How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - ON MOTHERHOOD… with Jessie Ware and Francesca Segal

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

Motherhood is often portrayed purely as a joyful, magical chapter of life – and while it certainly can be – we rarely speak openly about the hard, exhausting and deeply challenging truths. In this episode, singer‑songwriter Jessie Ware reflects on becoming a parent while building a career in the public eye. She talks about the pressure she felt to prove she could do everything at once, the exhaustion that followed and the grounding process of learning to be present rather than perfect. We also hear from novelist Francesca Segal, who shares the story of her twins’ premature birth and the unexpected reality of early motherhood inside a neonatal ward. She describes the chasm between the idealised story of birth and the lived experience many mothers face. I hope this episode brings comfort to anyone navigating the complexities of motherhood. May it remind you that every journey is different, that there is no single right way to parent and that you are never alone in this experience. Listen to Jessie’s full episode of How to Fail here: http://swap.fm/l/8cUuwGs4vc7tAXiPcDab Listen to Francesca’s full episode of How to Fail here: swap.fm/l/MsPtRFvgP8z18GLPgpdL 🔗 LINKS + MENTIONS: Maternal Support: https://maternalmentalhealthalliance.org/ https://mothersformothers.co.uk/ Elizabeth’s Substack: https://theelizabethday.substack.com/ Join the How To Fail community: https://howtofail.supportingcast.fm/#content 💌 LOVE THIS EPISODE? Subscribe on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts Leave a 5⭐ review – it helps more people discover these stories 👋 Follow How To Fail & Elizabeth: Instagram: @howtofailpod @elizabday TikTok: @howtofailpod @elizabday Website: www.elizabethday.org Have a failure you’re trying to work through for Elizabeth to discuss? Click here to get in touch: howtofailpod.com How to Fail is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment Production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts To bring your brand to life in this podcast, email [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Not the glossy, idealised version we're often sold, but the real thing. The version that is raw, complicated and contradictory. First, singer-songwriter Jesse Ware reflects on becoming a parent while building a career in the public eye. She talks about the pressure she felt to prove she could. do it all, and how with hindsight, she's learning to slow down, be present and show herself just a bit more kindness. Then writer Francesca Siegel shares the story of her twins' premature birth and the unexpected realities of early motherhood in a neonatal ward. She reflects on the gap between the idealised narrative of birth and the more complex and difficult reality

many mothers experience. Plus, she explores the powerful solidarity she found among the other women there. I hope these stories bring you a sense of comfort and a feeling that you are never alone. First up, let's hear from Jessie Ware. How much do you think being more in control of what you think and being able to express it to someone is partly as a result of becoming a parent? Is there any connection? I think there is a connection, but I also think it's potentially due to my imperfections of trying to, okay, how am I going to go about this? So being a parent, first time round, I felt like I needed to prove to myself and to my work that I could do it all, I can be it all, I could be perfect, as perfect as possible.

Working mother, back to work, doesn't matter, I'm there, I'm doing it. I'm still making sure my daughter has her food every day. I'm there for bath time. I do short sessions because that's how I work and I'm doing everything and I'm balancing and I'm juggling and I'm doing it great. And actually, oh my God, when I think about it now, I was really struggling to pretend that everything was okay and actually tried to prove to a rather sexist-ageist industry that you can have it all. And I don't think I needed to do that and I regret that. And I do have, again, like from memories of times where my daughter was able to come on tour with us, equally it was incredibly stressful and emotionally exhausting and I just kind of wish I'd been a bit

kinder to myself and maybe lived in the present a bit more and taken that maternity leave but I think I felt like my career wasn't at a place where I could take time off and because I felt like I needed to prove that it wasn't going to change me it wasn't going to change how I work at my strong work ethic and I regret that a lot weirdly second time around with my son I had this added thing of having the podcast. And, you know, he was at the dinner table with me and whatever Naina Cherry doing a podcast, but it felt different. And I felt more in control. And I felt it was a pleasure and it was an easier way to work and be a parent. But yet again, I'm finding myself in, especially during lockdown, you know, my husband has a very different approach to parenting

them. We agree and we are so united. But he's brilliant at being in the present and he's he gets incredibly frustrated when I'm on my phone when I'm doing about 10,000 things at once. However, I make it bloody, I mean, this is not me trying to sound like I'm a perfect person at all. But of course, I wanted to make a wild garlic pesto whilst also okaying the sound thing for the Graham Norton performance that I'm doing. And also okaying the setup and also trying to do a half-ass jigsaw puzzle with my daughter when actually what I should have just bloody done is put the phone away, not done the

fucking food, put a waffle in the toaster and sat with my daughter and done the jigsaw properly. You know, and I'm still working that out, and I'm not very good at it, and I do try and do too many things. And I think failure to live in the present happened with me not enjoying that initial period of being a new artist and having these amazing things happen. I was always like fearful of what was going to happen next, although it would be taken away. And I should have just enjoyed that. And again, now being a parent, this awful thing that's happened to the world has actually made me have to slow down. And I'm still trying to slow down. but actually it's kind of been the best thing for me and my family to be able to have an accidental

maternity leave, even though, yeah, I am still working. I don't know. It makes total sense. Yeah, yeah. I didn't answer your question about how being a parent made me more confident, but there you go. You got something else as well. It was a great answer.

