Bed bugs which are tiny insects from the genus climex can be found in any household as they can be transferred through clothes, luggage or even public transport. They feed on human blood mostly at night. Their bites can result in a number of health impacts including [skin rashes](https://nabtahealth.com/articles/getting-started-with-nabta-health-your-101-guide-to-skin-and-hair/), psychological effects and [allergic symptoms](https://nabtahealth.com/articles/healthy-eating-for-your-milk-allergic-child/) that can range from mild to serious. A scenario that is replicated in various households grappling with this problem. #### **The health impact of bed bugs** Bed bug bites cause hives and blisters, accompanied by mild to severe itching and burning on the affected area of the skin. A great source of distress and discomfort. Being primarily nocturnal, their bites can cause loss of sleep, fatigue and anxiety. Directly impacting an individual’s productivity, mental state and social life in the long run. Staying awake and concentrating on tasks becomes an uphill task especially for children who come from these households. Scenarios involving people isolating from family and friends due to embarrassment and mental anguish associated with having bed bugs in their homes are common psychosocial effects following bed bug infestation. While they are not known to cause any serious illnesses, secondary [skin infections](https://nabtahealth.com/articles/fungal-infections-in-infants/) may occur largely as a result of scratching the bites and introducing germs to the wound. But with proper monitoring, this can be avoided. Other people have reported varied levels of allergic reactions which can also be handled with proper medical attention. Constant spraying of affected areas with pesticides or incorrect use of pesticides in a bid to get rid of the bed bugs can also pose a potential health risk to the people around. And it’s recommended that proper guidelines be adhered to when exterminating these insects. #### **How AKI is trying to help** Angamiza Kunguni Initiative (AKI) is a female led Non-Profit Organization (NPO) that deals with eradication of bed bugs among the under privileged members of the society. I am the founder and I was inspired to start this project after experiencing first hand the effects of bed bug infestation while studying at the University. These included sleepless nights, allergic skin reactions and poor grades during examinations. With lack of proper information or access to the right pesticides, I strived to find lasting solutions to this menace. So far, AKI has worked with a number of households in which they have carried out fumigation using environmentally friendly pesticides and successfully combated the issue. Stigma is also an issue that arises as bedbug infestation is associated with certain levels of poverty or poor hygiene. A notion that AKI seeks to demystify. In 2019, AKI was nominated for the Zuri awards “Young achiever of the year”. Currently the demand for the services of AKI has far exceeded available resources. For us, the journey has just begun and we are excited about the possibility of reaching more households countrywide. #### **About Winnie** My name is Winnie Mwangi. I am passionate about charity and giving back to the community. Moved by the plight of less privileged members of the society who have been affected by bedbugs, I founded AKI 5years ago. My main aim is seeing a bed bug free society and children scoring better grades in school. A dream I’m hopeful will become a reality someday. ##### How I met Nabta’s CEO Sophie: I signed up as a mentee for the [Cherie Blair Foundation](https://cherieblairfoundation.org/) having done research on foundations that support women in business especially in Africa. I was matched with Sophie in 2019 and she guided me on how to run the Initiative. In March 2020, I was declared redundant at my place of work due to the [Covid-19](https://nabtahealth.com/covid-19-questions-and-answers/) pandemic. I talked to Sophie about my situation and she suggested I join Nabta Health as an intern. I’m currently the head of Nabta Health local presence here in Kenya and I remain grateful to Sophie for all the support, favours and guiding me on the right path. #### **A word from Nabta’s CEO Sophie Smith** I signed up as a mentor for the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women after speaking to Cherie Blair about Nabta and learning about the work she was doing to support women in emerging markets. Winnie and I were matched as mentee/mentor in 2019. Initially, I was advising Winnie on her NPO, the Angamiza Kunguni Initiative (AKI), which was focused on eradicating bed bugs in Kenyan households. Then, when Winnie was made redundant at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I suggested that she joined us at Nabta. Winnie is now heading up our local presence in Kenya and has done a fabulous job of improving the visibility and formatting of the content on our platform. I remain extremely grateful for the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and the opportunity to meet amazing women like Winnie.
