Dr Renee White: [00:00:00] Knowledge is power, and we are all about empowering the mamas of the world. In each episode, we will unravel and interpret the latest research and evidence-based practices for pregnancy, postpartum, and motherhood. As mums and researchers ourselves, we have experienced firsthand the overwhelming complexity of information myths and those classic old wives tales.

Dr Renee White: I'm Dr. Renee White, and this is The Science of Motherhood. Hello and welcome to episode 171 of The Science of Motherhood. I am your host, Dr. Renee White. Thanks so much for joining me today. This is something new that we are doing on today's podcast. It's a bit of a podcast takeover now, I was interviewed last year by the gorgeous ladies from Not Another Onesie, and it was part of their [00:01:00] miniseries that they've got going.

Dr Renee White: And I was invited to come on and talk about matrescence and changes in self-identity and I guess, you know I'm always, I'm gonna talk about my personal experience and I'm also gonna weave in a lot of science behind it as well as what I have learned along the way personally and professionally. And, um, it was a fantastic chat and I said to the ladies at the end, you know.

Dr Renee White: I, I really get the opportunity to sit on the other side of the microphone and I thought, you know what? I think this would be really valuable listen for our Science of motherhood listeners as well. So we're doing a bit of a cross collaboration here, which, you know, I'm all about supporting other mums in business.

Dr Renee White: And so it's a really lovely opportunity to get them a little bit of awareness as well. And also just to kind of, you know, chat a bit more about matrescence . This is a topic that we probably don't [00:02:00] talk about enough on this podcast, so it's lovely to share this with you as well. Before we jump into the episode, I just wanted to remind everyone that if you are very keen to learn more about matrescence. If you are planning having a baby, or you're pregnant, you're just about to have a baby, and you're thinking, oh my goodness, what is this thing about matrescence? How should I start planning to, you know, welcome my newborn? And you might be a little bit overwhelmed with it all.

Dr Renee White: We have got a fantastic guide on our website, which is called our Quickie Guide. It's over 30 pages of what I like to call motherhood goodness. Um, essentially it's gonna springboard you into topics like how to keep your sanity when you're having a really rough day. It's got how to transition your toddlers with the new arrival of a bubby, how to prepare for a successful feeding [00:03:00] journey.

Dr Renee White: And one of my favorite things is that I always tell parents to be, you need to prep your fridge and freezer as if the zombies are coming and you are doomsdayers and so I have got a ton of recipes in there which you can start stocking your kitchen with and they are all postpartum specific, so repleting, all of those lost micronutrients that our babies suck the life out of us with lots of bang for your buck in there. So things that are high iron, high DHAs, high collagen, high vitamin C, all of those things. So if you really are looking for a quick guide to get you started in planning for what life looks like after the birth of your baby. Jump over to our website ifillyourcup.com head to our Freebies and Guides section and you can grab yourself the quickie guide over there.[00:04:00]

Dr Renee White: Alright, without further ado, here is my interview with the lovely ladies at not another onesie.

Louise: We would like to respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land as well as the Guringai people, and we'd like to pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. Hi, I am Louise.

Elisha: And I'm Elisha.

Louise: And we're the co-founders of Not Another Onesie, a carefully curated directory of mother focused care professionals.

Elisha: We have gathered your village so that you don't need to,

Louise: and we are delighted to introduce our new miniseries of conversations with experts from our village.

Elisha: It's through these conversations that we can really explore the unspoken truths of modern motherhood.

Louise: Our guest today is Dr. Renee White. She is a mum, an expert biochemist, she's a postpartum [00:05:00] doula, and also the founder of Fill Your Cup. Alongside that, also the host of her very own podcast, the Science of Motherhood. Welcome, Dr. Renee.

Dr Renee White: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Louise: Delighted.

Elisha: Is there anything crucial we left out of that?

Dr Renee White: No, that was great. It's always weird to hear my bio. I don't know. I get like really like all ooh.

Elisha: Okay. So we would love to just get the conversation rolling. Thinking first, uh, with quite a big question. How does the transition to motherhood affect a woman's sense of identity? So this is kind of drawing on the work you've done with many women, many mothers transitioning into motherhood mm-hmm for the first time, or even second, third, fourth, fifth time. It's a transition each time. What would you, what would you say is the [00:06:00] biggest challenges and how that affects them?