It was. Oh, thank you. No, it was. And I do, I think I have that thing of trying to do multiple things at once and filling up my diary to a breaking point. And for me, it comes from a fear that I'm not always going to have. have these chances. Yes. Yes. And so I want to make them, ironically, it's that I want to make the most of the presence prevents me from living in the present. I totally agree. And it's that thing of

the fear that if you say, I think I had to learn how to say no. And I really struggle with that. But it's been the most powerful thing I could ever do and the most fulfilling thing to do. And I don't know about you. But yeah, I do do a lot. And I do juggle a lot. And I think I thrive on that in some ways. I think it was in the Jess Phillips one that I listened to with you. It was about like she likes having lots on. She likes it. And I do think I kind of come alive when I've got lots on my plate. But it's about being able to deal with each one the right way. But yeah, I mean, I forgot that to answer your question about the other confidence, I think the podcast has given me the best confidence. That's the thing that's weirdly, it kind of always all come back around

to journalism, not journalism. I don't know if it is journalism, but like just having this other job where I just feel safer. And so that thing about being, I don't know whether it's for you, you know, you're a novelist, you're a writer, you're a journalist, you're a podcaster. And weirdly, you can wear all these hats now, Elizabeth, but you can also potentially feel less worried about. I'm putting words into the mouth, but I do. No, I feel, I do feel that. I feel the biggest lesson, and we spoke about this at the beginning, the biggest lesson to me from the podcast and the book that I wrote that came out of it was that people. responded most to me when I was being most honest and vulnerable. And like you, I'd been

sort of scared of doing that for obvious reasons. I mean, not everyone feels like doing that quite sensibly. But that has been something that I feel like, oh, well, that's relief because I don't have to pretend to be anything or anyone. So that's helped me live much more in the present because I can just be myself. But do you have strategies now that bring you back to the present? Do you you have any tactics? Do you meditate? Oh my God. I fucking paid for that headspace. So did I. About two fucking times.

I got stressed then about meditating. I got stressed about like 15 the day. Totally. Oh, that fucking remind it. You'd be like, oh, fuck off. I'm fucking stressing out. Fuck off. I can switch off most when I'm cooking.

And it doesn't mean that it's an idyllic, calming atmosphere in the kitchen. my husband would say completely the opposite. He's like, you are so messy. It makes me so annoyed. But I chopping, cooking, focusing on something where you can't be on your phone, where you can't be having a conversation where potentially you could be listening to music or a podcast. That's the way that I slow down.

But equally, my favorite thing is having the kids in the kitchen, whilst I'm cooking, I can watch them. I'm cooking. They're doing something. Everyone's happy. I mean, this barely happens because my husband, my, oh, my son will be like tugging. my legs. Now he's such a greedy bastard. He knows when I'm cooking. He knows that this means

that I'm going to be delivering something soon to him. And so he's so greedy that he kind of just this is his way of communicating with me that he's like, yeah, come on them. Where's the food? But no, that's something that I'm really enjoying during this lockdown, just cooking, enjoying that. But yeah, my phone is my biggest enemy in technology. It's like the worst thing for me and my family and I could be glued to it all day working. I could always find time. to fit in another email. Makeup has always mattered to me, but honestly, I cannot be dealing

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hyper-educated about skin to skin and about those early bonding and about trying to breastfeed immediately and all these things that are amazing aspirations and very powerful bonding mechanisms between mothers and babies, but for an awful lot of women, actually not just women whose babies come prematurely, but for lots of reasons, women who have traumatic births of other sorts, those early moments aren't possible. And they are so cherished in this narrative we have of what's owed to these babies that you immediately feel like you have damaged your children in some way. You know, what will their attachment look like if I haven't held them skin to skin within the first half an hour, or in my case, the first three days? And I think an awful lot of women

are left feeling guilty and anxious about the sort of those lacks because that narrative is so pervasive, but actually you're incredibly lucky if you get to hold your baby immediately after birth, and there's no intervention at all when your birth went swimmingly and you feel comfortable. And there's not a lot of women who don't have that. I think there's also this pervasive narrative about how you feel an overwhelming rush of love for your baby as soon as your baby is born. And I know that not everyone feels that because friends who've had children have been honest with me about that. But what was that like for you, given as you say, that you couldn't hold your babies immediately and given that you first saw them for a full day after they'd entered the world? Did you feel an overwhelming rush of love?

because they were so fragile as well. And again, not looking like the baby is meant to look in a romantic comedy. Yeah. How did that feel? I think in some ways I did, perhaps even more than if sort of a big fat bouncing, you know, romantic comedy baby had been plopped onto my lap, smiling, because I felt so desperately protective and worried for them. There was just a sort of big soup of hormones and worry, terror and love,

and fear and guilt, enormous amounts of guilt, that we'd sort of found ourselves there, and perhaps if I hadn't walked up the stairs at quite such a speed the day before, and God knows what, you know, that nobody knows why it happened. So I was left free to construct narratives in which it was always my fault.

