You may think the last thing we need is another parenting podcast. Ask Lisa has already set the gold standard, and many others have rushed into its wake, each with their particular focus or hot take on the thing that so many of us shuffle through daily.
Yet there’s something in Mother, the new podcast from the near-constant content creator Keelin Moncrieff, that’s worth listening to. Just three episodes in, it’s a reminder of the gamut of motherhood and of the real need for this kind of cut-through-the-Insta-lives frankness, especially if you’re new to the parenting rollercoaster.
The format is solidly informal: Moncrieff, who gave birth to her first child at the age of 24, two years ago, talks motherhood with guests who have some kind of profile – so far, writers and social media stars. She asks a recurring three questions at the end of every episode, but, outside of that, Mother is a freewheel through the mothering life as experienced in all its general and particular glory and gore.
The first episode, with Louise McSharry, is a smart start, with an honest and generous discussion of McSharry’s experience with an alcoholic mother who was both a wonder and a scourge, and of being adopted at the age of seven by an aunt and uncle. “I pined after her for years,” says McSharry, describing a woman who wrapped every spoke of her brother’s BMX bike before presenting the gift while struggling with an addiction so clearly harmful that removing her children from her care was, her daughter says, “definitely the right thing”.
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McSharry also dealt with a surprise pregnancy: she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma when she was 31 and warned that she would have trouble getting pregnant after her treatment. Having made plans to travel with her husband for a while, she instead conceived her first child almost immediately, news that required some serious mental adjustment. Later, when she suffered from postnatal depression, she wasn’t taken seriously, her story a stark reminder of the way the medical establishment continues to fail women.
From the author and content creator Melanie Murphy we hear about dealing with anxiety and panic attacks as a parent, and learning to be open with your children about mental health while shielding them from certain elements of that struggle. Most importantly, she reminds parents, “You have to acknowledge what you’re doing right,” which feels like something everyone could do with remembering amid all the information overload about how we are individually and collectively ruining our children.
Every element of mothering life – changing bodies, work-life balance, identity struggles, perfectionism as a parent, feelings of failure, self-care, the need for mam friends, the horrors of pumping – is on the table, and it’s refreshing to hear it all out there in a way that a generation of those living very public online lives is clearly accustomed to.
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These are not tight or scripted interviews – they’re long and meandering – yet you can imagine the comfort it might bring to a lonely new mother to find herself in the room with these women, whose lives and selves may appear enviable online but who have the same leaky boobs and mom guilt as the rest of us. In a way it’s a snapshot of mothering, Gen Z style, which turns out to have plenty in common with all the gens before: feeling judged, feeling overwhelmed, feeling lost, feeling bored, feeling guilty and feeling the great unmooring panic and joy of matrescence.
