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After a major life transition, something unexpected happened. I realised I had a lot to say. What started as personal reflection quietly grew into a genuine love for writing. I found myself drawn to the page, exploring change, identity, loss, growth, and the quiet transformations we do not always speak about.
These books are not academic texts or professional guides. They are simply my thoughts and feelings finding their way onto paper honest and unfiltered. Writing has become more than a creative outlet. It is where I allow myself to speak freely, creatively, and wholeheartedly. It feels like coming home to a voice that was waiting to be heard. These books are part of that discovery.
I write under a pen name so that my writing and my professional work can remain separate. Both matter deeply to me. They simply live in different spaces.

You can also find a growing collection of digital resources by Shirleen Schmidt, writing as W. R. Chatham, through SM Schmidt Resources on Etsy. The shop includes practical workbooks, guided resources, mini courses, and other tools created to support people through change, uncertainty, and different stages of life.
Feel free to browse the collection and see what may be useful to you.

Our modern world is depriving us of our village where we are supported by the wisdom of preceding generations. The modern young parent and parent-to-be increasingly look towards social media to fill that gap. And it's true; these online communities can be incredible sources of support and advice. However, social media can be as confusing
Our modern world is depriving us of our village where we are supported by the wisdom of preceding generations. The modern young parent and parent-to-be increasingly look towards social media to fill that gap. And it's true; these online communities can be incredible sources of support and advice. However, social media can be as confusing and overwhelming as a vast and overcrowded maze flooded with conflicting information and the pressure to measure up to picture-perfect posts that don't tell the whole story. The key to finding your way through isn't to avoid the maze altogether, but to learn how to move through it with intention.
This book addresses this modern parenting paradox: while digital communities promise connection and support, they often create information overload, comparison traps, and emotional overwhelm. The book guides expecting and new parents in building a healthy, intentional digital support system. A true village that supports rather than depletes them.
Inside you will find information as well as exercises to help you navigate this maze while holding on to your sanity.

The journey into pregnancy and parenthood is filled with joy, but also an avalanche of advice, opinions, and information online. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by conflicting guidance, comparison traps on social media, and the pressure to be a "perfect" parent. The Scroll Sanity Companion is an interactive workbook designed specifically t
The journey into pregnancy and parenthood is filled with joy, but also an avalanche of advice, opinions, and information online. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by conflicting guidance, comparison traps on social media, and the pressure to be a "perfect" parent. The Scroll Sanity Companion is an interactive workbook designed specifically to help expecting and new parents navigate the digital world with confidence and calm. It is a workbook for consciously curating your online world. Through step-by-step exercises, you’ll learn to filter your feeds, identify trustworthy sources, and build a digital space that supports—rather than stresses—your unique path.

Love Transformed emerged from the deeply human experience of caring for ageing parents and witnessing love change shape over time. It reflects on the emotional shift that occurs when the people who once held you steady begin to lean on you. When strength looks different. When independence softens. When familiar roles quietly reverse.
This
Love Transformed emerged from the deeply human experience of caring for ageing parents and witnessing love change shape over time. It reflects on the emotional shift that occurs when the people who once held you steady begin to lean on you. When strength looks different. When independence softens. When familiar roles quietly reverse.
This book does not offer instructions or solutions. It offers recognition. It explores tenderness, frustration, loyalty, grief, guilt, devotion, and the strange mixture of gratitude and sorrow that often coexists in caregiving. It acknowledges the private thoughts many adult children carry but rarely voice.
At its heart, Love Transformed is about love that does not disappear when circumstances change. It deepens. It stretches. It transforms. It honours both the parent who is slowly letting go and the child who is learning to hold on in new ways.

Still Growing was written from a deep respect for the inner life that continues long after the world begins to look at ageing from the outside. It is a reflection on becoming in later life, written specifically for those in their eighties and beyond. In a culture that often speaks about older people rather than to them, this book offers d
Still Growing was written from a deep respect for the inner life that continues long after the world begins to look at ageing from the outside. It is a reflection on becoming in later life, written specifically for those in their eighties and beyond. In a culture that often speaks about older people rather than to them, this book offers direct conversation, dignity, and recognition.
It explores identity beyond productivity, meaning beyond usefulness, and growth beyond visible achievement. It honours memory, grief, resilience, humour, faith, doubt, and the subtle transformations that continue even when the body slows. Ageing is not presented as decline to be endured, but as a profound stage of becoming.
This is not a guide to “successful ageing.” It is an invitation to reflect on the richness of a life lived, the complexity of still becoming, and the quiet truth that growth does not end simply because others assume it should.

You are not just becoming a mother. You are becoming someone new.
Long before pregnancy, the stories, expectations, and beliefs you carry begin shaping how you imagine motherhood will unfold. Then reality arrives, and something deeper begins to shift. Your identity, relationships, priorities, and sense of self are quietly re-organised.
This
You are not just becoming a mother. You are becoming someone new.
Long before pregnancy, the stories, expectations, and beliefs you carry begin shaping how you imagine motherhood will unfold. Then reality arrives, and something deeper begins to shift. Your identity, relationships, priorities, and sense of self are quietly re-organised.
This transformation has a name: matrescence. Like adolescence, it is a profound developmental journey that often unfolds through a period of liminality—an in between season where the woman you were no longer fully fits and the mother you are becoming is still taking shape.
Crossing Into Motherhood is a compassionate, psychologically grounded companion that walks with you from the earliest thoughts of motherhood through pregnancy, the first year, and beyond. It will help you understand the transformation you are living through, so you can navigate it with greater clarity, confidence, and self-compassion.
Because motherhood does not erase who you are. It reshapes you.

Menopause is weird, inconvenient, emotional, confronting, and occasionally quite rude.
It interrupts sleep, shortens patience, changes the body, stirs grief, sharpens honesty, and makes a woman wonder who she is becoming now. Yet with time and hindsight, it also brings humour, clarity, freedom, and a surprising sense of return to what matt
Menopause is weird, inconvenient, emotional, confronting, and occasionally quite rude.
It interrupts sleep, shortens patience, changes the body, stirs grief, sharpens honesty, and makes a woman wonder who she is becoming now. Yet with time and hindsight, it also brings humour, clarity, freedom, and a surprising sense of return to what matters.
In Menopause: Unapologetically Me, W. R. Chatham offers a warm, honest, and gently humorous reflection on menopause as more than a physical transition. This is not a medical guide or a promise of perfect acceptance. It is a companion for women entering the whirlwind, standing in the eye of the storm, or looking back from the other side.
A book for every woman growing into the next version of herself.

Menopause can change far more than the body. It can affect how you think, feel, react, relate to others, and even how you recognise yourself. The Menopause Mind, Body & Emotions Workbook: Understanding Your Reactions and Working With Change was created for women who want to make sense of those less visible parts of the experience. Combin
Menopause can change far more than the body. It can affect how you think, feel, react, relate to others, and even how you recognise yourself. The Menopause Mind, Body & Emotions Workbook: Understanding Your Reactions and Working With Change was created for women who want to make sense of those less visible parts of the experience. Combining accessible information with therapeutic reflection and practical exercises, the workbook explores anger, anxiety, shame, grief, sleep, brain fog, body confidence, intimacy, relationships, identity, and the pressures of continuing everyday life while you are changing within it. It does not promise to fix menopause or tell you how you should be coping. Its purpose is simpler: to help you understand your own reactions, work with what feels difficult, and move through change with greater clarity and self understanding. .