If you’ve listened and enjoyed and would like another mini-series, please consider hitting the pledge button, buying me a coffee (or two! god knows I need them), or sharing the podcast with any women you know navtiagting the headfuckery of managing motherhood alongside career or creative aspirations. This podcast is for them, and all the women who feel, one way or another, interrupted.

On with the show

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If my conversations with Lucy Jones and Alice Vincent have been (mostly) about the internal transformations and revelations of motherhood, today’s conversation with actor and writer Naomi Sheldon is perhaps about the opposite: how does the external world transform around you when you become a parent?

For Naomi, the struggle of motherhood hasn’t been holding on to herself - it’s been holding on to her place in the world; on stage, on set, in the writer’s room. It’s been about having to close the bedroom door to her family while she gave herself over to her work and the endless demands of rewrites from a famously relentless industry. It’s been fighting for parts that she thought she’d already secured, working on sets that have been hostile to her because she needs to feed her babies. And, as all women know, it's so incredibly easy for the external battles to slip into our bloodstream, infect us from within: Is this my fault? Am I doing something wrong? Am I not good enough? What more can I sacrifice to make this work for someone else's batshit and sexist expectations?

Naomi is fiercely ambitious with an wildly impressive resume of TV, theatre and film credits. Emma Thompson called her one-woman stage show, Good Girl, “cutting edge truth and hilarity from one of the freshest voices of this century”. She’s clearly in demand and obviously quite busy. She has adapted The Girlfriend for Amazon Prime, staring and directed by Robin Wright, out later this year and her next original show (a thriller about a new mother) is being developed by Media Res Studio. She’s working on The Spot, a new HULU show showrun by Ed Solomon, developing a series starring Suranne Jones, and, playing Dolly in Anna Karenina at Chichester Festival Theatre which runs until the end of June.

Naomi’s determination to work also came out of necessity when she discovered she was pregnant with twins during the first lockdown of the pandemic and her husband, a theatre director, lost all his work. Naomi became the family breadwinner, back at her laptop when the babies were weeks old, pumping milk, fighting off tiredness. To say Naomi is impressive would be a gross understatement, but she also demonstrates something I’ve long believed: women can do pretty much anything when they have to.

The pandemic obviously wasn’t an ideal situation, but pursuing her dreams while paying the bills was an ambition in itself. Naomi wanted to be “the hero” of her story. She wanted to provide for her family, have a career and be out in the world, not succumbing to the traditional narrative of women’s lives getting more domestic and less exciting with the arrival of children. As with any good story arc, our hero faced challenges and setbacks along the way, self-doubt reared its ugly head, and a few wicked witches tried to block her, but she’s also had some fairy tale moments, too, like performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company as a mother to one-year-old twins.

Now, four years into motherhood, she looks back with a hint of sadness at those first demanding years. Perhaps she didn’t have to do it all, perhaps she could have pushed back on deadlines, asked for more help. In our conversation, Naomi is very honest about the pressure we can put on ourselves to prove we are capable. Naomi has high expectations for herself, sure, but the pressure didn’t come from her alone. It also came from the very real s**t women face in the workplace, in the world, when they become mothers - the doubt, the side-lining and writing-off. The fear wasn’t imagined, it was very real.

At times, I was almost quite overwhelmed by what I was hearing. Naomi has done so much; carried the weight of twins while carrying the weight of keeping the family afloat and keeping her career on track. But mostly, listening to her, I felt a fire lit in me. I was in awe of a woman who’d fought so hard to be a working mother (the stories of maternity discrimination are wild), I was giddy to hear her writing career had flourished since having kids, and I was extremely motivated by her unwavering ambition. I felt galvanised. But there are important caveats, most notably her ‘secret weapon’: a husband who was the primary carer, one who she’s had to accept at times knew how to care for her children better than she did.

It’s been the greatest economics lesson of her life, she says, a constant calculation of worth and cost. What is worth time away from her kids? What can she spend her time on when bills need to be paid? What is the value of her time invested in her career? This week, Naomi emailed me from Chichester, where she’s performing in Anna Karenina. She tells me how she misses her children, but how excited they are to see her work. Yet another calculation, and, ultimately, one that burrows into all our bones and chests late at night: Will it all be worth it?

Thanks for being here

Marisa

It’s hard to know where to put these next few words. If there’s enough of them or too many. If this is the right place, the wrong place. If words can ever come anywhere close to articulating the truth of what is happening. But it’s impossible to think about motherhood at the moment without thinking of the children of Palestine. 5-year-old Ward lost two of her brothers, her three sisters and her mother when an Isreali airstrike hit the school in Gaza City they were sheltering in at 1am.

