Liz Longley sat on her porch and cried. Her daughter was upstairs. The album she was writing was called "New Life." She told me she didn't get to choose whether she had postpartum depression. It just showed up.
Three of the most honest conversations I've had on this podcast have been with mothers describing the part of motherhood that doesn't make the highlight reel. Liz Longley, Amy Speace, and Lauren Lucas described three different seasons of motherhood. All three told me some version of the same thing. Nobody warned them.
Amy Speace became a mother at 50, through IVF and an egg donor. Her son Huck arrived. Then her father died. Then postpartum depression hit her as Huck was weaning, which she did not see coming. She had to go on antidepressants and mood stabilizers. Underneath all of it, something else surfaced. Pent-up rage from her childhood that she didn't even know she was carrying started coming out. Her marriage ended in the wake of it.
She told me she never expected to be a mother at all. And then she said this: "If Huck is the gift of all of this, I do it over and over and over again." She meant the IVF, the loss of her father, the depression, the medication, the marriage. All of it. Over and over.
Liz Longley's album "New Life" came out of the same kind of season. Two and a half year old daughter. The news on in the background. She told me, "I brought New Life to a dying planet." She said it the way someone says a thing they've already said to themselves a hundred times. She wasn't asking for sympathy. She was naming the weight. The album is what she made out of it.
Liz Longley Performing During a Set at Red Stool Sessions in Roswell, GA, May 8 2026
Lauren Lucas became a mother right as the COVID lockdowns began. Her co-write "Motherlode" is the cleanest description of new motherhood I've heard in a song. "Up before dawn with an elbow to the face." She told me nobody warned her how isolating it was going to be. You are always on, for this little being, and there is no off switch. The chorus reframes the whole thing. "When the hardest job's the one you love the most, that's how you know you hit the motherlode."
All three of them were unsurprised they had ended up in this place. They were surprised that nobody had told them it was coming. There is a script for new motherhood that everyone agrees to repeat in public. Glow. Bond. Bliss. These three women are writing a different script, in their songs and out loud in interviews. The joy is in there too. The hard part is sitting right next to it.
If you are a mother who has felt any version of what they describe, explore their Curious Goldfish episodes on YouTube. You aren't alone in any of it.
Happy Mother's Day.