Mothers Uncovered is all about women reconnecting with the self behind the mother. It's a mum group, more than a mum and baby group. Such things are rare - women, and especially mothers, repeatedly say something along the lines of, 'the baby's fine, I'm not really, but no, I mustn't say that, yes, everything's all fine…' They are experts in self-neglect and yes, this does have a detrimental effect on the baby and everyone else around them.

There is a desperate need for an environment where they can share the brave new world they are in. That's why PND groups don't always fit the bill. By and large, these women have 'new motherhood', not PND and people don't want to feel they are being scrutinised and monitored, with notes being kept about them on medical files.

I have written variations on this theme for the last few years and wanted this opinion to be put out there. I know some people will dismiss it as middle class mothers moaning, but it's not, it's a cross-class problem and is more about how women are regarded full stop, which is an extremely hot topic (various debates raging about Page 3, online abuse, Everyday Sexism et al). Nor is it moaning. These women don't want to be labelled as depressed - they want to share the highs as well as the lows. One of my new facilitators Charlotte, works for Comment is Free and we approached The Guardian about using a piece. We had to wait for a suitable news item and one presented itself in the shape of the NHS providing inadequate mental healthcare for mothers. I don't want to denigrate the NHS, I think they generally do a fantastic job, but they can't be all things to all people and a different approach might be called for.

I had a meeting recently with health visitors, some of whom clearly felt more comfortable once they had pigeonholed Mothers Uncovered as a 'creative group', therefore probably a bit hippyish and insubstantial. Yes, there's an arts element to what we do, but arts therapy is an extremely well established and respected tradition across a wide range of of spheres. What we really offer is peer support and community building. Cameron yarps on about the Big Society, but this is hollow and insubstantial. Our poor NHS is being dismantled along with our education system. It breaks my heart that a few suits in Westminster can have such a detrimental effect on the rest of the country but they do. It's time for us all to stand up for what we want and deserve.

Read the full Guardian article here...

So, Christmas is a-coming and aren’t we all excited..?! Or do you perhaps feel a little sense of ennui that half the supermarket has been submerged under tinsel and collection boxes of chocolate when there’s still six weeks to go?

It seems to me that mums have the roughest time, because all of the expectation and planning falls on their shoulders. If you don’t think that’s true, ask yourself this? Who will be sending the Christmas cards to your husband/partner’s family…? Come on, be honest, it’s probably you, isn’t it? Because you know that they will send cards to your house and if you naively assume your fella will pull his finger out to send one in return, it won’t get done and there’ll be pursed lips from Great Aunt Ethel about the ingratitude. The same applies to presents for all the extended family, the arrangements over the festive period, the entire food and drink shop and everything else besides. Not to mention all the paraphernalia the kids will need.

Last year Asda cottoned on to the fact that mothers undertook this mammoth task every year. Their blurb read – ‘we know that there’s a mum working hard to make it magical for the whole family – that’s the theme of our latest TV ad.’ The advert featured our pretty blonde heroine, sometimes dishevelled, but always cute and winsome, as she heroically battled on through all the tasks. The tree won’t fit in the car – how amusing; the lights for the tree are all tangled – bust a gut; there’s only a pouffe for her to sit on at the Christmas table – stop now, it’s really hurting. But she doesn’t mind, you see. When she sallies forth to the living room at the end, where all the family are spread-eagled, groaning with food and her husband calls out, ‘What’s for tea, love?’ (ho, ho, ho!); she smiles because all her hard work has paid off. They’re completely ignoring her and are glued to the telly.

‘Behind every great Christmas there’s mum,’ intones the male voiceover, ‘and behind every mum there’s Asda’. Their website eagerly assures us this ad struck a chord with lots of mums who said it’s just like that. Really? Had they all been driven to drink and valium by this stage?

Do you know what I’d like to have seen happen? Halfway through this nauseating tosh Santa Claus comes crashing in. In my imagination, this will be George Clooney, but you can picture whoever you want. He’ll sweep Mum up under his arm (her apron will fall off at this point to reveal a sparkly dress). She’ll announce, ‘Stuff the lot of you (especially you, Great Aunt Ethel), I’m going to enjoy myself…..’ and off they’ll go on his sledge, necking champagne and wolfing caviar.