**I was a late starter. Late to [puberty](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/puberty/), late to make-up (I still don’t really wear any), late to the appreciation of nice bath products. Late to hidden meanings in films, late to appointments. An ugly, awkward teenager with blocky braces and rimless glasses that didn’t suit me.** **My mother only told me how babies were made when I was eleven years old. Nowadays, children in the UK learn about the facts of life much sooner – sometimes as young as four of five, which seems to me to be a desecration of childhood innocence, but each to his own. It’s less relevant for this part of the world. Even at eleven years old, I wasn’t really ready to hear the truth; it would be another couple of years before I got my head around it. I maintain to this day that my mother sabotaged me.** **As it transpired, I was to be a late starter in terms of almost everything that made me a “woman”. Including my period, which arrived a couple of months after my sixteenth birthday and then proceeded to be wildly irregular for the first ten years of my adult life. The average age of menstruation is twelve and a bit years, so sixteen is late by any standards. Late enough, in fact, that about six months previously my father (who is a doctor) had suggested, slightly awkwardly, that I might like to go and get myself checked out. I politely declined.** **I don’t remember much about my first period except that it happened so quickly I wasn’t really sure it had happened at all. I do remember thinking, “Is this it? What’s all the fuss about?” Of course, by the time my second period had come and gone – lasting a full seven days, heavy, and accompanied by the tell-tale cramps and emotional maelstrom – I had drastically altered my opinion.** **It was the irregularity of my cycle that prompted me, long before such things were fashionable, to download a period-tracking app and start trying to understand exactly how the thing worked. I never got as far as taking my temperature every day, but I did monitor a whole range of physical symptoms, including when my period started and how heavy it was on particular days.** **Just this – the simple fact of tracking my period – made me feel much more in control. I could see, for example, that although my periods felt like they came and went with reckless abandon, there was a pattern to them. My cycles were longer – the shortest around 31 days and the longest somewhere between 50 and 55 days – but on average, they tended to be between 31 and 34 days. I started buying sanitary items in advance; I took them with me on holiday. I stopped worrying.** **By the time the moment arrived for me to start thinking about marriage and babies, I felt pretty sure that I knew what I was doing. My periods were starting to settle down and I was using the Billings Method of Natural Family Planning (NFP) to accurately predict when I was fertile.** **None of this would have been possible without my period tracking app. If I could have changed one thing about it, it would have been to make the daily logs a little bit more comprehensive and accessible. At the time, the user experience was pretty unfriendly. I could also have done with a gentle reminder the day before my period started so that I remembered to take the necessary items with me if I went out. After you have children, of course, the signs associated with fertility change.** **My objective with [Nabta](https://nabtahealth.com/) Fertility is to create a product that caters for all ages and stages in life – whether you’re just entering [puberty](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/puberty/) and need a guide to navigate its ups and downs, or you’re looking to start a family and would like to plan the next step effectively. Or if the reproductive phase of your life is coming to an end, and you need a support system to see you through the transition.** **That is what we are; that is what Nabta hopes to be. A guide, a support, a friend. A community to learn from, a small group of peers to confide in, a vast cavern of information to mine. [Nabta’s story](https://nabtahealth.com/) is my story, but my story is also every woman’s story.** **That, I think, is the real beauty of it.**
It is two years to the day since Nabta was founded. March 21st 2017. An historic day. Not only Nabta’s birthday, but Mother’s Day in the Gulf, my co-founder’s birthday, and the day my son was due (in the end, he arrived 11 days late on the 1st April). I thought I would mark this moment by reflecting, in a very specific way that has nothing to do with being asked to write an article by P&G on exactly the same topic, on the reality of being a woman in women’s health in the Middle East. **The reality of being a woman** -------------------------------- The first reality is this: when people ask you to explain what you’re doing, still the first question is often, “What is it like to be a woman doing X?” rather than, “What is it like to do X?”