I have been familiar with Veronika Robinson’s motherly handiwork for quite some time.  She is a vivacious wife to Paul and mama to Bethany (13) and Eliza (11), based in Cumbria, UK.  However, her integrity and loving commitment to raising children surpasses any of her other worldly achievements. Veronika has even been labelled as an “Extraordinary Breastfeeder” in the UK.  She is author of several books including The Drinks Are On Me : Everything your mother never told you about breastfeeding, which is a superb read. But I think Veronika is most popular for her international-selling magazine The Mother, the ethos of which is one of supporting a holistic attachment parenting style (fertility awareness, conscious conception, peaceful pregnancy, ecstatic birthing, natural immunity and more!). Without further adieux I introduce you to Veronika Robinson ~ Über Mama.

Veronika, briefly how did you come to embrace your Earth-loving lifestyle?

As a toddler, I could be found playing among the plants in our garden. We lived at the edge of a city in the suburbs, and my older siblings would take me to a place called Dead Horse creek (awful name, beautiful place), and we’d spend hours jumping from the trees into the pond. Our garden had a large passion fruit vine and I would literally spend hours sitting there, breaking each fruit open with my teeth, and sucking the seeds out.

At six, my parents moved us to a 700 hundred acre property (on the Darling Downs, Queensland, Australia), and my love affair with Mother Earth became my life. I was always up trees, riding horses high into the  mountains and camping overnight, swimming in creeks, picking fruits and herbs from our huge garden, sucking the end of honeysuckle flowers. My mother’s love of the Earth was pivotal in shaping me. She spent every day outside ~ easy to do in sunny Australia! ~ nurturing our garden. She fed us foods she’d grown, tended any ailments naturally, and never took us to doctors.

Becoming a parent meant drawing upon a lifetime of Earth wisdom passed to me from my mother. I’m always learning, and have so much more I’d like to learn, but on a day to day basis, being able to get outside and just ‘be’ with my plants, soil and the visiting wildlife is sustenance to my soul.

In your book you mention that you eat a plant-based diet, but don’t say whether your two beautiful girls and hunky hub go along the same approach. Can you elaborate on this? How long have you nourished yourself / family in this manner? How easy/difficult have you found it?

Yes, they do. Just before I met my husband, I’d drawn up a long list of what Mr Right would be like, and near the top of the list was ‘vegetarian’. You can imagine how thrilled I was when I discovered he didn’t eat animals. Over the years I’ve alternated between being vegan and having the odd egg or cheese, and although I was vegan for my pregnancy with Bethany, the second the sperm and egg collided at Eliza’s conception, I couldn’t eat enough eggs and cheese.

We’re all vegan. There’s no difficulty in eating this way at home, but when we go travelling it requires a lot of forethought, in either looking for places online before we leave or taking plenty of our own food. We love to make food in this house, and eating out is increasingly becoming a disappointment.

Nutritional supplements tend to be in hot debate in the health field. Which do you and your family use – if any?

No doubt it’s hotly debated because it raises the issue of the awfully unnatural lives we lead, and beggars the question: why don’t you attend to the root, rather than the symptom?

We start our day (breakfast) with a smoothie made from E3 Renew Me. It’s ridiculously expensive, and I always breathe deeply when I buy it, but it’s both a short and long term investment in my family’s health. I’m constantly disappointed by the quality of fruit and veg in this country. We’ve a great organic fruit and vegetable farmers’ market in our local town, but even there I find myself not buying things because I doubt they’ll ripen fully. When you’ve been raised in the sub-tropics and actually know what ripe fruit tastes like, it’s instinctual to decline certain fruits in the UK. I don’t know why, but I’m still shocked that the English can think a rock hard green mango is ripe! No, a ripe mango is yellow/orange, can be smelt from several paces away, and is so lush and juicy that the only place you can eat it is naked in the bathtub. Anything that doesn’t involve such measures is not ripe. Unfortunately, mangoes are my favourite food in the world ~ and a pleasure I rarely have.

Who inspired your plant-based diet?

I chose to become vegetarian when I was five. One morning I woke up and declared that I was no longer going to eat animals.
Although we had cooked food growing up, my mum squeezed us a fresh orange juice every morning, and we always came home from school to a large plate of salad.

