Another Mother is a podcast on faith and motherhood from My Spring Harvest and Emma Borquaye. Subscribe to hear conversations full of practical wisdom to help you on your journey of raising little ones, the way that God intended - with all the joy!

For each episode of Another Mother, Emma has pulled together some helpful resources that run alongside her conversations. They will help us explore the themes from the podcast more, whilst seeing what has inspired Emma and her guests.

Resources: Episode 1

In the first episode of Another Mother I sat down with my husband Isaac (also known as Guvna B) and chatted all things family life. We covered a lot of ground, including the birthing pool experience, navigating our differences, and we want to talk to our children about the ones we have loved and lost.

Good Grief

Isaac’s dad, Charles, passed away around 18 months before Ezra was born. In the early stages I had no idea how to support someone facing such a sudden loss so I read quite a lot of books to try and gain some helpful insight. One of the books was ‘Good Grief’ by Granger E Westburg- I highly recommend it! I read that often when someone is grieving, there is a fear that this person they loved so much will be forgotten, which is why sharing happy memories of a person that has positively impacted our lives can be such a helpful part of the grieving process, yet it’s something we shy away from either as the person grieving because you don’t want to impact the general mood, or as the friend supporting because you worry you might make something worse. I took this advice on board so from pretty early on we were intentional about talking openly about all the lovely things we remember about Charles, whether that was watching F1 and saying ‘ah my Dad would love this!’ or ‘remember that day we were playing articulate with all the family and it was your dad’s turn to do the describing and he was doing it so slowly and we couldn’t stop laughing!’

Where Grandad Lives

However when I fell pregnant with Ezra, I knew that this new season would bring up different challenges for Isaac as we welcomed a brand new life into this world who would have never had the opportunity to meet Charles and make memories of his own. So, I decided I would write a book that we could read to Ezra, that had all our favourite happy stories in it so that Ezra would grow up with a sense of knowing the man his Grandad was and how his legacy and impact could continue to live on through us all. 

Life quickly got in the way and the book didn’t get written, but I eventually told Isaac about the idea and as the ‘make it happen’ kind of guy he is, within minutes he had planned how we could turn this in to a children’s book that doesn’t just help our family to keep the memory of his dad alive, but to help families everywhere have those beautiful, healing, conversations with their children as they share memories of those they have loved and lost.

This is when ‘Where Grandad Lives’ was born! We based the characters on Ezra and his friend Zadie, and the story goes on a little journey that starts with Ezra sharing that his Grandad lives somewhere really special. His friend Zadie is sure she knows where - but when all her ideas of special places are exhausted - she has to ask Ezra to show her... And Ezra shares what it's like when someone you love lives in the good, the bad and the hard to explain.

Our prayer is that this book will be as much of a helpful tool for families navigating grief and loss as it has been for us.

Where Grandad Lives is due to be released on June 8th 2023 and is available on the Spring Harvest store to pre-order now!