. If you throw a baby in a carrier or an advanced pregnancy into the bargain, this question is usually accompanied by a healthy dose of concern. With the #MeToo and other movements, I expect it won’t be long before the question of being a woman ceases to exist in many parts of the world, but for now at least, in a region that historically has some of the worst stats for female inclusion and empowerment, it’s here to stay. **The reality of a healthcare system driven by commercial benefit** The second reality is that combining two novel (and to a greater or lesser extent, taboo) concepts – hybrid healthcare, and women’s health – into a single bid for change, prompts mixed reactions; from investors, from members of the healthcare ecosystem, and even, occasionally, from other women. The MENA healthcare market is one of the fastest growing in the world. Take the UAE, for example, where the healthcare sector is expected to grow by 60% in just five years – from $17BN in 2016 to over $28BN by 2021. Much of this growth, as defined by the UAE 2021 Vision National Agenda, will be fueled by investments in preventive medicine to address the issue of Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, diabetes, and chronic respiratory diseases, which are, “the leading global cause of death and are responsible for 70% of deaths worldwide” (WHO, 2017). With this in mind, you’d have thought that a platform such as Nabta, designed specifically to facilitate preventive and personalised medicine by seamlessly integrating virtual care components such as mobile technologies, smart medical devices and tests, and machine learning, into traditional care pathways, would be an easy sell. Not so. Not when that platform is (1) built by women, (2) focused on women’s health, and (3) forced to compete with a healthcare ecosystem that is underpinned by commercial benefit, driven by investments into traditional “brick and mortar” setups, and a good three to five years away from understanding the concept of value-based care. **The reality of investment opportunities for women (or the lack thereof)** The third reality of being a woman in women’s health in the Middle East (and anywhere else for that matter) is that the amount of capital invested in female-led startups is significantly lower than the amount invested in male or co-led startups. In 2018, all female founders in the U.S. put together raised $10BN less than one cigarette company, Juul, took in by itself – just 2.2% of the total $130BN invested. This is despite the fact that (1) the female economy is considered to be the largest and fastest growing in the world – worth more, at circa. $23TN, than the GDPs of China and India combined, and (2) in a study by the Boston Consulting Group, it was found that female-founded or co-founded startups generated, on average, higher revenues per dollar invested than their male-founded counterparts. Although many of the MENA region’s top publications like to highlight the fact that female entrepreneurship is on the rise, the reality in terms of access to capital is very different. Ticket sizes from funds that claim to focus exclusively on female-founded or co-founded startups are significantly smaller than the average – ranging in size from $10K to $50K at the seed stage (versus $50K to $250K). And even the capital that is available is not equipped to support startups that do not follow the popular eCommerce / marketplace / software-only models, i.e. startups that have even a whiff of an R&D budget baked into their projections. **But realities change** The fourth and final reality is perhaps the most important: realities change, and they change because we change them. By persisting in the face of adversity; by refusing to allow statistics to get us down; by not being too proud to admit where we have been wrong and allowing our business models to pivot and evolve to support the real need we are trying to address, we can alter reality. Perhaps it will take women of our generation three years to close a funding round where it should take one; perhaps we will always feel that we are on the hard end of negotiations concerning valuation and investment terms; perhaps we will get tired of being patronised, ignored and knocked back down, and choose other paths and vocations. But there is value in the fight. Do not underestimate the impact your voice can have. Do not hesitate because people call you “crazy”, “delusional” or dismiss you out of hand simply for being a woman. In the words of Nike’s recent, amazing, “[Dream Crazier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whpJ19RJ4JY)” advert: “So if they want to call you crazy? Fine. Show them what crazy can do.” **Sources:** * https://gulfnews.com/uae/health/uae-health-care-market-to-grow-to-dh103b-by-2021-according-to-new-study-1.2002656 * https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/258940/9789241513029-eng.pdf;jsessionid=C4C2CAEB2F25C6DC856AD047A965F4D8?sequence=1 * http://fortune.com/2019/01/28/funding-female-founders-2018/ * https://hbr.org/2009/09/the-female-economy * https://www.ft.com/content/a18196c6-ba62-11e8-8dfd-2f1cbc7ee27c