Who do you especially admire in the gastronomic realm?

Sadly, very few, including the raw food world, as some of them really don’t walk the talk. They tell their admiring public one thing, and live lives that are at odds with that information. I do, however, feel that Gabriel Cousins (author of Conscious Eating) is authentic and always enjoy his writings.

What does your family eat on a typical day?

There’s no typical day, and it depends on the day of week. The further away it is from Tuesday (fruit and veg market day) the fewer greens there are, for example, though I plan to have plenty in the garden from June to October. I really dislike buying fruit and veg from a supermarket, even the organic ones ~ laden in plastic.

This morning we started the day with blueberries and strawberries, and had our breakfast smoothie (algae) for morning tea instead. At lunch the family had a plate of various dark leafy greens, grated carrot, yellow pepper, tomato, cucumber, grated broccoli and alfalfa sprouts. I had a juice with greens, ginger, carrot, apple and pear.

I’ve got my eye on a lovely ripe avocado, which I’ll include in tonight’s salad, and we’ll have grilled aubergine to accompany it.

No pun intended, but how do you nurse your spirit and keep motivated? What spiritual disciplines do you practice – if any?

There’s no typical day, and like life, disciplines and practices change.
I start the day with about half an hour’s quiet, contemplative time. This morning I wrote Morning Pages (3 foolscap pages based on the Artist’s Way to unleash one’s creativity), I went for a brisk one hour walk with the family, did 70 minutes of Yin yoga, and had a vegetable juice for lunch to give my digestive tract a bit of space. During the rest of the day, I’ve got to find the time and space to do a full-time job (editing The Mother magazine ~ answering emails is a full-time job in itself!), there are home educated children to nurture, a husband to smile at from time to time, and I’d like to visit a friend up the road. She has two toddlers and I know how very long the day can seem when you’re ‘home alone’ with children. In the evening, I will most definitely read a book to keep me inspired, such as Romancing the Ordinary.

My family and I have fortnightly chiropractic. This is to keep the nervous system open and responsive.

Music is one of the greatest foods for my soul, as well as solitude.

I love to learn more about others and myself through the Enneagram and psychological astrology. It’s made an extraordinary difference to how I see others. Rather than putting people into a box, it allows us to step out of the boxes we create for ourselves: in short, to take responsibility for how we act.
As a child, I practised yoga with my mother, and again when I was pregnant. It’s a recent addition to my life, and I regret not having kept it up after my pregnancy. I was ‘forced’ into yoga because my body increasingly ‘yelled’ at me to do something to compensate for all the computer hours I’m required to do for my job. Day after day I’d come to the computer chair and my body said ‘no’. I’ve ignored this for so long, and ended up in excruciating pain for most of the past seven years.

The beautiful side-effect of yoga is that although the benefits to my back are immeasurable, it’s also brought a deep calmness to me and in the way I see things. Every mother deserves this in her life, especially when her children are young.

How would you best describe your life philosophy?

Live simply, so that others may simply live.

Veronika, you whole-heartedly embody attachment parenting. What are your thoughts on the disconnected parenting that has become so prevalent in our Western society?

It breaks my heart. Every time I go to town and hear a baby crying, or see a toddler being slapped or bullied by a parent, I die inside. The vast majority of people have no concept that the way we parent our children is the foundation of the society we live in. If you don’t have the time to love, cherish, nurture and meet the biological needs of your children, then you should leave population growth to someone else. It may sound black and white, but the bottom line is: disconnected parenting is EVERYONE’S problem. We all pay the price for such abuse and neglect.

The trouble is, in such an emotionally backward country like Britain, you can leave your baby in a pram or car seat all day with a dummy in the mouth, and topped up with formula milk and no one says a word. Put the focus on a woman who naturally nurtures her child with full-term breastfeeding, and the whole country cries ‘paedophile!!’ How we begin to put back the pieces to creating whole, happy human beings happens one baby at a time, one mother at a time. It’s like starting to build humanity all over again ~ dismantling prejudices and ignorance.

What are your feelings / thoughts on dummy/pacifier use?

