ON MOTHERHOOD… with Jessie Ware and Francesca Segal

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2:15That's 15 % off at masterclass.com slash fail. Masterclass.com slash fail. Welcome back to How to Fail. Today, we're diving into a subject so many of us carry, motherhood. Not the glossy, idealized version we're often sold, but the real thing, the version that is raw, complicated and contradictory. First, singer-songwriter Jessie Ware reflects on becoming a parent while building a career in the public eye. She talks about the pressure she felt to prove she could do it all and how, with hindsight, she's learning to slow down, be present and show herself just a bit more kindness. Then, writer Francesca Siegel shares the story of her twin's premature birth and the unexpected realities of early motherhood in a neonatal ward.

3:05She reflects on the gap between the idealised narrative of birth and the more complex and difficult reality many mothers experience. Plus, she explores the powerful solidarity she found among the other women there. I hope these stories bring you a sense of comfort and a feeling that you are never alone. First up, let's hear from Jessie Ware.

3:32how much do you think being more in control of what you think and being able to express it to someone is partly as a result of becoming a parent is there any connection I think there is a connection but I also think it's potentially due to my imperfections of trying to okay how am I going to go about this? So being a parent first time around, I felt like I needed to prove to myself and to my work that I could do it all. I can be it all. I could be perfect, as perfect as possible. Working mother, back to work, doesn't matter. I'm there. I'm doing it. I'm still making sure my daughter has her food every day.

4:18I'm there for bath time. I do short sessions because that's how I work and I'm doing everything and I'm balancing and I'm juggling and I'm doing it great and actually oh my god when I think about it now I was really struggling to pretend that everything was okay and actually try to prove to a rather sexist ageist industry that you can have it all um and I don't think I needed to do that and I regret that and I do have again like from memories of times where my daughter was able to come on tour with us equally it was incredibly stressful and emotionally exhausting. And I just kind of wish I'd been a bit kinder to myself and maybe lived in the present a bit more and taken that maternity leave.

5:00But I think I felt like my career wasn't at a place where I could take time off. And because I felt like I needed to prove that it wasn't going to change me, it wasn't going to change how I work and my strong work ethic. And I regret that a lot. Weirdly, second time around with my son, I had this added thing of having the podcast and you know he was at the dinner table with me and whatever nana cherry doing a podcast but it felt different and i felt more in control and i felt it was a pleasure and it was an easier way to work and be a parent but yet again i'm finding myself in especially during lockdown you know my husband has a very different approach to parenting them we agree and we are so united but he's brilliant at being in the present and he's he gets incredibly frustrated when i'm on my phone when i'm doing about 10 000 things at once wherever i make it bloody i mean this is not me trying to sound like i'm a perfect person at all but of course i wanted to make a wild garlic pesto whilst also okaying the sound thing for the graham norton performance that i'm doing and also okaying the setup and also trying to do a half-assed jigsaw puzzle with my daughter when actually what i should have just bloody done is put the phone away not done the fucking food put a waffle in the toaster and sat with my daughter and done the jigsaw properly you know and I still I'm still working that out and I'm not very good at it and I do try and do too many things and I think failure to live in the present happened with me not enjoying that initial period of being a new artist and having these amazing things happen I was always like fearful of what was going to happen next or that it would be taken away and I should have just enjoyed that and again now being a parent this awful thing that's happened to the world has actually made me have to slow down and I'm still trying to slow down but actually it's kind of been the best thing for me and my family to be able to have an accidental maternity leave even though yeah I am still working I don't know you know it makes total sense yeah yeah I didn't answer your question about how being a parent made me more confident but there you go you got something it was a great answer it was thank you no it was And I do, I think I have that thing of trying to do multiple things at once and filling up my diary to breaking point.

