The Secret Life of Mothers

Alex Bollen is a researcher, writer and postnatal practitioner. She was previously a director at the research agency Ipsos MORI and is now self-employed. She qualified as a Postnatal Practitioner with the NCT and has been running groups for new mothers for more than a decade. Her book  Motherdom: Breaking Free from Bad Science and Good Mother Myths was published by Verso in 2025.  The Washington P...

Audra Phelps founded Mama Audra to help moms unravel the web of old beliefs after leaving the LDS church to discover her own identity as a woman and mother. With over 15years of experience in international education and coaching, she discovered her passion in supporting moms grappling with grief, mom guilt, and identity loss after a faith crisis. When she finally made the life-altering decision to...

Eve Canavan is the Co-Founder and Coordinatorof Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week. Having experienced Postpartum Psychosis after the birth of her son, Eve began blogging about her experience and established the voluntary group Perinatal Mental Health Partnership anddevised the Awareness Week, a free yearly global resource, highlighting Perinatal Mental Health, how to access support and focusin...

Madhu Senaratne is a lecturer, researcher and writer. She holds a PhD, and her work focuses on voice, power, and ethicsin storytelling. She currently lectures in areas of humanitarian reporting, and media and development. She has previously worked as a journalist and with the United Nations in conflict and post-conflict contexts. She has published numerous academic and creative pieces. Her debut p...

Elaine Gregersen is an award-winning writer, public speaker, and podcast coach based in the North East of England. She writes and speaks about baby loss, caring, grief, and creativity. In 2025, she won the Allyson Kent Prize for Fearless Writing. She has also been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Prize and the Curae Literary Prize. Her pop culture podcast,  The Honeymoon Period , reaches lis...

Chloe Saunders is the Director of The Afterbirth Club, a community supporting parents through the messy, in between stages of parenthood. Alongside this, she works in cyber security, balancing a structured professional world with advocacy, podcasting and community building. She brings an honest perspective on motherhood lived in the often overlooked space of not quite a young mum, but not quite an...

Re-releasing this episode from April 2023. Maggie interviews Ali Norell, who tragically lost her baby daughter Romy at 4 months old due to a rare condition. Even though Romy's life was short, she changed Ali's life (she believes for the better) and led to the work she does now. #alinorell #grief #maggiegordonwalker

The re-release of this first episode from March 2023. Trustee of Mothers Uncovered/Livestock interviews Maggie Gordon-Walker, who is the founder of Mothers Uncovered, set up for her charity Livestock in 2008.The Brighton-based creative support courses are led by past participants, celebrating the woman behind the mother, while allowing feelings to be explored honestly, without judgement. She is an...

Naomi Booth is the author of the novels Exit Management  and Sealed , and the short-story collection Animals at Night;  her work has been featured in books of the year in the Guardian and the White Review, listed for the Sunday Times short story award, and she won the Edgehill Short Story Reader's Prize in 2023. Naomi grew up in West Yorkshire and now lives in York; she is Professor in Creative Wr...

Charlotte is Professor of Family andSociety at the UCL Social Research Institute and Co-Director of the ThomasCoram Research Unit. She is one of the directors of the UCL Centre for HumanReproduction where she leads Repro@UCL, a network for social science andhumanities scholars working on reproduction She is currently leading a large UKRI fundedstudy, entitled '50 Years of Becoming a Mother' with I...

Ida Melum is a BAFTA & BIFA nominated and Annie & RTS awardwinning animation director based in Sweden. She has a master's degree in Directing Animation from the National Film and Television School in London, where she made her award winning, and BAFTA nominated graduation film ‘Night of the Living Dread’. She just finished her newest film, “Ovary-Acting”, a short comedy that deals with the...

Hannah Turlington is an artist, writer and creative practitionerliving and working in North Yorkshire. Her work explores her own lived experiences through her work, such as being an adoptive mother. It also creates opportunities for the viewer toshare their own narratives. She runs community based projects that focus on connecting people with their creativity alongside running skills specific work...

