We're back from our summer break. And to ease back in, we've made a mini episode: our four favourite terms to retire, played back to back for the first time.

If you're new here, every episode we take a word or phrase about motherhood that isn't working and give it a proper send off. This one gathers the best of them in one place, and heard together they make a bigger point than any of them do alone.

We start with baby brain, the phrase that tells women they're losing it right when the research says the opposite. The maternal brain isn't shrinking, it's specialising, and by midlife it can actually look younger than it did before. This is not baby brain. It's neuroprotection.

Then baby blues, which Bianca calls out for what it really is: the fastest hormonal crash in human biology, dressed up as something cute. There's honesty here about the day three drop and what it actually feels like from the inside, plus the line that matters most, that anything lasting beyond two weeks deserves real support, not a shrug.

We take on the village next, the myth that community just appears when you need it. It doesn't. You build it, from a WhatsApp group, a nursery run, a partner who flexes, and every piece of that patchwork costs something. And we finish on maternity leave, the word that frames one of the biggest transitions of your life as time off. It isn't leave. It's becoming.

This is a short one to tide you over. We're back next week with a full episode and a new structure that includes your questions, so if there's something you want us to answer on the show, we want to hear it.

Come and find us on Instagram at @matrescenceunfiltered, and if you've got a question or just want to say hello, email us at [email protected]. If this one gave you something, send it to someone who needs to hear it.

Your working day was built around a hormone cycle that resets every 24 hours. Yours doesn't. So why are we all still measuring ourselves against it?

Sophie Cliff is the author of The Hustle Cure and Choose Joy, a coach and the founder of The Joyful Coach. Seven years ago she walked away from a corporate career because she could see the trade-off coming: be ambitious, or be present. Pick one. She decided not to. Today she runs a growing business on three days of childcare a week, went back to work 10 weeks after both of her babies, and has the positive psychology research to explain exactly why it works.

We get into why almost every productivity book she picked up in pregnancy was written by a man with someone else handling his life admin, and what happens when you stop trying to work like one. Sophie explains the 24 hour male hormone cycle the entire working world is built around, what your own cycle actually means for when you do your best thinking, and why waking up at 5am is not a moral achievement but simply the length of a piece of DNA. She also tells us about the nap she takes during work hours and the moment she stopped apologising for it.

There is honesty here too. Sophie burnt out at the start of this year while writing a book about burnout, and she talks openly about what that taught her. We cover how she and her husband divide the mental load through explicit conversations rather than assumed ones, the shoulds she has shed in motherhood from parenting camps to the myth of having it all together, and why prioritising joy is not selfish at all but the thing quietly fuelling your resilience, your relationships and your career.

If you have ever felt like the game is rigged, it is. This one is about playing it your way.

A note from us: we're taking August off for a summer break, and we'll be back with more brilliant guests in September.

You can find Sophie at sophiecliff.com, over on Instagram at @sophiecliff, on her podcast Practical Positivity, and in her book The Hustle Cure.

Last episode, we named the cost. This one, we do something about it.

First, Rose goes solo through It's a Rich Man's World, the book from the founders of Female Invest that reframes the whole thing. Why the person you marry is the biggest financial decision of your life. Why women live longer but retire poorer and sicker. Why motherhood still costs women almost everything.

Bianca joins for the practical half. The exact accounts they use. Pensions, and why they might be the most powerful tool you are ignoring. The tax-free childcare most parents never claim. And how to start investing when every app feels built for someone else. Not financial advice. Just two women telling you what has actually worked. Part two of two.

Nobody hands you the invoice. But becoming a mother has a price, and it is bigger than you think. The cost of raising a child to eighteen. The 42% drop in a mother's earnings. The nearly £100 billion the economy loses every year when women step back.

This episode puts numbers on the things that usually go unspoken. And as always, we flip the story. This is not about what women give up. It is about what the economy takes for granted and never pays for.

Rose brings the data. Bianca brings the reality of doing this maths for the first time, in real time. If the sums have never quite added up for you, they don't. And it is not your fault. Part one of two.

In this episode, Bianca and Rose break down what's actually happening inside a new mother's brain in those first twelve weeks known as the fourth trimester, and why "baby brain" is one of the most misunderstood phrases in motherhood. Because your brain isn't failing. It's remodelling, the same kind of major neuroplastic shift as adolescence, trimming and strengthening the connections that make you sharper at reading emotion, detecting threat, and keeping a tiny human alive on almost no sleep.

They get into why everything suddenly feels louder. Why your nervous system and your baby's are, for a while, essentially one shared system learning to divide. And why the guilt so many new mothers carry, for needing help, for feeling depleted, for not bouncing back, might be less about personal failure and more about a species that was never designed to do this alone.