In this clip from last week, Ward sits alone in rubble in front of a camera. When she is asked about her mother, through her tears she says,

“I love mama as big as the sky and earth and the stars”.

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Welcome to Episode 2: Alice Vincent on Motherhood and Creativity.

I wanted to talk to Alice because I admire her career immensely. I am fascinated by how she’s navigated the freelance waters as a new mother while building a fantastic body of brilliant writing and creative work, centred around women’s lives. As I said in last week’s newsletter, I wanted to know how she’s done it - the secrets, the strategies, the sacrifices. As someone with a lot of eyeballs on her, I wanted to hear how she percieves it all, how she’s felt about trying to manage motherhood with the need to make and create. Does she feel like it’s working?

For those who don’t know, Alice is a bestselling author of Why Women Grow: Stories of Soil, Sisterhood and Survival and her latest book, Hark, How Women Listen (scroll down to find out how you could win a copy!), was a fairly freshly delivered manuscript when we spoke last year. Alice has many strings to her bow: she was formely an arts journalist at The Telegraph before becoming a gardening columnist for places like The Guardian and The New Statesman. She’s also a features journalist with bylines in The FT and Vogue (where her wedding photos also appeared), and a podcaster. Unlike many of the writers I know, Alice also has a flair for the aesthetic. There is a visual element that imbues her work and online presence. It’s poignant, thoughtful, quietly beautiful, and, more often than not, flourished with the natural world. She has a way of elevating the small details of life, giving them a glow that others can catch their reflection in. It’s not surprising to me that she holds writing retreats in beautiful places, even when her writing can deal with much darker, tougher issues. It’s a full-package approach to communicating with the world, and it's very effective.

When Alice and I spoke, her son was 15-months-old, and for all the curated beauty of her online presence, she was wonderfully honest. We talked about what happens to ambition after motherhood, giving up the sensible family-friendly job and figuring out how to pay for a baby when you’re a freelancer, writing a book on mat leave, and the often hidden reality that new mums can still create things and make things and are not incapacitated by alleged ‘baby brain’, despite what we might have been told, or however shameful that might feel to admit. From her garden shed, Alice helped me understand how hard she’s worked to balance a baby and her career, and how they are, in fact, essential to one other. It is a refreshing and much-needed take: her baby wasn’t the end of anything, he was the start of so many things.

To be completely honest, there is a lot I envy about Alice: she’s a bestseller, on book number four with a large and loyal following. She’s made great podcasts and worked on fascinating collaborations. Her success has only increased since the arrival of her son and she’s making life work for her on her terms. Or, at least that’s how it can look from the outside.

I, like so many of us, am extremely susceptible to the misconception that another person’s success says something about my own - even if we’re only seeing the carefully curated version. Speaking to Alice was an anecdote to how the highlights reel of social media can make us feel. She was honest and vulnerable. She shared nuanced and conflicted feelings. And it was an important reminder that trying to make and build something, while also trying to be the best mother you know how, is both doable and hard - however many books you’ve sold. Speaking with Alice reminded me of the greatest lesson I’m yet to learn (the one that Oprah famously instructed her army of young producers when making TV history): watch your own horse. Because this is clearly what Alice has done: she’s been strategic, deliberate, intentional and committed when trying to make motherood and creativity both fit in her life - not relying on a hope and prayer, like I know I have. So, if you’re worried about your creativity as a new mother, take comfort in Alice’s story. It won’t be easy, you need to get planning, and, as Alice told me, some days you won’t even get round to wiping the morning’s toothpaste off your crotch, but it can be done.

Listen here, on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify

And finally, Alice has kindly given me one copy of Hark: How Women Listen to give away! She describes it as “A book for those who have been through a change in their life and not known how to feel afterwards. A book for women who don’t feel heard. And it’s a book for people who want to listen better – to the world, to their loved ones and, crucially, to themselves”. And just look at those cover quotes! If you’d like a chance of winning a copy, hit the restack button below and I’ll choose a name at random. Good luck!

Marisa x

Ps. For all those not listening to the podcast, they’ll be one more episode published next week and then normal scheduling will resume. Stay with us!

The greatest joy of my career to date has been having the privilege to ask women about their lives. And that’s what I did here. I wanted to talk women I admire, who have done brilliant work while also being mothers, and I wanted to know how they are doing it. What are their secrets and sacrifices? How do they feel at the end of each day? What’s changed? What’s stayed the same? What’s the hardest thing, the best thing? I wanted to know if they felt like I have over the last 2.5 years.

Luckily, three excellent women agreed to talk to me.

* Lucy Jones, journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Matrescence. I really don’t think it’s an exaggeration to describe Matrascene as the most important book on motherhood since Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, which was published 20 years ago.

