A single line from a child can rewire a parent’s life. When Bev’s daughter wished for “the happy Mammy” from the zoo lights, it wasn’t a throwaway comment—it was a mirror. What follows is an unflinching, strangely joyful journey through grief, postnatal anxiety and psychosis, birth trauma, and a cervical screening delay that could have ended everything.

We start where she didn’t: the motorbike accident that injured her niece and planted guilt she wouldn’t name for years. Then we sit beside the hospital cot where baby Emily fought and died, and with the family that weathered more loss again. Bev explains how Irish stoicism—be grand, keep going—hid the damage until motherhood cracked it open. She details the compulsions, the catastrophic thoughts, and the moment in a lift when she finally let herself cry. She also shares the hospital scare with Piper that stitched old trauma to new fear, and the miscarriage she endured at work because duty felt safer than stopping.

The hardest pivot comes with a phone call: high-grade cervical changes from a 2014 smear that never reached her. She takes us through the waiting, the Googling spiral, the LLETZ procedure, and the decision to use her small platform to get women to book their smear tests. Then comes Otis’s birth—fast, dismissed, and scarring—and the registrar who suggested mental health support. That conversation unlocked six years of unpredictability and the choice to accept therapy. We talk generational patterns, raising kids in quieter homes, and rebuilding confidence after bullying. And because Bev is a stylist, we celebrate how clothes can become care—how helping others feel right in their skin helped her claim her own strengths.

This is a candid, compassionate listen for anyone navigating maternal mental health, trauma recovery, or cervical health. It’s also a nudge to stop pretending you’re fine and make the call—book the smear, ask for help, tell the truth to someone you trust. If this resonated, follow the show, tap five stars, and share it with a friend who needs a brave, hopeful story today.

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