You call them A-Let and B-Lut in the book. Why did you call them that? We hadn't even started thinking about names. And the hospital called them twin-1 and twin-2, so it seemed much more sort of intimate to call them A and B for some reason. and then that became A-Lit and B-Lut. And then that was so sweet and became really their names

that we kind of didn't get around to giving them names for ages. And it was only when our very lovely consultant threatened to call social services that we finally decided to bust out the namebooks and give them proper names. It seemed less important than keeping them alive in truth. I think if we'd had names for them before they came, it would have been different. But having not even started, there was something very superstitious about it. will you tell us about the mirror and what happened with the mirror?

Yeah, so the first time I held one of them, I held A-Lut, and it's not a straightforward thing holding a premature baby. You need a nurse sometimes two, one to lift the baby and one to lift this amazing salad of wires, this kind of spaghetti junction that comes off them. And they've got this paper-fine skin so you can't tug on any of these cables that are attached to them. So you have to lie back in a chair and have this nurse, have a nurse deliver the baby to your chest. and then you can't really move them once they're there. And so it was the most incredible, overwhelming experience having this baby on my chest.

I couldn't really see her. She was tiny and she was tucked up under my chin. And it's really not done to talk to the other mothers, the other parents on the ward. You're in very close proximity, but you're having such intimate moments with your babies and such painful things happening that there's no eye contact or communication at all

whilst you're tending to your babies on the ward. But I was saying to Gabe over and over, I can't see her. can't see her. And one of the other mothers, Sophie, who then became one of my most precious friends on the ward and since, sent her husband over and gave me a hand mirror. And that's how you look at your baby's face when you're holding a premature baby on your chest. It's one of the most moving moments of the book I found, and I'm welling up now, even thinking of it, because it's such a beautiful moment of solidarity between two women in a traumatic and sense. And

similar situation that you can't possibly understand unless you've been through it. And as I mentioned at the beginning, mothership is also testament to the friendships that you forged on that ward. And I wanted to ask you why you called it mothership. Well, I can't take credit for the title. That was a lovely friend of my Nat who came up with it. And I think it's brilliant. And as soon as she suggested it, I thought that's it. That has to be. I mean, you turned down some of my suggestions, just FYI. They were excellent. They were excellent. I can't I can't remember any of them, but I'm sure they were either. So probably right not to choose a deeply unmemorable title, but please feel well done that, well done that with mothership. Please continue.

Yeah, well what I really wanted to write was, it was threefold really my ambitions in writing this, but one was to write a love letter to my daughters, but also to write a love letter to the NHS and ultimately to the other women, to the mothers of this ward, because that comradeship really was what saved me. And I just think it's an extraordinary example, an extraordinary environment in which women are free to support one another, as we have always done in an atmosphere that is.

Nobody spoke on the wards, but you were endlessly expressing breast milk for these babies who can't eat orally. They're fed by nasogastric tubes. So we were in what we call the milking shed endlessly, this little room with all the breast pumps, and you're sitting in a circle, tits out, completely exposed to one and,

another in almost every way. And that was really where these incredible friendships began very, very quickly. In parallel with sort of lifelong lasting friendships, also just really powerful human encounters that might only last an hour, because you might never see that woman again, but you would talk incredibly frankly to one another. And my experience there was that it was just an incredibly supportive and almost kind of deliberately nurturing place. It felt to me, as though everyone who came in understood that this was not a place for competition, this was was not a place for discussions of, you know, well, how many days your baby was on a ventilator and how many days your, you know, it was a source of such tremendous strength for me.

There's a really interesting subplot to the book, which is about you finding your voice in that particular situation, so that when you started out as this new mother, you were still in the situation of being a people pleaser and a good girl and the one who didn't bother the doctors. and it was actually the other women who taught you that you had to stand up for your own children. So did it feel like that, that you were finding your voice through that process? Very much. I can't speak for anybody else, but I did not become a mother the moment my children were sort of lifted from me. I had to learn.

That's so interesting, I think. You had to learn. I had to learn. And I was slow. And I learned by study, careful, rational study of other. people around me. You know, Sophie taught me by spying on her really across the ward that I should be singing to them. It didn't cross my mind. I didn't know. Of course you sing to babies. That's what babies need. They crave your voice. It's the only familiar thing they have.

But it was watching Sophie that taught me that I should be singing to these babies and their incubators. And similarly, it was, you know, other friends whose robust interactions with the doctors and their bravery and taking hold of their children's medical care and understanding it and asking questions that made me realize. The NHS is incredible. The doctors and nurses are incredible. But the only person who's there every day is you. The only person who saw what happened yesterday and will see what happens tomorrow is other parents. But it wasn't overnight. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick. I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's Suicide Crisis Helpline. It's good to know just in case.

Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. I'm Craig Melvin. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. I've always been a glass half-full kind of guy. And now I'm talking to some people who look at the world that way too.

Some really fascinating folks who share their defining moments, their triumphs, their challenges. Their stories are funny and quite candid. So I hope you'll join me each week. And who knows, you might just come away with your own glass apple. Search Glass Half Full with Craig Nelson from today on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.