Dr Renee White: Uh, it's a great question. I think we probably have to pair it right back to, why does it happen? I, as a scientist, I kind of always go back to the why. Uh, 'cause I find when I talk to mums about this incoming transition and shift in their identity, when we talk about the why, everything kind of just falls into place right? And when we talk about the shift in identity, I think the core of that comes from the word matrescencece which I think is probably our theme for today, and people listening may or may not have heard what the word matrescence is, what it what it means. I recently did a workshop for postpartum planning and I had a whole bunch of couples there and I said, has anyone heard of the word matrescence?

Dr Renee White: And no one put their hand up. Which I thought was thought provoking [00:07:00] because as someone who's in this industry, I hear it all the time. So I think, let's go back to basics. What is matrescence? So matrescence is a term that describes. The profound transition, you know, women experience as they become mums. It's similar to the term adolescence, which, you know, lots of people know it's mainstream. We know what that is. It marks the transition from childhood to adulthood. And in a similar vein, matrescence involves, you know, the significant physical, emotional, psychological changes. But I think, what we're discovering more and more is that, it is a, it's really complex. It's a complex emotional social transformation, not just physical and it was essentially fi kind of [00:08:00] first cropped up in the early seventies in a book by Dana Raphael, who was an American medical anthropologist, and she was studying, she was studying women during and after childbirth, and she highlighted the real need for society to recognise the unique challenges that you know and transformations that women were undergoing in this period.

Dr Renee White: Now, to go back to your kind of question of what is this shift in identity that mothers see, I think. One of the things that we are discovering now is those unique physical changes that happen to a woman right from the very beginning. So, at the mument of conception, your brain starts to remodel, and a lot of people don't realise this at all. And it [00:09:00] is this beautiful kind of neuroplasticity we call it. So neuro being brain plasticity, you know, moldable and things like that. And what happens is during that remodeling we know that our gray matter actually shrinks, which sounds alarming everyone. Everyone calm down. It's okay. It shrinks alarming it, it does shrink, but what's actually happening is there's this remodeling and what we like to call, I call leveling up and fine tuning of maternal circuitry. That's the kind of term that the neuroscientists have have called it. And what happens in this process of neuroplasticity is that we see improvements in things like memory, emotional intelligence, you know, which result in behaviors where mothers can be more flexible.

Dr Renee White: We're more [00:10:00] responsive, we're great at problem solving. And if you think about that logically from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense, right? So. We've got this beautiful thing where we, we can watch people's faces and they don't necessarily have to say anything, and we can just see changes in, in their facial, um, expressions. And we can fine tune that and understand emotions and that makes sense because our children, when they're born, babies just cry. They can't speak the language like you and I. And so what happens is we're fine tuned to that. We can watch our babies and that's why we watch our babies for so long. You hear mums going, I can't stop the staring at my baby like all day. Like I just, I can do it like 24 7. We do that because we are constantly fine tuning and, and being really perceptive to their changes and needs. And so that in and of itself is an evolutionary mechanism. [00:11:00] So what happens is, yeah, yeah, we get this beautiful kind of neuroplasticity changes in our brain.

Dr Renee White: It's responsible for that fogginess that we feel it's responsible for, like that horrible phrase that we hear baby brain, which, you know, we can throw that in the bin, I'm not interested in that, but that's, that's what it comes from. But it's a, it's a, it's a very unusual feeling that we feel. But this, I guess from a biological perspective, this is the fundamental cause of the feeling and sense of change that mothers experience where you know, their sense of self, has become something very, very different and it starts to feel, I felt it personally, I felt like I was having like this kind of outta body experience and I remember checking in with my psychologist at the time and I was like, oh gosh, [00:12:00] I don't, I don't feel like myself anymore. Something's changed and I don't like it. And I actually thought I had, um, postnatal depression or anxiety. I did have anxiety. I didn't have the depression part, but it was this sense of like, things were shifting. I actually heard a really good term for it the other day, feeling untethered, feel untethered, 'cause you're just like, and you need an anchor in that mument and that's kind of essentially what you want your um, village to be, that anchor, with that untethering mument

Louise: That actually encapsulates motherhood quite succinctly, doesn't it really? Yeah. That sort of, and that that is a massive shift for many women from what their lives were like previously, you know?