* Alice Vincent, the bestselling author and journalist who found big success when she quit her full-time job, went freelance and had a baby.

* Naomi Sheldon, a theatre and TV writer and actor who became the family breadwinner when raising newborn twins during the pandemic.

All three women are extremely impressive, but they are also candid, honest and speak with great vulnerability about their experiences. Their experiences are very different but there’s a thread that runs through them all; it’s one of compromise and challenge and roadblocks and discrimination. It’s one of not knowing how things will turn out. It’s one of testing their mettle and examining who they are. It’s one of trusting instincts, discovery and rediscovery. It’s one of staggering committment to the things in life they value. It’s a steady forward movement - even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

I took a tremendous amount from each conversation and hope you will too.

But, really, why? Because I know, and you know, the world does not need another podcast.

In many ways, I simply felt compelled. I still feel the urge to wrestle with the ideas and questions caught up in the tangle of motherhood - and perhaps always will. But also because I think I needed to take stock of the earliest days of motherood. The version that is so achingly lonely. The hours spent walking around a park. The hours awake in the night when your partner is sleeping. The profound sense of detachment, disorientation, the anxiety, the terror that something essential about yourself has gone. A podcast like this would have been a lifeline when I was that mother, doing laps around a park with a 4-month-old strapped to my chest, buying a coffee I didn’t want because sometimes that was my only adult interaction all day. I truly hope these conversations can offer the comfort and reassurance to others that I so desperately needed. But I also hope their usefullness extends far beyond those with newborns. I had these conversations as a mother of a toddler and found them extremley helpful. I hope, in time, to talk to mothers of older children, too. After all, I hear the conondrum of motherhood and creativity is an ongoing one…

And, as much as these conversations are for other women, they are also for me. They are for the version of me with unwashed hair and eyes stained red for reasons I could never quite articulate - a version that still appears more often than I’d like to admit. They are for the version of me who felt like she was having out-of-body experiences at baby groups, terrified she’d never have an intelligent conversation again. They are the version of me who’s heart shattered when I left my son with a childminder but felt dizzy from the rush of freedom. They are for the version of me today who is watching the clock for nusery pick-up, still figuring out how ambition fits around teatime. I’ve made these podcasts for every version of myself that doubted she’d ever be writing these words, introducing a new creative project.

I knew that I wanted to have these conversations but actually doing it has been a whole other thing. I’d start only to immediately stop. Sometimes because of work/life commitments, but mostly because my self-doubt was chronic, at times, paralysing. This podcast was a crisis of confidence staring me in the face every day from my laptop. The daily retorts in my head got louder and louder: You’re too late to start a podcast, how embarrassing. Everything about motherhood has already been said, how embarrassing. Nobody will want to be a guest because you don’t have any subscribers, how embarrassing. This chorus always been there, but with motherhood, it has become deafening. Yet, somehow, I sent out interview requests and each time I recieved a ‘yes’ back, it felt like a light being turned on. I then let the recorded interviews sit on my desktop for months on end while I tried to talk myself out of publishing them.

Somewhere along the line, self-doubt has infected my bloodstream. As I get older, I realise the task is not to try to eradicate it because that’s not possible. The task is to learn how to do all the things anyway. For this project, I managed to turn down the doubt by thinking of that version of me, two years ago. The fragile and frightened first-time mum. By publishing these podcasts, I’m proving to her that she will come back to herself. And yes, it might take a while. And no, my podcast isn't going to sell out the Sydney Opera House. But I’ve created work I believe in, in the service of other women, and surely that’s a success in it’s own right? Or at least, that’s what I’m trying to tell the voice in my head who has been trained to chase numbers and noise. As I send these conversations out into the world, as A turns two and a half, I want nothing more than to sit out in the garden with all the versions of me that have arrived since a snowy day in November 2022, pour them all a glass of wine, and say: we f*****g did it.

We’ll start with my conversation with Lucy Jones (you can hear at the top of this email). I’m evangelical about Lucy’s book and truly believe her research is foundational to any conversations on motherhood. In this episode, we talk about identity after motherhood, reassembling ourselves, a world hostile to parenting, changing brains and cells, and how the radical transformation of matrescence can, eventually, bring ourselves closer to who we really are.

Please bear with the slightly homemade sound. Editing is hard! I will release one weekly via my substack, and the episodes are long because, as every mother knows, the days, and the nights, are also long. You can also listen to them on Apple and Spotify. If you enjoy, please hit like, review and share. If you would like to support me in making more of these conversations, you can via Ko-fi or hit the pledge button.

Finally, this is for all of the women who feel, one way or another, interrupted.

On with the show,

Marisa x