's a lot of day and we don't always have the staffing levels that I would like. I think it's okay to say that. As a working midwife, quite often your own needs come way down the pecking order in terms of what has to get done that day and what can get done, and most of my career I've worked in its triage department which is very busy and fast-paced. I describe it as A&E for pregnant people so it's always changing, it's always acute which is part of what makes it interesting and exciting, but also sometimes what makes it impossible.

  So, yeah, I wrote about that sort of gradual feeling of pressure building, and I wrote about one particular night when it was a really busy shift, and the women just kept coming and coming and coming, and the hospital was full, and there were discussions about closing the hospital to new patients, and that wasn't done for one reason and another, and just became untenable, and I had what I now know, I can see it was a panic attack which probably sounds pretty boring and run of the mill to most people, but-

  Katherine May:

  They're never boring and run of the mill when you're having them though.

  Leah Hazard:

  No, they're not, and it was the first time at work that I just felt completely paralyzed, and that is deeply shameful for somebody who goes to work so she can help people and put herself last and always be competent and always be effective and efficient and safe, and I couldn't. There have been times before and since that night when I've been able to kind of pull myself back from that edge and kind of pull it together and just keep going, but I just couldn't that night, and I had to leave.

  Katherine May:

  But that's the problem with feelings when you're pushing them down. They just, at some point, will all come flooding up when you don't want them to.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, and I guess I'd probably been doing that for a while on other occasions as well, and that's why on that night, I was not in control, and I had to go home. Yeah, I mean, the only word that keeps coming into my mind when I think about that is shame which is ridiculous rationally because I know I shouldn't be ashamed and I shouldn't be embarrassed and that's just normal, and I do all kinds of this other sort of advocacy around mental health to tell other people that it's fine, but I was not in that place on that night. It took a long time for me to accept that that was okay, and actually, looking back that night probably was kind of transformative in how I treat myself and look after myself.

  And then I did something really silly and I wrote about it, and told everyone that it happened, and that kind of maybe in a way diffused it a bit because at first, when I thought about writing the book, I thought, "Right, this is just going to be a book about women's stories and midwifery in general. It's not going to be about me because that's boring and nobody wants to hear that." But then the more I started writing, the more I thought, "No, I'm actually doing my colleagues an injustice if I'm not honest about the pressures we're all under because I'm certainly not the only person ever to have had a night like that."

  Katherine May:

  And I think it's hardest for carers and people who see themselves as the person that sorts out the problem. I think it's often hardest for people like you to acknowledge when you're suffering yourself. You want to be the person that carries on solving it. That's part of your identity somehow, and it's very undermining when you have to admit you can't cope.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, absolutely, because all of a sudden, all those skills, it doesn't matter if you can make up an IV pump of a really fancy antibiotic, it doesn't matter if you can suture somebody's perineum, or catch a baby, or guide someone through a 12-hour labor. It's totally irrelevant if you are then sat frozen on a chair in the tea room, unable to even chew your dinner. I mean, that's kind of where it was. Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  But I mean, I had to learn this myself. I didn't have that one moment of crisis, but by the time I got to have my autism diagnosis when I was 39, I had been through decades of panic attacks, anxiety, dropping out of major things in life, jobs, university, I tried to drop out university, they didn't let me, damn it, but I gave it a bloody good go, missing out on all sorts of experiences. What was really transformative for me was to be able to say, finally, after all those years, I couldn't cope with what life was throwing at me, and until then, I was so resistant to being able to say that because if I was modeling myself as a neurotypical person, then there was no reason why I shouldn't be coping with it. What was wrong with me? I mean, I'd literally been to counselors where I'd had a few months of talking to them. They finally leaned over and said, "Is there an abuse story here?"

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh no. Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  They were kind of waiting to find out what the hell was wrong with me.

  Leah Hazard:

  Like the big reveal.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, because I was acting like somebody who was carrying terrible trauma that hadn't happened, and so I was kind of a mystery, but having that moment of revelation has changed a lot for me. It doesn't mean to say that I cope perfectly with everything, but I've learned to let myself off the hook, and it kind of works actually. It kind of works to say, "Do you know what? This is just more input than you can cope with at the moment, and you need to go and sit down in a quiet room and recover yourself."

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, definitely. I'm sure if you had a friend who was feeling that way or your son was feeling that way, that would be the first thing you would say.

  Katherine May:

  Yes.

  Leah Hazard:

  You would be so kind to them and you'd say, "Right, this is too much for you. Why don't you just remove yourself from this or take a break or look at it in another way?" But I think for some of us, and again, I don't know if it's a woman thing or a mother thing-

  Katherine May:

  Or an overachiever thing.

  Leah Hazard:

  Or just an overachiever perfectionist thing, yeah, or all of the above. It takes a long time to think, "Oh, right. Maybe I can actually be nice to myself in that way too." It's really difficult, and there shouldn't be any shame attached to it, but there is, I think.

