'I Didn't Know Anyone': How One Forres Mum Found Her Community

Kirsty had lived in Edinburgh for most of her adult life. She knew her neighbourhood, her coffee shop, the shortcut to the GP surgery. Then, at thirty-one weeks pregnant, she and her partner relocated to a small village outside Forres so he could take up a new job. She arrived in Moray in November, heavily pregnant, knowing almost nobody.

"I kept telling myself it would be fine," she says. "I'm good at meeting people. I thought I'd figure it out." What she had not accounted for was how profoundly a new baby changes your world. Her son, Roan, arrived six weeks after the move. Her partner returned to work quickly. And Kirsty found herself alone in a quiet house in a town she did not yet know, trying to work out whether what Roan was doing was normal, whether she was doing anything right, and whether the sadness she felt was just tiredness or something she should talk to someone about.

A community midwife mentioned Vibrant Health Advocates – Hermes during a home visit. Kirsty looked it up that evening, decided it was probably not for her, and then showed up the following Tuesday anyway. "I think I just needed somewhere to go," she says simply.

What she found surprised her. The session was held in a relaxed space in Forres, and the room was full of families at different stages — some with babies even younger than Roan, some with toddlers careering around the edges. Nobody asked Kirsty to explain herself or fill in a form. Someone handed her tea. A woman sitting nearby asked how old her baby was, and the conversation that started then continued for the next hour.

Over the following weeks, Kirsty became a regular. She learned practical things: how to read Roan's hunger cues more confidently, what the different approaches to introducing solids looked like, when it was worth a trip to the doctor and when it was fine to wait and see. But she also built something harder to quantify. "I have actual friends now," she says. "People I message. People who'll meet me for a walk. I genuinely don't know what the first year would have looked like without it."

Her story is not unusual. Many of the families who come through our doors in Forres are navigating some version of the same challenge: a new baby in a community they are still finding their way into, or a growing family stretching the resources of a rural area where professional support can feel distant. We cannot fix every difficulty, but we can offer information, a familiar face, and a Tuesday morning that families can count on.

Roan is eighteen months old now. Kirsty still comes to sessions occasionally, and she has started bringing a friend who moved to the area recently and has a three-month-old. The circle keeps widening. That, more than anything, is what Vibrant Health Advocates – Hermes is for.