9 Months, My Arse:

9 Months, My Arse (and the ‘Arse’ that is Adult-Adolescence – a Product of Chaos) talks about how ‘chaos’ (moments in your life that utterly rattle your normality – in my case, having, and losing, an extreme-premature baby) often leads to ‘adult-adolescence’ – a significant change in your adult-self. With this in mind, I open up about how I felt, handled, and bounced-back after everything my partner and I went through in our chaos. In its current rendition, the structure of the book is as follows:

1.  Introduction – a brief introduction to the two concepts, ‘chaos’ and ‘adult-adolescence’.
2. Welcome to Oxfordshire! (The place that will make you, break you, and leave you to make yourself once more) – a 20K story retelling the events surrounding our extreme-premature son. It starts with the night before his birth, primarily focusing on the eight days we spent in the unit, and concludes with (or near to) our present day.
3. Rising from the Chaos: Made, Broken and Left to be Made Once More – a 40K word section where I explain all the factors that went into our grief, recovery, and new normality that followed. Some of the chapters in this section include the likes of: Circles, where I talk about how I visualised my partner and I as the ‘bullseye’, and the different members of our ‘bubbles of origin’ as the circles around us; Channelling Chaos and Change, where I explain how we channelled our thoughts, feelings, and memories into activities and creations (such as writing, crafting, or reading) and how channelling can suit anyone going through chaos and adult-adolescence; and The Idea and the Reality, where I discuss how we were mourning two different things – the reality of who our extreme-premature son was, and the idea of he we had thought he might become.