If this sounds like I whoop things up for the entire fortnight that Christmas now is, you couldn’t be more wrong. I’m just as bad as all the other mums, including our heroine, in doing way more than my fair share. But I’m telling myself, and all of you, to take a bit of time for you. A lot of the stuff is not necessary. Have a long bath, go out to the pictures, read in bed while eating all the choccies. The world won’t fall apart and you’ll be able to resume duties with a lighter heart. Have a truly lovely Christmas.

 In the last eight months I've read three diatribes about mothers. They have all come from childless women in their forties. Emma Kennedy self-congratulatory piece portrayed mothers as deluded and insensitive. Then 'I'm Not a Mother, but I'm Still a Person' – gentler in tone, but implying no mother was capable of showing interest in anything except motherhood/children. And now Lynch's demolition job 'Mothers, stop moaning!' Between them they assume all mothers are vacuous, ungrateful and self-obsessed.

'I don't want to mum-bash', claims Bibi Lynch. Why then, open your article with two stories about mothers who anyone, even other mums, would find ridiculous...? That of the 'devastated' about-to-be-mother of three boys and how tired Victoria Beckham is, despite her undoubted fleet of staff and luxurious lifestyle.

She then slips in a sideswipe at 'Mumsnet Towers', assuming all women who have procreated worship at its feet. If moaning mothers annoy you, why look at Mumsnet? It's like saying you hate origami and getting all aerated because Peter from Swanage can't fold the perfect swan on origami.co.uk.

Lynch claims she knows how horrendous post-natal depression is, or illness as it is technically termed. Depression is depression, yes, but does she know that according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), more than ten per cent of maternal deaths - that's deaths within one year of giving birth - are caused by suicide? And often particularly grisly suicides at that, the women wanting to punish themselves in the worst way possible for leaving their child motherless.

Mothers are treated as superior citizens, she says. As anyone who has battled with a baby in a busy place will tell you, this is not always the case. People tend to look the other way and tut when a noisy baby and harassed mother cross their path. She was asked to get off a bus for a mother with a pram. Yes, that's not fair. Perhaps the woman might have been someone like me, who had cried every day since giving birth four months earlier and was in desperate search of a group that recognised I was still a person behind the mother. I had to get two buses to this group with a new pram (the inherited one had collapsed) which I hadn't, in my agitated state, learned how to deal with. The crowded bus watched as I tried to fold it with one arm, the other holding the baby, before admitting defeat and leaving the bus. Half an hour's walk later, upset and very late for the group, I phoned my partner on the second bus, and didn't put the phone away properly. It was stolen. I didn't make it to the group.

In the majority of cases, depression in new mothers does decrease and of course, they have the immense gift of that baby, but to suggest that they should have no further sadness, anger or boredom in their lives, just because they are mothers, is preposterous. I run a creative support network in Brighton called Mothers Uncovered. The women that participate are bursting with love and gratitude, but they are also struggling to find their way as mothers. And before you say it, they are not pampered middle class brats. They come from all walks of life.

Lynch dwells romantically on how mothers and their offspring belong to each other. This is a wonderful thing, but the very many cases of estrangements within families belies this as a universal truth. Or what about the mothers of murderers, of rapists, or the case of the boy in the news this week who killed his mother with a hammer? Were they glad they were mothers?

'I will never be loved as you're loved', she mourns. Well, let this 'moaning' mother tell you: one of the bittersweet truths you come to realise is that your love for your child is greater than they will ever have for you. While your child is still young, it is reciprocated in equal measure. But the child must grow, move away from the nest, fall in love with others, perhaps have a child of their own. If they do, they will feel for that child what you felt for them. There may be a renewed closeness when that point is reached, but the intensity of motherly love is a one-way street.

On the perennially explosive topic that is breastfeeding, it seems you have to declare your own experience at the outset, so that, like with much else in life, people can pigeonhole you. I'll oblige, although I don't really agree – I've had two children. Both times breastfeeding was difficult at the outset, especially the first time. I was handed a bottle of formula in the hospital because 'baby might get jaundice'. With some persistence I managed to breastfeed, although my first always had a little bottle of formula most days: I'd not been able to shake the idea that my milk was 'not enough'.