Dr Renee White: Hmm. A ab, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So I guess that's probably the why. Why do we have this shift in identity? And the other thing that kind of [00:13:00] crops up with the families that I support is a lot of, a lot of mums, including myself personally. After you become a mum, it's not uncommon for you to change careers like drastic huge, 180 pivots, retraining to something that's like completely different because you have changed as a person, completely, and you have different priorities and different values and things that sat really well with you in terms of your values as a person. Have have changed. They've completely shifted.

Louise: I think this whole idea of reevaluating everything mm-hmm. Is, is really true. Be it your career, your friendships, your kind of lifestyle purpose, really. Yeah. Almost to some extent. Yeah. So, yeah, that's a huge transition.

Elisha: Yeah, definitely. And do you think, do you see any kind of common with [00:14:00] that, with the shifts and the changes, do you see common issues that arise that really kind of feel like a roadblock for a lot of new mums?

Dr Renee White: I think, and I was just talking to someone recently about this. I think for a lot of people who are deeply independent and you know, A-type personalities like myself, it is, it's a very strange experience to go through because through this change in self identity, what happens also, you know, as I said, you get, the neuroplasticity, some other qualities include leveling up on like bonding and attachment. And so for people who have gone from deeply, deeply independent, I only need to worry about myself. And obviously you know your partners and friends around you, but you are deeply independent. And then due to these you know, physiological and neurological [00:15:00] changes, you are no longer independent, you can't just walk out the door. You know you've got this beautiful little baby who is a hundred percent reliant on you to survive that is, that can be quite a challenge for people to grasp that and to like really accept that.

Louise: I remember certainly with my first born, it was making that, that mental shift mm to or that realisation too, even just a few days in to having a newborn, to having a baby for the first time.

Dr Renee White: Yeah.

Louise: That, that huge understanding that it's it, it really did feel like it's all on you.

Elisha: Shower, the toilet. All the simple things you take for granted in a day.

Louise: Don't. Yeah. And I don't think anything really prepares you for that. No, actually no. No. You don't know until you know [00:16:00] and then

Dr Renee White: Exactly. And you don't know what kind of baby you're gonna have as well. I think that that's something that's like really hard to grapple. You know? I recall having a conversation with a friend who had two kids, she was a nurse you know, and I said to her, I really wanna call you over the weekend because I want to go through all the things that I think I need before I have my baby and you know, I was that crazy woman with her Excel spreadsheet, with the whole list of like, everything a baby could possibly want. And, you know, I said, okay, alright I've got my computer open, let's go through it, and, and she, she just said to me, hold on. Can we just hold on? Let's just have a conversation first.

Dr Renee White: And I was like, okay. You know. And I was just like, what is there to have a conversation with? It's just a checklist. Like, let's just go. And she said, I need to talk to you about the fact that I'm actually, I wanna be really helpful with for you right now and you know, I'm a hundred percent supportive, but we don't know what kind of baby you're gonna have. And I was like, well, [00:17:00] what do you mean, what kind of baby I'm gonna have? And she's like, okay, well. What have you got on the list? And you know, I was like, okay. I was like, carrier bouncer, you know, bath you know, do I need soap? Do I need whatever? And she was like, well, I don't know if you're gonna have a carrier baby or a pram baby or a bouncer baby.

Dr Renee White: And I was like, what does that mean? I was like, what do you mean? Like, I'm. I dunno if you're gonna have a carrier baby. She's like, well, you know, it might have for my first, she just, you know, didn't really care for the carrier, screamed the entire time, but was totally chill in the pram. Whereas second baby was like a barnacle baby didn't wanna be outta the carrier, screamed if I put him down, all of those things and it blew my mind 'cause I was like. Oh my God and for someone who needs to be in control, A-type personality, that's a big pill to swallow, right?