  Katherine May:

  Oh yeah. I think we all kind of carry that shame of those moments where we've not managed it, but we, I hope, all don't believe that other people should carry it. So, what did you change after that? What did you learn from that moment, and what adjustments have you made to help you to not get to the point where your head's about to explode in the future?

  Leah Hazard:

  I think again, it's a process and it's still unfolding. I think I'm much quicker to recognize now when I'm starting to feel like that, and the only thing to do is slow down, and now, it's not always possible in my workplace because if there are six women in the waiting room, all needing to be seen in that moment, it's not much you can do about that. But just slowing down incrementally is very seldom a dangerous thing to do and realizing that it's okay not to see all the women at once. It's okay to ask somebody else to maybe do something for you if they have a minute.

  It's actually quite important to make sure you eat and drink something and go to the toilet, and I know these are really daft sounding things, but it would be so easy to go through a 12-hour shift and not have a break, and just try and see every single person single-handedly who comes through the door. And also, just about on days off, recognizing that, checking in and realizing maybe I'm not feeling great, maybe I'm feeling quite anxious. Really, I should force myself to go for a walk or a run, or write something, even if it's not very good.

  Katherine May:

  Well, there's a probably other source of stress now that you're a publisher writer. It's not casual anymore.

  Leah Hazard:

  God, yeah, the dreaded second album. Here it comes. Yeah, so it's just about having better self-awareness, I think, because again, if that was happening to one of my children, I could see it a mile off, and I could say, "Oh, I don't think you look right in yourself. What is going on? How are you feeling? Slow down a bit." But in myself, stupidly, it's taken 42 years to learn those cues and to acknowledge them.

  Katherine May:

  They take long time, those lessons. And yeah, I'm exactly the same as you. If I saw somebody else ready to pop, I would say, "Are you getting enough sleep? Put yourself to bed early. Have a glass of water."

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, simple things.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, eat something. They're exactly the things that we skip when we are stressed. It's fascinating. We all need a mother following us around and sort of checking in, I think, sometimes, or we have to be our own one of those, unfortunately.

  Leah Hazard:

  We do. I mean, that's a whole other podcast for another day, to be honest, about who's been mothered and in what way and how that affects how we look after ourselves. But yeah, I've had to learn a bit of that and be kind to myself in that way.

  Katherine May:

  But I feel like for you, it has led to a kind of leadership in your field, not necessarily in the technicalities of being a midwife, but in that radical vulnerability and in being able to talk about the humanity behind that uniform and that role.

  Leah Hazard:

  I guess so. I mean, I think I'm a bit of an unlikely person, or in myself, I feel like an unlikely person to be a leader in that area, but I've seen so many colleagues and students struggle with these very same things, and we're working so hard in the NHS now and at all times, that again, not recognizing these things and sort of amplifying these concerns seems like a disservice to everybody else on my team. It's not really about me, but if I can share my experience and let the world know how hard we're all working and how sometimes it affects us, then I'm glad. I think that can only be a good thing.

  Katherine May:

  Yeah, it seems really important to me. So, finally, tell me about what you're working on next in those few minutes you can grab.

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh god. Oh, okay. So, this is a world debut exclusive, almost.

  Katherine May:

  Yay. Whoa.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah. So, as we were just saying before you pressed record, when lockdown hit, I was days away from selling my next big, exciting, non-fiction project, and this was like the big one. This was like jaws of my life. This was going to be the one that was going to make it, I felt. So, without giving too much away because maybe it'll happen at some point, it would've involved a lot of research and a lot of traveling and looking at sort of birth work around the world, but the one trip I did manage to do as part of my research before this all happened was I went to Sweden and I watched a uterus transplant.

  Katherine May:

  Wow.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it was absolutely fascinating, and I was getting into this whole world of womb transplants, and what they are, and how they work, and how women feel about them, or why they might have them, and what birth might look like in the future. And unfortunately, the book that was going to be a part of it looks like it might never happen, but at the same time, when I was kind of just stating that and starting to write it up and stuff, I had an idea for a novel about two sisters, one of whom gives her uterus to the other.

  Katherine May:

  Wow, that's a fascinating premise.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, it's pretty cool, and it happens. It has happened, and when I went to watch this particular transplant in Sweden in November, it was two sisters on the table as it were, and I thought, "Wow, that is pretty cool, and also pretty messed up in a lot of ways in terms of where that could take you if it all went wrong and if you didn't maybe psychologically manage that very well." So, that started off as the premise, and now it's become this thing.

  Katherine May:

  This monster.

  Leah Hazard:

  This monster, this novel. It's about what it means to be a sister, but also to be a mother. It's about women's relationships with their bodies. It's about Scotland, strangely enough. I've found myself researching all kinds of flora of Scottish islands in 11th century monasteries and all kinds of weird stuff where I never thought it would take me, but it's great. I'm actually, when I'm not hating what I write, I'm loving it. I'm loving the process of it.