7:12And for me, it comes from a fear that I'm not always going to have these chances. And so I want to make them, ironically, it's that I want to make the most of the present prevents me from living in the present. I totally agree. And it's that thing of the fear that if you say, I think I had to learn how to say no. and I really struggle with that but it's been the most powerful thing I could ever do and the most fulfilling thing to do and I don't know about you but yeah I do do a lot and I do juggle a lot and I think I thrive on that in some ways was it I think it was in the Jess Phillips one that I listened to with you it was about like she likes having lots on she likes it and I do think I kind of come alive when I've got lots on my plate but it's about being able to deal with with each one the right way and but yeah I mean I forgot that to answer your question about the other confidence I think the podcast has given me the best confidence that's the thing that's weirdly it kind of was all come back around to journalism not journalism I don't know if it is journalism but like just having this other job where I just feel safer and so that thing about being I don't know whether it's for you you know you're a novelist you're a writer you're a journalist you're a podcaster and weirdly you can wear all these hats now Elizabeth but you can also potentially feel less worried about I'm putting words I do I do no I feel I do feel that I feel the biggest lesson and we spoke about this at the beginning the biggest lesson to me from the podcast and the book that I wrote that came out of it was that people responded most to me when I was being most honest and vulnerable and like you I'd been sort of scared of doing that for obvious reasons I mean not everyone feels like doing that quite sensibly but that has been something that I feel like oh well that's a relief because I don't have to pretend to be anything or anyone so that's that's helped me live much more in the present because I can just be myself but do you have strategies now that bring you back to the present do you have any tactics do you meditate oh my god I fucking paid for that headspace so did I about two fucking times um I got stressed then about meditating I got stressed oh my god totally the day totally oh that fucking reminder you're like oh fuck off I'm fucking stressing out fuck off um I can switch off most when I'm cooking and it doesn't mean that it's an idyllic calming atmosphere in the kitchen my husband would say completely the opposite he's like you are so messy it makes me so annoyed but I chopping cooking focusing on something where you can't be on your phone where you can't be having a conversation where potentially you could be listening to music or a podcast that's the way that I slow down but equally my favorite thing is having the kids in the kitchen whilst I'm cooking I can watch them I'm cooking they're doing something everyone's happy I mean this barely happens because my husband my son will be like tugging at my legs.

10:12Now he's such a greedy bastard. He knows when I'm cooking, he knows that this means that I'm going to be delivering something soon to him. And so he's so greedy that he kind of just, this is his way of communicating with me that he's like, yeah, come on then, where's the food? But no, that's something that I'm really enjoying during this lockdown, just cooking, enjoying that. But yeah, my phone is my biggest enemy in technology. It's like the worst thing for me and my family and I could be glued to it all day working. I could always find time to fit in another email.

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12:57Modern day makeup that's clean, strategic and multifunctional for effortless routines. For a limited time, our listeners are getting a free shimmer face oil on their first purchase when they use code FAIL at checkout. Just head to jonesroadbeauty.com and use code FAIL at checkout. after you purchase they'll ask you where you heard about them please support our show and tell them that we sent you you talk there about the failure of physically staying pregnant but how much was it also a failure of the narrative you had told yourself about what the first days of motherhood would be like oh enormously i think because particularly now because we're all meant to be you know we're all so hyper educated about skin to skin and about those early bonding and about trying to breastfeed immediately and all these things that are amazing aspirations and very powerful bonding mechanisms between mothers and babies but for an awful lot of women actually not just women whose babies come prematurely but for lots of reasons women who have traumatic births of other sorts those early moments aren't possible and they are so cherished in this narrative we have of what's owed to these babies that you immediately feel like you have damaged your children in some way you know what will their attachment look like if I haven't held them skin to skin within the first half an hour or in my case the first three days and I think an awful lot of women are left feeling guilty and anxious about the sort of those lacks because that narrative is so pervasive but actually you're incredibly lucky if you get to hold your baby immediately after birth and there's no intervention at all when your birth went swimmingly and you feel comfortable and there's an awful lot of women who don't have that.

14:35I think there's also this pervasive narrative about how you feel an overwhelming rush of love for your baby as soon as your baby is born. And I know that not everyone feels that because friends who've had children have been honest with me about that. But what was that like for you, given as you say that you couldn't hold your babies immediately and given that you first saw them for a full day after they'd entered the world? Did you feel an overwhelming rush of love? Because they were so fragile as well and again not looking like the baby is meant to look in a romantic comedy yeah how did that feel I think in some ways I did perhaps even more than if a sort of a big fat bouncing you know romantic comedy baby had been plopped onto my lap smiling because I felt so desperately protective and worried for them there was just a sort of big soup of hormones and worry terror and love and fear and guilt, enormous amounts of guilt, that we'd sort of found ourselves there.

15:37And perhaps if I hadn't walked up the stairs at quite such a speed the day before, and God knows what, you know, nobody knows why it happened. So I was left free to construct narratives in which it was always my fault. You call them Aila and Bila in the book. Why did you call them that? We hadn't even started thinking about names. and the hospital called them Twin One and Twin Two so it seemed much more sort of intimate to call them A and B for some reason and then that became A-lit and B-lit and then that was so sweet and became really their names that we kind of didn't get around to giving them names for ages and it was only when our very lovely consultant threatened to call social services that we finally decided to bust out the name books and give them proper names.