Louise: Yeah. Letting go of the control, which is really, we talked a lot about [00:18:00] productivity and the sort of, yeah, some mostly lack of at times, but it is just reframing what pro productivity actually looks like, I think. And um, yeah. And that's a massive shift and a massive transition. It's like, yeah, absolutely.

Dr Renee White: Yeah, absolutely.

Louise: The standards of your previous life and changing them and reshaping them to, according to what you know, your new levels of productivity look like. And I. That's, yeah. Completely different.

Dr Renee White: It is completely different. And you know, I, I think we're probably gonna talk about this later on, but if there's one thing that I wish that, you know, mums knew it is the, about the invisible work that they're doing. I. By just holding their baby. Like if you could see the beautiful chemistry, the biochemistry, the neurological synapses that are being made and joined, and all the amazing hormones that are going on, not only in your baby's body, [00:19:00] but also yourself, like you are setting an a a fantastic foundation for your child's mental health. And this is a mum who is, you know, seemingly sitting on a couch, quote unquote, doing nothing, like not stacking a dishwasher, not getting the laundry done, not going out to the cafe and meeting five friends. You are merely sitting on the couch holding your child. You are doing so much just in that moment. Yeah. And it's beautiful. We just can't see it. Yeah.

Louise: So on that note, what aspects do you wish were more widely shared and spoken about With regards to mm-hmm. Um, so that women can actually feel more prepared and, and more kind of at peace with, I guess, the transition that they, they make.

Dr Renee White: Yeah I think my first kind of recommendation and suggestion is [00:20:00] always like, this is so normal like we just, we don't like matrescence, even though it was like, you know, first kind of spoke about in the early seventies, it dropped off, you know, as in terms of a term and it was kind of reincarnated. I think it was like it was with a TED Talk, Alexandra Sacks, she's a medical, uh, a reproductive psychiatrist in New York and she gave a TED talk about how we should start to look at motherhood differently. And reinvigorated the word matrescence and so it's kind of taken off from there and there's been some beautiful books and things like that, but for a long, long time we didn't talk about it, which means that we didn't understand it, which means we haven't put value on it and so it is finally coming back.

Dr Renee White: And I think if we can have more and more conversations about it, the better because mothers need to understand that this is a really normal [00:21:00] process and it's really normal to feel untethered. It doesn't feel great, but it's really normal to feel untethered. It's really normal to feel foggy and different, and to have that out of body experience, but also that you, you don't need to know it all. You know, like as a mum, we're stepping into this journey and we're discovering who we are ourselves, as well as taking care of our babies, but I would, I would really highly encourage people to talk about it, not only amongst your friends, but like talk about it with your partner. You know, Lucy Jones wrote an amazing book, which is all about matrescence, and she's interwoven her own personal experience, but also she's interviewed researchers along the way and honestly, I recommend all of my families, like mums, dads, you know, supporting [00:22:00] people to read that book because it gives you this beautiful insight into all the changes and so when you get to that point, you're like, oh yeah, that's what's happening to me right now.

Elisha: There's something wrong with you or that you're broken, right? It just, this is, this is what it is in all it's shapes and forms, it's normal process.

Dr Renee White: Exactly. Exactly. And like we know from the research that you know, in order for mums to thrive, they need four key elements. The first is reliable and realistic information. So, you know, make sure that you fact check your stuff. Don't just get it from a reel on Instagram or anything like that. The second one is sharing of experiences. You know, and preferably with other mums, that's what, that's what they found. The third was emotional and physical support. So gather your village, you know, they're [00:23:00] there for a reason. We weren't meant to do this in isolation. And the fourth one is psychological support. So if things are feeling tough, if you are feeling really, I'm come back to that word, untethered, or you feel like you're slipping down like that anxiety, depression kind of pathway reach out to someone in the know, a psychologist, a counselor, a social worker, something like that.

Dr Renee White: Because motherhood is really difficult to do by yourself, like we think I thought I could do it all by myself. It's really challenging, like it's really, really challenging and we weren't wired to do it by ourselves, I think that's the other thing that we need to acknowledge, and we saw that time and time again through Covid here in Australia we put mums in isolation. And what happened? The wheels fell off, you know, for so many people. So I think on that point, it's something that I always encourage our families to think about is [00:24:00] learning how to ask for help. Totally. It's a hard one to do, right? It's, it's just so, so difficult for some people. So what I suggest is, start flexing that muscle, I always talk about flexing the muscles. It's like as well.

