About the Author
Helen Fayers is a community midwife in the Acorn Team at Ipswich Hospital ESNEFT Trust, a small team who specialise in supporting pregnant people who are considered complex, vulnerable or disadvantaged. She completed her training at the University of Suffolk.
Helen has been a midwife for over 7 years, and moved into the community after 18 months to nurture her passion for developing relationships with the women she cares for.
Introduction
I moved into community care after feeling a pull towards the beauty of supporting low-risk, physiological births. A year later, I transitioned to the Acorn team, driven by the fulfilment I found in supporting a specific family through a period of deep crisis.
The Acorn team supports women who have been affected by experiences of trauma, abuse, mental health struggles, addiction, or systemic barriers. We hold a smaller caseload to allow us to give the families we care for more time and flexibility to increase their opportunities and outcomes in a world which doesn’t always cater for everyone’s needs.
The inspiration for my poem ‘Gold’ grew from this work where I see firsthand that human nature is rarely simple. In my role, the themes of light and shadow, vulnerability and strength, overlap constantly, both in the lives of families fractured by hardship and in the raw experience of women in labour. This poem reminds us that our futures are deeply shaped by the foundations we are given and the support we receive along the way. Ultimately, ‘Gold’ is a call to look past the surface, validate lived experiences, and uncover the remarkable beauty and worth hidden within us all.
Gold
Have you ever looked for the beauty in the ugly and found it looking back at you? Tasted the sweet in the salt, the good folded into the bad? There is bad in the good. There is good in the bad. There is ugly in the beauty and beauty in the ugly. No buts. Just life — with its peaks and its lows, its contradictions held together in one breathing, beating soul.
We have never been one story. Never just one truth.
I stand with women the world has given up on. Friends have left, family turned away. Judged only for what they can see on the outside. Inside, the darkness sits beside the light, the chaos sits beside the calm, and somewhere in that complexity — there’s someone who needs to be seen.
A flower neglected may shrivel and die. But hold a hand. Nurture the heart. Plant a seed — and watch it reach up towards the stars.
When the sun peers through the morning mist, I see a warrior in the woman. I see the tears in men, and those around them breathe in awe. For the warrior carries wounds. The strong carry doubt. The soft carry a fierceness the world has not seen. And inside the one the world has written off — there is gold. Maybe just a glint — but gold all the same, worn down but never gone, waiting for someone, to lean in close enough to see.
Believe in the magic of women. In their warrior state, and in their tenderness — as powerful as any battle cry.
There is strength in vulnerability. There is vulnerability in strength. They do not fight each other — they thrive together.
Guide her toward the possibilities she carries within herself, not to make this ours — but to make it theirs.
Empower her toward the birth she dreamed of. Build strength where there was hopelessness. Find the warrior where the world sees only fragility.
As a new day dawns and the moon rises to command the night, light and dark taking their turn, we fight again — hope and action woven into the unknown.
And in that room, in that moment — the pain and the joy indistinguishable, the ending and the beginning the same breath — woman with woman, woman with man — we all look on in awe at what she finds in herself, as the miracle of life is born.
I have seen the ugly in the beauty and the beauty in the ugly. I have tasted the salty in the sweet. I have stood beside the forgotten and watched them bloom.
We were never just one story. Never just one truth. And that — that is pure gold.