16:18It seemed less important than keeping them alive in truth. I think if we'd had names for them before they came it would have been different but having not even started there was something very superstitious about it. Will you tell us about the mirror and what happened with the mirror? Yeah so the first time I held one of them I held ailet and it's not a straightforward thing holding a premature baby you need sometimes a nurse sometimes two one to lift the baby and one to lift this amazing salad of wires that this kind of spaghetti junction that comes off them and they've got this paper fine skin so you can't tug on any of these cables that are attached to them.

16:53So you have to lie back in a chair and have this nurse, have a nurse deliver the baby to your chest and then you can't really move them once they're there and so it was the most incredible, overwhelming experience having this baby on my chest. I couldn't really see her, she was tiny and she was tucked up under my chin and it's really not done to talk to the other mothers, the other parents on the ward. You're in such intimate moments with your babies and such painful things happening that you really, there's no eye contact or communication at all whilst you're tending to your babies on the ward.

17:25But I was saying to Gabe over and over, I can't see her, I can't see her. And one of the other mothers, Sophie, who then became one of my most precious friends on the ward and since, sent her husband over and gave me a hand mirror. And that's how you look at your baby's face when you're holding a premature baby on your chest. It's one of the most moving moments of the book I found, and I'm welling up now even thinking of it, because it's such a beautiful moment of solidarity between two women in a traumatic and similar situation that you can't possibly understand unless you've been through it.

18:01And as I mentioned at the beginning, mothership is also testament to the friendships that you forged on that ward and I wanted to ask you why you called it Mothership. Well I can't take credit for the title that was a lovely friend of mine Nat who came up with it and I think it's brilliant and as soon as she suggested it I thought that's it that has to be. I mean you turned down some of my suggestions just FYI. They were excellent. Thank you. I can't remember any of them but I'm sure they were excellent. I can't remember any of them either. So probably right not to choose a deeply unmemorable title but please feel well done Nat well done that with mothership please continue um yeah well what I really wanted to write was it was threefold really my ambitions in writing this but one was to write a love letter to my daughters but also to write a love letter to the NHS and ultimately to the other women to the mothers of this ward because that comradeship really was what saved me and I just think it's an extraordinary example an extraordinary environment in which women are free to support one another as we have always done in an atmosphere that is it was nobody spoke on the wards but you were endlessly expressing breast milk for these babies who can't eat orally they're fed by nasogastric tubes so we were in what we call the milking shed endlessly this little room with all the breast pumps and you're sitting in a circle tits out completely exposed to one another in almost every way and that was really where these incredible friendships began very very quickly in parallel with sort of lifelong lasting friendships, also just really powerful human encounters that might only last an hour because you might never see that woman again, but you would talk incredibly frankly to one another.

19:39And my experience there was that it was just an incredibly supportive and almost kind of deliberately nurturing place. It felt to me as though everyone who came in understood that this was not a place for competition, this was not a place for discussions of, you know, well, how many days your baby was on a ventilator and how many days your... it was a source of such tremendous strength for me. There's a really interesting subplot to the book, which is about you finding your voice in that particular situation. So that when you started out as this new mother, you were still in the situation of being a people pleaser and a good girl and the one who didn't bother the doctors.

20:21And it was actually the other women who taught you that you had to stand up for your own children. So did it feel like that, that you were finding your voice through that process? Very much. I can't speak for anybody else, but I did not become a mother the moment my children were sort of lifted from me. I had to learn. That's so interesting, I think. You had to learn. I had to learn and I was slow and I learned by study, careful, rational study of other people around me. You know, Sophie taught me by spying on her really across the ward that I should be singing to them. It didn't cross my mind.

20:58I didn't know, of course you sing to babies, that's what babies need. They crave your voice. It's the only familiar thing they have. But it was watching Sophie that taught me that I should be singing to these babies in their incubators. And similarly, it was, you know, other friends whose robust interactions with the doctors and their bravery in taking hold of their children's medical care and understanding it and asking questions that made me realize the NHS is incredible. The doctors and nurses are incredible. But the only person who's there every day is you. The only person who saw what happened yesterday and will see what happens tomorrow are the parents.

21:32But it wasn't overnight.

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