  Katherine May:

  It's a part of the process, yeah.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, so watch this space. I'm enjoying it and hoping to have it a bit less horrible in a few months time.

  Katherine May:

  Oh, well, that just sounds absolutely amazing, and I cannot wait to read it. I hope you get some good time to get on with it. [inaudible 00:45:28].

  Leah Hazard:

  Oh, thank you.

  Katherine May:

  That's really exciting.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah.

  Katherine May:

  Well, thank you for talking to me today. I am so, so delighted to actually speak to you, not in person because nothing can be in person.

  Leah Hazard:

  I know.

  Katherine May:

  I think that's the gift of this time that actually we can sidle up to each other and go, "Oh, I could Skype you. We don't have to be in the same city."

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, yeah, it's great. No, thank you so much. I know we were meant to meet in person the week that this all kicked off.

  Katherine May:

  I know.

  Leah Hazard:

  This is great. So, yeah, thank you so much for having me.

  Katherine May:

  It's really good. I'd just like to recommend your book yet again to the readers, Hard pushed, which I just love the moment I read it, and I'm sure loads and loads of other people will too, and indeed, loads and loads of people have already, and we'll look forward to your next work.

  Leah Hazard:

  Yeah, hopefully, fingers crossed. Thank you so much.

  Katherine May:

  Thanks, Leah. Bye-bye.

  The day's warming up a bit here now. The white clouds that were covering the sky this morning are gradually burning off. There's a beautiful blue sky, but I think I'll be hiding indoors again come lunchtime. Probably for the best, but you know, I'm always talking about how to embrace the rhythms of the year in the winter, and it's true of the summer too. It's maybe not so much part of our culture to talk about how difficult the summer can be, how interminable it can feel, how, although it has kind of luxury associated with it, holidays and sitting outside pubs and restaurants drinking rose, it's also a very difficult time for lots of people. I think it's a time when it feels out of place to be sad, to be grieving, to be anxious, to be depressed, to be recovering from something that's happened to us. I don't think summer and summer culture welcomes that, and so that can be really hard.

  I think for some of us, the way that there's a natural pause in the year here, because even if we're not on holiday, often the people we work with or that we know are, everything can feel very disrupted, and I don't really cope very well with that disruption. It breaks up my routines. It makes everything seem slow and complicated, and I often get really frustrated with myself because like every other human being, I have to slow down a bit in the heat. I don't get as much done, and I don't always clock why that is. I just get frustrated that my to-do list isn't going down, but these things have their natural break, and it'll come, that moment of acceptance, that moment of, ah, screw it actually. But honestly, we do have to surrender to the constant change that's happening across the year.

  I'm going to be in America for Lammas this year. Lammas is the sort of residual pagan festival that happens around about the beginning of August, the 1st of August, which in traditional culture, including in church culture, Church of England culture, it's a derivation of Loaf Mass. It's a time when we mark the beginning of the harvest. We're perhaps more familiar with the harvest festivals that we all attended at school maybe, or is that just me. I went to a country primary that marked the end of the harvest, but Lammas is the beginning of the harvest period. It's a time when the grain is ripe, a time when we think about gathering that in, before it is eaten by the mice.

  And last year I baked my first Lammas loaf which is a wheatsheaf-shaped loaf that is traditional in some parts of England this time of year. You can have a look at it on my Instagram feed. And so, this year, I'm going to bake mine early, and I'm still going to bake it because it's another lovely way to mark this turn in the year and actually to process some of the difficulties that come at this point.

  Anyway, I hope you're enjoying summer or at least surviving it wherever you are in the world. I want to say a massive thank you to Leah Hazard for the interview she gave a while ago, but for letting us rebroadcast it. Thank you to the Patreons who I've been having really interesting discussions with lately about how our community's about to change for the better, I hope. I'll let you all know about that soon. Thank you to Meghan and producer Buddy who look after this podcast so well, keep it running, and I have been working really hard on its reinvention for the next season. I'm hoping to share more with you soon. Take care, everyone. Bye.

Show Notes

While we take a rest over the summer, we’re sharing some remastered episodes from Season One, chosen by listeners.

This week, I talk to Leah Hazard, NHS midwife extraordinaire and author of Hard Pushed, part memoir of Leah’s life on the labour ward, and part exploration of the current state of the profession.

Leah is as funny, wise and warm in person as she is in print, and she talks about the life-changing decision to leave her TV career and train to be a midwife, and the moment when the stress became too much during one very busy night on the ward.

References from this episode:

• Leah’s Twitter

• Leah’s Instagram

• Leah’s book Hard Pushed

Other episodes you might enjoy:

• Season 2: Michele Harper on the calling to work in ER

• Season 3: Meghan O' Rourke on the invisible kingdom of chronic illness

Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!

To keep up to date with The Wintering Sessions, follow Katherine on Twitter, Instagram and Substack

For information on Katherine’s online writing courses, including her programme Wintering for Writers, visit True Stories Writing School

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Wintering is out now in the UK, and the US.