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This week an article appeared on the BBC website concerning international singer -songwriter Paloma Faith. In the piece, she's talking not so much about her music but about being pregnant and the difficulties and anxiety she'd experienced with her first pregnancy. Those feelings were something she had kept quiet about. This time she doesn’t intent to do the same!
Faith had her first child in 2016 and explained "I was expecting it to be this glorious thing, becoming a mother," says the singer. "It didn't even come into my mind that there would be any risk."
However, her reality was very different. A premature rupture of her womb membrane meant that her child was born three weeks early by an emergency caesarean section. Whilst her daughter was fine, Faith suffered physically with infections and mentally with post -partum depression. She decided to "shield her new born child from the media", declining to announce its name or gender and refusing to post family photographs online. It was a strategy that backfired as the tabloids then ran stories saying Faith was raising her child to be gender-neutral, whilst the singer found herself stalked by paparazzi on the way to the playground.”
This time round she has decided to take the anxiety away and to be more public with this pregnancy. She has shown many photos of her bump on Instagram, she explains the reasoning for this decision
"It's going to be obvious that I'm pregnant - and I should really own it, rather than it be something that's owned by a media that doesn't necessarily have my best interests at heart."
She's not alone in wanting to keep her child away from medias attention Rapper Iggy Azalea announced on Instagram back in June that she was already a mum and had given birth to a boy. She explained that she wanted to "keep his life private but wanted to make it clear he is not a secret." Again, All Saints singer Nicole Appleton kept her pregnancy hidden for 9 months until she announced she had a little girl on Instagram back in March.
It is fantastic to see Paloma’s positivity especially with all the difficulties she had faced previously. Pregnancy and being a mother has always been considered to be a big barrier for women in the music industry. This is why it is so lovely and inspirational to see her sharing her story the difficulties and the positives of being a mother.