The Wild Woman's Guide to Motherhood

To kick off the new season Meme, the host of The Wild Woman's Guide To Motherhood, shares her own journey of the wild pregnancy and freebirth of her second little girl, Indigo Atlas, just 3.5 months ago. You can connect with Meme on Instagram at @memetuohy

This freebirth story is a really powerful and important one to take the time to listen to. Ally's intuition and her deep connection with her baby guided her through a birth journey that strayed pretty far outside what the medical birthing system considers to be "normal" and would almost definitely have been intervened with quite heavily in a hospital setting. In births like this in hospital, women are left feeling like their bodies were incapable and failed them, but because Ally took full responsibility for her birth experience and, understanding the risks and guided by intuition, decided to stay home all the way through a 58 hour labour, she birthed Freya in her power and without intervention. This story reinforced my trust in birth and in the idea that the mother should be looked to as the authority on what's happening with her baby inside her. It also brings up even more questions for me around how narrow the range of what's considered "normal" is in hospital, and the mind-blowing amount of intervention happening that is not, in the true sense of the word, necessary.  

You can connect with Ally on Instagram at @ally_aura

In this first solo podcast episode I make a BIG surprise announcement! Tune in for a short, sweet, heartfelt chat with Meme.

What a wonderful, positive and inspiring birth story Sarah Cooper shares with us in this episode! Sarah planned to birth in hospital but, in labour, getting in the car and going there was the last thing she wanted to do. Instead she simply stayed home and birthed her son Bodhi with the support of her partner and her doula, my dear friend Laura Haataja of Birthing from the Heart. There is so much richness in this episode, from healing her relationship with her menstrual cycle through acupuncture prior to conceiving, to really connecting in with and listening to her intuition in birth and then setting up for a deeply supported and held postpartum, there is so much to take away from this conversation. It's a long one, but so worth listening all the way through. Enjoy!

You can connect with Sarah on Instagram at @ms.sjcooper

This conversation with Leila Armour is a beautiful exploration of her journey into motherhood and of how her own experience of a supported postpartum, and her wish for more women to have the same, led to creating the beautiful "Village for Mama" recipe book & cards. She has since done an in-depth training in postpartum nutrition and moved into working 1-on-1 with new mothers as a postpartum doula. I love Leila's focus on normalising asking for support as mothers, as mothering was never meant to be done in isolation. 

You can find Leila on Instagram at @villageformama or through her website at https://villageformama.com/ where you can also order your own copy of the Village for Mama book. 

I can't wait for you to listen to this conversation I had with Fiona of Mama Matters! She's a wealth of knowledge around infant and child sleep and relationship-focused, good-enough, gentle, responsive, no-pressure, reflective parenting. Fiona's down-to-earth, supportive approach to baby sleep and to parenting in general has made her someone that I've returned to again and again to find clarity and ideas for things to try when I needed a change during these early years of parenting Lua. We cover a lot of topics in here so sit back and enjoy!

You can connect with Fiona at https://www.mamamatters.com.au/ or on Instagram at @mamamatters.au

I'm so excited to have my dear friend Tania on for the first full-length episode of The Wild Woman's Guide to Motherhood! Tania's birth of her son Koa back in 2018 was the second birth I had ever attended as a doula, so it's pretty special and poignant that she's my first podcast guest as well. I'm so grateful to her for choosing again to walk with me and share her life with me when I'm taking the first steps of a new journey. In this episode Tania shares about both of her pregnancies and births, as well as her transition from maiden to mother which she felt took several years, in contrast to how it's often portrayed as being an almost instantaneous change. She felt unfortunately that the birth centre birth of her son, Koa, was deeply interfered with and sabotaged by the midwives present and the narrow restrictions of the medical system. When she fell pregnant with her second baby, she delved into the deep internal work examining and healing the trauma from her first birth and connecting with her power. Through this she decided that she wanted to give birth this time on her own terms, and had a beautiful, primal, healing freebirth of her daughter Minka. 

Welcome to The Wild Woman's Guide to Motherhood - a safe space for exploring and expanding our ideas of what it means to be a mother. This introduction will give you a little bit of an idea of what to expect from this podcast.