The Small Picture Podcasts

Your one-stop survival guide to staying sane during pregnancy

Includes:
• Everything you need to know to stay of the doldrums while up the duff
• Tried-and-tested labour tips to help you blitz birth
• All the stuff those deadly serious, anatomical guides to pregnancy leave out

For many women, the emotional aspects of pregnancy are far more taxing than the physical ones. There’s no shortage of studies into the health of the foetus and the physical state of its incubator. But how women FEEL during pregnancy is largely ignored. It’s just pregnancy, right? They’ll cope. Unfortunately, not everyone does.

This wise and very funny book is the result of hundreds of interviews with sympathetic professionals and pregnant chicks generous enough to reveal how they stayed sunny-side up despite spending nine months in tracky daks the size of North Korea. It is the essential survival guide to staying sane during pregnancy — a time when complete strangers think it’s OK to grope your groin, when it’s tempting to eat not just for two but for three or four, and when even the most ginormous underpants fit better back-to-front.

Emma says: “I decided to write Attack of the 50-Foot Hormones because so few of the books I bought on the subject took the emotional issues associated with pregnancy seriously: issues such as fear of labour, body image obsessions, antenatal depression, relationship problems, work worries, freak outs about impending parenthood, oh, and did I happen to mention fear of labour? As the sort of person who hates feeling like a victim, my difficulty in dealing with the emotional fallout of fertilisation drove me nuts — especially since I was all over the physical factors. I knew, for instance, that possible cures for pregnancy heartburn included chewing almonds, scoffing tahini and cow-like grazing. Yet I was completely lost when it came to managing pregnancy panic attacks — those terrifying tidal waves that rolled in every time complete strangers reveled in telling me horror stories about stillbirths, perforated private parts and never having sex, money or sleep ever again. That's when I started researching."

Attack of the 50-foot Hormones also includes Emma Tom’s hilarious pregnancy diary which reveals what happened after the former motorbike-riding rock chick was unexpectedly diagnosed with an SLF (which turned out to be ridiculous medical jargon for a Single Live Foetus).

Emma Tom is an award-winning Sydney writer and broadcaster. Her column appears in The Australian newspaper each Thursday and she freelances widely for magazines and newspapers both in Australia and overseas. She has written six books including a novel, Deadset, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Asia and the South Pacific for Best First Novel in 1997. In her spare time, Emma tutors and lectures at assorted Sydney universities and is inching her way through a PhD at the University of New South Wales. She lives in Sydney with her partner and daughter who is now twoandfourmonths (that's how she says it).

Emma's an extremely witty and clever person to talk to, and I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did!