I do think that most women, given the right amount of time and care, would be able to breastfeed for the first six months (beyond that I don't think is an area worth expending huge amounts of energy on) and this is the most desirable outcome. I was always struck by the analogy of the Martian looking down to Earth, being puzzled by seeing a new mother's breasts fill with milk who then gave the child a different form of sustenance.

This article is not to sing breastfeeding women's praises however, nor an indictment that all women should breastfeed. For those that can't or won't that's fine. I am more interested in the reactions and opinions that surround the issue.

The three main reasons espoused by the breastfeeding lobby are health, convenience and cost. The first is definitely a grey area, with evidence emerging regularly to prove or disprove theories regarding health benefits for mother and/or child and recently possible toxins in breastmilk absorbed from our environment (The Guardian 23/6/2012). I'm a bottle fed baby (my mother having been given no support) and I turned out just dandy. The other two reasons are hard to argue with. Yes, if you're bottle feeding someone else can do it for you, freeing you up to go out, but seriously, it's six months out of your life. It may seem an eternity while you're in it, but it's not really. The third speaks for itself really.

What intrigues me is the furore that is constant around the whole issue. Bottle-feeding mothers assume that they are being looked down upon by breast-feeding ones. Some feel guilty, others are defiant. Generally the breast-feeding mothers I've met are not judging, they're just getting on with their lives, hoping their cracked nipples will recover and their thrush doesn't worsen into mastitis. Sadly I think this is yet another example where women are pitted against each other, by themselves, the media and society in general. This is intensely personal because it involves their bodies and it is an oft-observed fact that women's attention to their appearance is more for the benefit of other women than attracting men, who are usually much more forgiving.

Very few articles I see on this subject acknowledge the fact that the increased sexualisation of women's bodies over the years has played a part in the attitudes to breastfeeding. We have a strange dichotomy on our hands. Many feel uncomfortable over women breastfeeding in public, yet we still have the daily sexy tits shot in a tabloid. A recent article by Zoe Williams discussed many of the issues around breastfeeding, but not that.

It also touched lightly on the even more thorny subject of class:

'The assumption tends to be that the kind of people who breastfeed anyway and eat organic have no need of advice, while the people to whom advice is dispensed are essentially counselled to act more like the middle classes.'

This was picked up someone commenting on the article. As a Spaniard, she doesn't realise that mentioning 'class' outright is for the English (not so much for the rest of the UK, I think) on a par with buggering the bursar.

'In this country, we have managed to turn breastfeeding into a class issue. As a Spaniard living in the UK for 24 years, it never ceases to amaze me how we again and again turn the most innocuous subjects into class definers.' Waybuloo, Comments

She goes on to say that she wishes she hadn't breastfed because 'I can't bear to be thought of as in the same camp as those breastfeeding nazis farting on and on.'

Again, a little harsh but it raises the uncomfortable fact that breastfeeding is a class issue. Generally those that breastfeed are middle class. Why is this? Is it as simple as the fact that they are raised or live in households where the daily newspaper doesn't display women's breasts? A daily dose of titillating tits would surely make most young girls believe that breasts not used in a sexual sense but as a food source is somehow disgusting and dirty?

Women can often be their own worst enemies and this topic is no exception. Claire Jones-Hughes organised a flashmob (literally) after her upsetting treatment at the hands of some narrow-minded bullies who were upset by her feeding her young baby in a café. This attracted a fair amount of media attention, especially as it was in Brighton, where we feed our babies until they're 56. As a supporter of Claire, I posted a link to the story on my Facebook page. An acquaintance of mine wrote: 'How disgusting. I would have gagged into my latte to see her feeding in public. Don't judge me, I have brought up three lovely bottle-fed children.'

Don't judge me?! When she herself was judging? I removed the remark from my page.

Feeling the battle is far from won, Claire is organising another event – a picnic - for mothers, families and supporters. Having received some flak for the first event from those claiming it was sensationalist and no doubt criticism for daring to speak out in public at all, this event is a bit different. She has described it thus:

'No one is excluded, no matter how you fed your baby, come and show solidarity with breastfeeding mothers. I'm extremely tired of certain media publications using the issue to sell papers and dividing the public in general. How we will ever hope to educate future generations of the benefits of breastfeeding if the debate is trivialised and sensationalised?'

How indeed? The debate will rumble on for many decades, I suspect.