If I have learned one thing since becoming a parent eighteen months ago – and yes, I believe that parenthood begins at the moment of conception – it is that being a parent means “appreciation in hindsight”. It doesn’t matter how much you think you are appreciating your child at the moment (if you remember to appreciate them at all), you always appreciate them more when the moment has passed and what they are content to do and who they are content with to be has changed forever. Whether it’s the fact that before your child can see properly, they are happy to lie quietly with their head resting on their knees and gaze into your eyes for minutes at a time. Or that the predictably unpredictable sleep cycles of a newborn provide you with plenty of opportunities to nap during the day – opportunities you will miss once your not-so-newborn is on the move. Or that for the briefest of moments, you are your child’s world, their whole world… until you are supplanted by a never-ending stream of stimuli and your role becomes simply that of “mama”. #### The same holds true for pregnancy (becoming a parent). To the new mothers out there, those saints among you who are getting slower by the day waiting for your precious cargo (and by precious, I mean wriggly-monster-butterflies) to make its transition to the outside world, I say: #### **Patience.** You think it’s difficult to sleep now, with the midnight toilet trips and the abdominal aches and the [heartburn](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/heartburn/); these are the last few nights you will have to yourself for the rest of your life. Certainly, until your children leave home, and even then, you will wake in the middle of the night worrying that something has happened to them when you see a missed call from an unknown number or hear sirens in the distance. Make the most of this time to do things for you – get a leisurely coffee with your girlfriends, spend a whole hour in the shower, wash your hair three days in a row. You will not regret any of it. #### **Be prepared.** For the birthing horror stories that will inevitably come your way in the last few days leading up to your [due date](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/due-date/). Until now, you will have heard only sage advice and encouragement from your close friends and family. Do not be tricked into complacency: the [labour](https://nabtahealth.com/what-pain-relief-should-i-use-during-labour/) nightmares are there and they’re coming to get you. Try not to set too much store by them. Labour is a unique experience – unique in terms of other life experiences, and unique to you. You will navigate it in your own way and, inevitably, will perfect your own horror story to pass on to your nearest and dearest when their time comes. #### **Do not try to be a hero.** As my old Religious Studies teacher used to say: we must accept suffering because it comes intertwined with love, but you’re a fool if you allow yourself to suffer unnecessarily. If pain medication is offered to you, take it, and take it before you feel as though you really need it. I made the mistake of asking for pethidine, the strongest form of [labour pain-relief](https://nabtahealth.com/what-pain-relief-should-i-use-during-labour/) other than an [epidural](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/epidural/), when I was already seven centimeters dilated, at which point the midwife wouldn’t give it to me because of the risk of the sedative effects being passed on to my son. So I had an [epidural](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/epidural/) and that took a good twenty minutes to set up and another twenty minutes to take effect, by which point I was extremely uncomfortable. The whole episode could have been avoided if I’d asked for pain medication sooner. Lastly, there is no point in trying to hurry things along. When your [due date](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/due-date/) passes, as it will for many of you, you can eat as many hot curries as you like, go for thirty kilometer walks in the blazing sun, and walk up and down stairs sideways for half the day, it will do basically nothing, despite what your doctor might tell you. Your baby will come in his or her own good time, and when those [contractions](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/contraction/) start, you’ll wonder why you were so keen to get started. #### Becoming A Parent For The First-Time Many of the [pregnancy apps](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nabtahealth.nabta) out there allow you to track your baby’s development on a weekly basis. Some even include animated graphics of your baby in utero. Looking back now, I wish I’d had a way of recording my part in the journey as well. Even something as simple as being able to create a photo journal for my husband and I, or recording “the last bike ride”, “the last swim”, “the last time I slept all the way through the night”. Not only because it would have allowed me to compare future pregnancies with this first one, but also because when I’m old and grey, I would like to have as many memory prompts as possible – tools that will allow me to remember the most treasured moments in my life. So we will add this feature to [Nabta](https://nabtahealth.com/), and by doing so will enable all mothers out there to make pregnancy not just about the baby’s development, but about the transition to motherhood – recording it, celebrating it, immortalising it. Nabta is reshaping women’s healthcare. We support women with their personal health journeys, from everyday wellbeing to the uniquely female experiences of fertility, pregnancy, and [](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary)[menopause](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/menopause/). Get in [touch](/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#324b535e5e53725c535046535a57535e465a1c515d5f) if you have any questions about this article or any aspect of women’s health. We’re here for you.