Agggh. Do I really have to answer that? They’re called dummies for a reason. They ‘dummify’ us. It’s not just the baby who has to ‘shut up’ (AND CLOSE DOWN) ~ it’s also the mother.

There’s an amazing circuit of energy that disintegrates between mother and child when we start using artificial substitutes.

Dummies take 750 years to decompose. If a mother isn’t moved by the impact of that on this Earth, she’s pretty unlikely to be connected to her baby either. Cultures which hold the mother and child bond as sacred, also hold the Earth as sacred.

Sometimes even breastfeeding mothers will say that their child needed a dummy because s/he wanted to ‘suck all day’. Yeah, that’s what little babies do! I find that the more connected a mother is to her baby (i.e. emotionally and physically present), the less likely babe will want to suckle all the time (unless the baby is teething, in which case they’ll seek out this natural analgaesic). Babies have their own ways of seeking attachment, and learning to surrender to the art of conscious mothering makes the job a whole lot easier.

How would you best describe the link between breastfeeding and sexuality?

Cor, the last time I attempted to answer something like this I was shot down in flames. People don’t want to hear that breastfeeding is linked to sexuality, because they think it means ‘sex’ and that you want to have sex with your baby/child or partner.

We are sexual beings, from top to toe. There’s no denying it, though most people sabotage, abuse or denigrate it in all sorts of ways. We have a ‘creative energy’ into something with evil, deadly or dangerous dimensions.
Breastfeeding is designed to be pleasurable ~ for mum and baby. That it’s not for so many women is a good indication of how warped we are, culturally, when it comes to body pleasure.

Michel Odent’s book The Functions of Orgasms is vital reading. He thoroughly explains the ‘orgasm’ of breastfeeding ~ the beautiful, biological ability to experience climactic transcendence due to the hormonal surges of breastfeeding. These words, powerful and true as they are, are unlikely to fall on listening ears for many years.

What words of wisdom you would share with moms who are going raw and raising families in the area of breastfeeding and attachment parenting?

Always listen to your own instincts. They’re there, they’re powerful, and they’ll always guide you if you get your ego out of the way, and blank out our culture’s messages.

In terms of how much raw food you bring into your life, remember it’s not a religion and it’s certainly not a competition. Some of the biggest names in the raw food world are not ‘all raw’ behind the scenes, either in their own diet or what they feed their children, so don’t use them as your yard stick.
Always make your decisions on what feels right for you and your family, and never because of what someone else might think.

We’re all human, and there are times when our hunger goes way beyond food and into old, old emotional wounds. These are the times we seek out less than nourishing products and habits. Nurture yourself lovingly through these times. This can be especially true as a parent, because our children bring up all our childhood wounds for healing.

Beware of gurus, especially those within the attachment parenting field, e.g. proponents of Aware Parenting, who espouse controlled crying but within a mother’s arms. This is biologically wrong and very harmful to the baby.

Any recipes or food tips you can share with us?

I love salads, and shy away from raw foods that are sitting in dehydrators for days on end ~ which have me drinking water for Britain ~ or require industrial strength food processors. I love leafy green salads, and like to play with them by adding something unexpected, like strawberries or borage flowers. Often when we have visitors, even if there’s cooked food on offer, they’ll always comment on the salads, probably because most people think of iceberg and cucumber.

We had a potluck last night at a friend’s house, and the salad contained lots of rocket, baby pak choi, red bartlett pear, strawberry, and sunflower seeds.
I love variety and different textures, such as thinly sliced cucumber, lemon juice, fresh spearmint leaves and a sprinkle of sesame seeds or grated carrot, sultanas, sprouted chickpeas, and a dash of pineapple juice.

Lastly, what new projects are in the pipeline that you would like to share with us?

I’m working on a few books at the moment. One is our home educating journey as a family, particularly the aspect of autonomy and freedom in learning. Another book is on natural weaning (child-led weaning and biological expectations) and the third is on the spirituality of breastfeeding. There are some other books I’m plodding along on, such as holistic menstruation, natural remedies and living with the continuum-concept in the modern world. Now, where was that 48 hour day?

Veronika, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to get candid on topics that are so important to us as mothers.

For more information or to keep up with this hardworking Mama’s luscious  work visit: www.veronikarobinson.com or www.themothermagazine.co.uk