Jane Upton is a playwright. She wrote her first play when shewas 30 after an eight-year career in marketing. Her first play BONES had a sellout run at the Edinburgh Festival which led her to leave her marketing job and pursue a new path as a writer. It’s been a road of many tangents and fourteenyears on. She’s married and has a 10-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son. Her Bruntwood shortlisted...

Caro Giles is an author and single parent-carer. She livesin Glasgow with her four daughters. Her first book, Twelve Moons is a memoir about her wild life in Northumberland with the girls, and her new book,Unschooled, is out now. Caro also writes a monthly column for Psychologies magazine. Instagram @carogileswrites Interviewed by Maggie Gordon-Walker for Mothers Uncovered www.mothersuncovered.com...

Maggie Gordon-Walker speaks to Daisie Lane, who is a mother of two, and writes poetry about motherhood which she shares online. She speaks honestly about maternal mental health, has run various workshops encouraging mothers to write about their experiences, set up an online community for mothers who gave birth in lockdown, and has published two books, including Motherhood in Lockdown - a compilati...

Maggie Gordon-Walker is delighted to speak to Becky Barnicoat, a mother to two boys, about her #matrescence, the juggle of motherhood with her creativity and much more. Becky is a cartoonist and writer for The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Grazia, and many more. Before becoming a full-time cartoonist, she spent 10 years working as an editor and writer at The Guardian. She is the aut...

Maggie speaks to the inspirational Sam Southern, who is a devoted mother of five children and a stepdaughter, navigating the complexities of life after losing her husband to suicide. As a manager of a service in Blackpool, she draws on her lived experiences to project manage initiatives that support those affected by suicide. She is a passionate advocate for suicide postvention support. Her journe...

Alisha Samms described making friends as a mother to be as hard as making friends in adulthood. You introduce yourself and don't feel like you're getting much from other mums. You're just left on your own. So she founded the group The Mamahood Space, a relaxed group that meets up twice a week. The groups in Birmingham and Wolverhampton and where participants just have a chat about anything and eve...

Ashleigh Houlton is a former beauty features editor. She’s now a mum of a 3 year old son, with a blog on motherhood. She has had many hurdles in her journey, both to motherhood and thereafter, having experienced adenomyosis, described as the ‘the evil sister of endometriosis’. The indomitable Ashley has not let it stop her. She makes sense of her new sphere of life on Substack and Instagram as Mot...

Kelly Thistlethwaite is a trauma informed yoga and breath work instructor and nervous system educator working with pregnant women and new mothers to aid their general health and well-being. She is a #matrescence coach, combining it with her skills and passion of somatic approaches. She has a particular interest in supporting women following birth trauma and loss. The passion for this comes from he...

When I became aware of the word matrescence, meaning the process of becoming a mother, I could see immediately the importance of it. The word was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael in 1973, but is not well known in the UK outside of medical circles, unlike the very familiar adolescence. Both are times of hormonal fluctuations and bodily changes, when a new identity emerges and emotions run riot...

Beverley Pannell is from Sussex but was living in Aberdeen when she gave birth to her child. She  tells the story of the birth that was traumatic and she felt very unprepared for and also about the baby loss that preceded it.  She now lives in Horsham with her partner and two year old daughter. Beverley found her transition to motherhood very uphill, and often felt like she wasn’t thinking or feel...

We speak to the fabulous and inspirational Emma whose daughter Hannah’s mental health was affected by a traumatic incident when she was eight, turning a confident and happy child doing well at school into one who had three fixed exclusions in a year. Emma, already working with families whose children had additional challenges with her organisation SELFA, had to relearn parenting to support her dau...

Join us as we delve into the inspirational Secret Life of Mothers as we hear real stories from real women sharing the real story of Motherhood. Be prepared for raft of stories around courage, resilience, wit and strength - all through the eyes of a Mother. A podcast about the real story of Motherhood told by real women from through their own lived experience.