I first suspected I was pregnant when I started waking up at 5:30 AM every morning to go to the toilet. I have never been a heavy sleeper, but this was definitely different. Then I became famished by around 11:30 AM, not long after eating a substantial breakfast and way before my usual lunchtime. Next, I deviated from my “water is best” rule and began drinking fresh orange juice by the gallon; a sign of pregnancy I only recognized in hindsight when I learned that orange juice is a natural source of [](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folate)[folate](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/folate/) (or “Folic Acid”), which is taken as a supplement throughout pregnancy to help with the development of the baby’s brainstem. I took a [pregnancy test](https://nabtahealth.com/accuracy-of-home-pregnancy-tests/) when I was six weeks pregnant, by which point the signs had been around for about a fortnight. It confirmed my suspicions. My husband and I were going to emerge from our first year of marriage with a third person in tow. #### Experiencing pregnancy for the first time Every woman’s experience of pregnancy is different. Some, like my aunt, are incapacitating unwell for the first three months of their pregnancy. Severe Morning Sickness (or “[](https://www.webmd.com/baby/what-is-hyperemesis-gravidarum)[Hyperemesis Gravidarum](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/hyperemesis-gravidarum/)”) affects approximately 1 in 100 women and can be so debilitating in terms of its symptoms, which include severe vomiting, dehydration, and weight loss, that victims end up bedridden or even hospitalized for weeks at a time. Over 70% of women will suffer from some form of morning sickness, whether mild or extreme. I was relatively lucky. My nausea took the form of “hunger sickness” and I was mostly able to avoid it if I ate breakfast as soon as I woke up and lunch at around noon. By the time I entered my fourteenth week, it had all but disappeared. #### The first scan There is nothing quite like seeing your baby turn somersaults for the first time during your twelve-week scan. For my husband, that was the moment it hit home (although I don’t think it really hit home until Oliver was delivered six months later after a protracted labor and with the assistance of a Ventouse in theatre). The “realness” of him only continued to grow from there – from his first kicks, which landed in the form of giant, butterfly-like flutters just as I was preparing to speak at a HealthTech conference in Kuwait organized by my business partner, [Dr. Mussaad Al-Razouki](https://www.linkedin.com/in/razouki/) – to his first hiccups, to his first visible movements, which made my belly look like the swell of the tide against the shore. #### The second trimester My second trimester was much more difficult. We had just moved to Dubai, it was early October, and I was finding the heat and humidity difficult to cope with. It didn’t help that we were occupying a single-room studio apartment while we waited to see whether my husband would accept a job at the firm he was temping at. The closeness of our living quarters, the newness of the city, made both experiences – our first year of marriage and my first pregnancy – that much more intense. #### The third wind It is normal to experience second, third, fourth, and even fifth “winds” during pregnancy. Some women are drained from morning sickness during their first trimester, wildly energetic during their second, and tired again during their third. I was almost the exact opposite – fine during my first trimester, then overwhelmingly lethargic, and bubbly again by the time Month 7 came round. The last month is always tough. Your ligaments are so stretched by then, so overloaded, particularly as your belly starts to drop in preparation for labor, that walking for even ten minutes at a time can feel like a mission. My advice to all **newly falling pregnant women** is: **read widely**. It’s good to know what you’re up against and what could affect you during pregnancy. If you know you’d like to have a baby, start taking vitamins and other recommended supplements such as folic acid before you conceive. In general you will crave what your body needs – if it’s meat, potentially you have an [iron](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/iron/) deficiency; if it’s dark, leafy greens, citrus fruits, or brown bread, you’re probably low in [folate](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/folate/). One of the truly great things about pregnancy is that your body starts sending you really clear signals about what it needs and doesn’t need, and, possibly for the first time in your life, you won’t physically be able to ignore them. So, **listen**. To your body and to your own intuition first and foremost; you will know instinctively what is best for you. To your mother, who went through this with you and is just dying to be part of your journey. To your pre-[pregnancy feeling](https://nabtahealth.com/subtle-signs-of-pregnancy/)s about your husband, which will be threatened when he fails to appreciate what you’re going through, pushes you to be the way you were “before”, and refuses to show you the proper amount of sympathy. Trust me, your pre-pregnancy feelings will resurface once the baby is born and will only be strengthened by this new bond between you. I can say with complete certainty that Oliver is the best thing that ever happened to me and my husband. #### The birth of Nabta As it happened, it was at the conference in Kuwait where I first felt Oliver kick that Mussaad and I got to talking about the possibility of creating a dedicated health platform for women in the Arab World. The prospect of [Nabta](https://nabtahealth.com/), of the good we could do with it, energised me then and for the remainder of my pregnancy, and it continues to motivate me now as I navigate the exhausting months postpartum. I tell myself that if Nabta ends up helping only a few women with their transition to motherhood, as it helped me, it will have been worth it. First published in **June 2017.**
