So I wondered if you could tell us how that affected your relationship with your mother when you were growing up and how did that all come to the fore when you were pregnant? i

mean i'm definitely not the first person to acknowledge or witness how sacrificial motherhood is i think it was made muddy in the sense that my mother was constantly battling with a demon that i was not privy to necessarily such an extractive experience and for any working mother navigating an illness like that, it is inevitably going to be witnessed by a child.

And I do make a point about the gendered nature of this as well.

To be witnessed by a daughter simultaneously is deeply complex.

And naturally part of the soul searching that I was always embarking upon as a girl then approaching adolescence was the origin story of my own body woes and also the origin story of my mother's.

When I found out throughout my own research and in speaking to my psychologist that anorexia was something inherited or, you know, something that could be both inherited Yeah, inheritable and cultural.

I found that incredibly enlightening and also deeply upsetting.

LAUGHTER

It just seems to me that that leaves this really big obvious gap where anybody else can come into with uh the veneer of authority and say i can give you certainty i can give you an answer um and in a lot of cases sell you sell you a product

Yeah, yeah, no, that's a really, really good point, you know, particularly in the arena of consumption, as you've made a point that the idea that I think what a lot of postpartum and perinatal women in general navigate is the ethical conundrums of consuming anything from a paracetamol to an antidepressant to, a substance like alcohol or cannabis, for example, and you're right that there is lacking research as to the impacts.

I don't want to say the ethicality because that becomes murky with moralism, but in terms of the actual scientific impacts on a fetus or a postpartum person's ability to breastfeed, for example, the quality of her milk.

So when you have a bunch of medical providers naturally saying, I don't actually know if you're able to take this substance or I'm not sure, that often is translated to you shouldn't.

Now when you've got someone that's feigning credibility online saying not only that you can but you should take this supplement instead, actually it's encouraging to be told that there is something that you can consume that's not loaded, that's not sort of potentially contentious.

I know a lot of women that have sacrificed their own health for due to the absence of research when it comes to the health of their fetuses by deciding not to take antidepressants, for example, when they have always in the past or something as small as not taking a cold and flu tablet because it could potentially tank someone's milk supply.

There's all of these sort of things here that threaten the symbiotic relationship with the mother and the fetus.

Where would you place it? Yeah,