If you've ever looked in the mirror in those early weeks and thought, "why don't I feel like myself," this episode won't fix your sleep. But it might change the story you're telling yourself about why.

Women are using AI about 25% less than men. Lauren Ingram is on a mission to close that gap before it sets.

We sit down with the founder of AI Girl Gang to talk about the skills gap no one has named yet, and why mothers have the most to gain and the most to lose. Lauren tells us how she built her whole career from her phone on maternity leave, newborn under one arm, talking to tech leaders at 2am between feeds. She shares the early pregnancy loss that sparked a strange creative renaissance, and the name AI Girl Gang itself. And she makes the case for trading the fear of being left behind for curiosity, play, and opting in.

Honest, warm, and a proper nudge to stop watching from the sidelines.

Find Lauren

AI Girl Gang: aigirlgang.tech

Substack: aigirlgang.substack.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ingramlauren

Instagram: @laurennextbigthing

Your brain didn't break when you became a mother. It got an upgrade.

Clinical psychologist Dr Rosanna M joins us on compassion-focused therapy and the three systems that run how we feel: threat, drive and soothe. Motherhood sharpens two of them. You hear the cry before anyone else does. You hold a hundred things in your head at once. The one that quietly slips is soothe, the rest and the steadiness that hold it all together.

So we get practical about getting it back. A grounding exercise you can do mid-feed. The five percent shift. And why a treat is never just a treat.

Warm, clever and genuinely useful. Find Rosanna on Instagram at @DrRosannaM.

• Guided breathing exercise (diaphragmatic breathing with Sophie, Nuffield Health): https://247.nuffieldhealth.com/videos/diaphragmatic-breathing-with-sophie
• Values vs goals, getting a sense of what matters to us again (video): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-sMFszAaa7C9poytIAmBvA
• The Happiness Trap Bull's Eye worksheet (PDF): https://thehappinesstrap.com/upimages/Long_Bull's_Eye_Worksheet.pdf
• More from Rosanna, Becoming Mum resources: https://becomingmum.co.uk/resources/

This episode is about the body. We spend a lot of time on this show on the neurological side of matrescence, but the physical transformation gets far less honest airtime. This week we change that.

Rose brings her research and coaching background, drawing out the link between movement, the nervous system, and identity. Bianca joins three weeks postpartum, asking the questions she is living through right now. And our first ever guest, Gemma Folkard, brings over a decade of teaching and a down to earth way of talking about the postpartum body.

Gemma is a Pilates and strength trainer, a mother of three, and the founder of Shape Pilates. We talk about why she does not see ambition the way she was taught to, how she built a business around her family rather than the other way round, and why she is wary of the phrase bounce back. She makes the case that softness is not weakness, that most postpartum healing happens where you cannot see it, and that breathing, not the gym, is where new mums should start.

For this episode's term to retire, we get into baby brain and bounce back, and why both deserve to go.

Whether you are in the newborn fog right now or further along and still making sense of it, there is something here for you.

Where to find Gemma

Instagram: @shape_pilates

App: Shape Pilates London (Apple App Store and Google Play)

Website: shape-pilates.com

Sensitivity note: this episode discusses birth trauma, emergency caesarean, and the emotional aftermath of a birth that didn't go to plan. If you're currently pregnant or in early postpartum, please listen with care.

You write a birth plan before you know what birth actually does. Bianca's didn't hold.

Episode eleven is about what happens after. Two weeks on from her son arriving, Bianca sits down with Rose to talk honestly about her emergency caesarean and the shame that followed it. Why she felt she'd failed at something her body was supposed to just do. Why that feeling landed so hard.

This one isn't Rose explaining the science. It's Rose listening, asking, trying to understand it alongside Bianca, using some data along the way. One study found 65% of women reported feelings of failure after birth, and they pointed all of it at themselves.

Then they get into the words. Why "natural birth" carries so much, what it quietly says about every other kind, and why they want it gone.

This is for anyone who has grieved the birth they planned for while loving the baby they got.

Bianca recorded this episode two weeks after giving birth. On the same day, as it happens, that the UK appointed its first ever National Maternity Advisor.

It is a meaningful step. Michelle Welsh MP will work with families, the NHS, and ministers to push for safer, more compassionate care. It happened because women like Louise Thompson and Theo Clarke refused to stop pushing.

But the announcement said nothing about what happens after the hospital door closes. The identity shift of matrescence did not feature. The neurological rewiring did not feature. The return to a workplace with no framework for what just happened to you did not feature.

Bianca is living all of it in real time. And the research backs her up: the brain changes of matrescence are not temporary. They are lasting adaptations. The support infrastructure for them does not exist.

This episode is for anyone who has felt the drop-off. From the moment the hospital door closed behind them to the moment they were expected to function as if nothing fundamental had changed.