As we approach the anniversary of Nabta’s incorporation, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the first year of both parenthood and company ownership, and the immense joys and challenges the two things have brought. First, the challenges: ### Lack of Sleep It’s an obvious one, but perhaps the most devastating physiological difference has been the requirement to cope with a lot less sleep than before. Interestingly, the primary function of the hormone [Prolactin](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/prolactin/), which causes new mothers to produce breast milk, is actually to induce Rapid Eye Movement or “REM” sleep. So women who breastfeed exclusively for the first few months after giving birth should, in theory, be less tired because the extra [Prolactin](https://nabtahealth.com/glossary/prolactin/) they are producing encourages deep sleep. Now that I’ve weaned my son, I would be inclined to agree with this as I have definitely been more tired since I stopped breastfeeding. However, if you’d asked me six months ago where I sat on the zero to “Utterly Exhausted” spectrum, I’d have been a solid eight or nine. ### Lack of “Me Time” I am the oldest of eight siblings so, growing up, I never really understood the concept of “me time”. Obviously this changed when I left home to study at university, and changed again when I became a working adult. Go back five years and I might have described “me time” as being left alone to read a good book for a few hours, or taking the weekends to go riding in the hilly wilderness of Perthshire. Now, not only am I VERY aware of “me time” (it’s one of these things that became noticeable by its absence), my definition of “me time” has also changed utterly. Today, I would be happy to have three minutes alone on the toilet without either my son or the cats pushing open the door and making loud demands at my feet. I classify “me time” as: cooking dinner in the evening after my son has gone to bed so that I don’t have to repack the cupboards while I’m doing it, or popping down to the local Carrefour to pick up milk without fifty hideous soft toys being removed from the thoughtlessly placed shelving unit by the entrance. Obviously the company means that whenever I am not getting demands from my son or my cats, I am catering to it and its needs. Nabta is a comparatively patient child, but it is no less demanding. ### Days Without End… Juggling entrepreneurship and parenthood, particularly if you act as the primary caregiver, is no easy task. My days starts at 6:45AM when my son wakes up, and ends usually at around 11:45PM when I send my last email to our partners in different timezones. I am with my son until 1PM every day – we swim, we go to gym classes, we run riot in the malls (it’s about the only thing you can do here in the Gulf at the height of summer) – and then he goes to nursery and I head to our office in the Dubai Science Park. I am there taking meetings, managing operations, and generally keeping things afloat until 5:45PM at which point I head back to the nursery to collect my son, and we head home for yoghurt, bath and bed by 7PM. And then work begins again. Although I do try and make time at the weekend to do things with my family, and obviously we go on holidays where I work less, I’m not sure a single day has passed since I started working on Nabta that I have not thought about it, engaged directly with it, or lived it in some way. In this way in particular, having a company is very much like having a child. It sits at the back of your mind, like the flutter of a gossamer curtain in the breeze, so that even if you are not looking at it and are utterly absorbed in something else, you are aware of it. It is There. ### … And Endless Joys I tried to sit and think of three joyful things that I associate with being mother to my son and Co-Founder to Nabta, but I could not. The fact is, there are not just three things, there are many. Many, many, tiny, trivial, wonderful things that no one but you sees or appreciates each and every day. Whether it’s the first time your child finds and comments on an interesting scrap of carpet you didn’t know you had, or falls off the bed and miraculously doesn’t hurt himself, or hugs the cat without pulling their tails (the cats did not find this so wonderful); or one of your team finally gets something they’ve been struggling to understand for days, or the image that was slightly off-centre is suddenly aligned, or you find yourself with a cohort of eighteen summer interns all of whom are ten times more capable than you were at that age, the joys really are endless. I guess my point is this: with parenthood as with company ownership, you will remember each and every one of the challenges you face – you will agonise over them, relive them, and suffer at their hands – and you will not remember the joys. But that is not because there were no joys, it is because they numbered too many to count. To all of you who are about to embark on either journey: sit tight and enjoy the ride – it will be the greatest one of your life.
