By Emily Beecher
Image courtesy of Pixabay
There are three Ps all mums need in their life right now: the opportunity to pee in peace, prosecco and podcasts. I say this as someone who until lockdown didn’t really understand podcasts. I already have someone talking at me constantly, why would I need more chatter? But the truth is, over the last four months podcasts have become the friends I couldn’t socialise with (only more portable).
The world of podcast is like a big party, where you can dip in and out of different topics as though you’re happily socialising with different friends. Depending on your mood, you can dig into an unsolved murder, or cry with laughter at unexpected ridiculous situations, or ponder the meaning of life, politics and interior design. There is one for everything, regardless of how niche. Wanna know about bees, Tom Cruise movies, or running a laundromat? There’s a podcast for that! And when it comes to parenting there are loads to choose from.
The thing I truly love about podcasts is that you don’t take the journey on your own - the hosts are your guide to whatever is going on in your world. Because you don’t need to be in one place to take in the information, podcasts are the perfect companion to transform mundane moments into ones of drama. I’ve started listening to podcasts when I’m cleaning the house or doing laundry. I can move from room to room bringing the conversation with me (and conveniently my headphones mostly block out the constant demands for snacks or something to do).
As a mum there is so much information out there to comprehend, debate and understand. I pretty much gave up on parenting books when my daughter was a toddler but parenting podcasts? It’s so interesting to actually get to listen to real people (and minor celebs) talk about how they handle the parenting challenges that get thrown at them. I’m all over that because it lets me hear how other people do things and what works for them and what doesn’t. The ‘real life’-ness of podcasts is as comforting as it can be moving and entertaining.
After such a hot and heavy affair with podcasts, it probably comes as no surprise that I’ve ended up starting my own. As the creator of The Good Enough Mums Club musical, I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to loads of different mums up and down the country about their experiences and lives as mothers. I’ve met mums in a mosque in Birmingham, those whose families live in the shadow of Grenfell, mums who have just given birth and mums whose children have died, and every single time I’ve come away from those conversations wishing I could have shared them with so many other people. The Good Enough Mums Club podcast does just that.
My co-host Jade Samuels and I speak to a different mum each week about their experiences, their trials and their triumphs and how they handle everything from childbirth to Tik Tok. It is an absolute honour to get to be a part of that world. It’s something as mums that we can do to help us feel like we belong to this community of mothers, that we’re not alone in our struggles and that actually, sometimes being good enough is best.