Elisha: Yeah. You start all little steps feel more comfortable. Yeah. And I have to confess it's, I'm learning as I'm, as I'm helping others do that, I'm learning. Yeah. Do that myself. It's not, it's not easy, but it's it, it's not needs we, we need to change that whole mental shift around why can't we ask for support? Why can't we ask for help and change? It's essential.

Louise: I think this is this whole sort of societal expectation that we all need to be supermums and we take that on board and we, we feel like we need to deliver that too. And I think it, it's so unnecessary, as you say, there's so much support out [00:25:00] there and, and it's just about having the the confidence being brave enough to ask for the help.

Elisha: Yeah, actually, I think I, I read something by Brene Brown where it was, I can't remember the exact quote, but she was saying how we tend to pride ourselves on our self-sufficiency. There's a sense of self-sufficiency equals success or equals. We're proud of the fact we can be. But to break that down, it's actually in order to connect with people, in order to have vulnerability and actual connection, which is a skill, uh, which is a, a something that we need, it's a survival skill, is you have to be able to connect. You have to be able to ask for help. It's, they go together, although

Dr Renee White: absolutely,

Elisha: Wants the connection, but we're not willing to ask for help.

Dr Renee White: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a strange concept. I preach to everyone about it, and I'm still working on it. I'm not perfect about it. But I find that if you start to implement that, start to flex that [00:26:00] muscle during pregnancy, things become a lot more easier in the postpartum. You know, when you become a mum, you don't have the sleep deprivation. We You do, but you don't have, like, you're not starting from zero, right? So you're not learning how to ask for help whilst your sleep derived, saw, emotional, hormonal, all of those things. So, and the other thing that I find is we do this great thing in our postpartum planning session and we get like a, it's a hard copy guide and I specifically do not staple the guide.

Dr Renee White: And like there's method to the madness because there's a particular page and I always ask our families to pop it on the fridge and on it is a little section about the mental load of running the house and we do like a traffic light system where it's like essential, preferable, or like don't really care. And so what we find though is that when they've written down the essential items that need to get done on a daily or a weekly or whatever it [00:27:00] is, we find that when friends and family come into the house, they always have a little sticky beak on the fridge and so when they see those essential items. They actually start to do them without being asked when they come and visit in the house. And I, and the point of that is, is that if you start to display the behavior, if you start to ask for help, I. You see this beautiful ripple effect and other people are like, they feel, they're like, oh, okay. It's okay to ask for help, so I'm gonna do that, or I'm gonna be generous and I'm going to like, you know, start to implement those essential items.

Dr Renee White: So yeah, learning to ask for help, I think is, is, is skillset that is quite challenging. And I think my last tip would be just lean into the change embrace it, it's beautiful. It's amazing. All of those wonderful skill sets that you are [00:28:00] now acquiring after becoming a mum.

Elisha: Yeah. Rather than resisting.

Dr Renee White: Yeah.

Louise: I read something recently that Zoe Blaske had had written and it was, um, no one enjoys every minute. Try to lock in the good moments and let the hard ones go. And I think, I think that's a really important point we speak of you know, motherhood is kind of beautifully chaotic. It's perfectly imperfect, whichever way you want to cut it, but I think it's just about understanding the highs, the lows, and everything in between and, and just embracing that as much as you can.

Louise: I think that's, um, that would be, you know, part and parcel of making that transition and, and it not. You know that that whole feeling untethered is, it's just lean into it, as you say. I think that's really good advice. So I'm sort of building on from that. What strategies would you recommend for a mother who feels untethered, completely lost? Mm. Um, this new role to kind of reconnect with the, um, aspects of her [00:29:00] identity or I guess maybe not even reconnect, but rediscover her new identity or discover her new identity. I think moving through this identity shift more easily. You know what, what advice can we give to people around that?

Dr Renee White: Hmm. I'm so glad that you, I could see the cogs moving you, you, you're like, actually she's not going back to the person she was before. It's this whole new identity. Yeah, it's true. I look, I've had those exact conversations 'cause I'm like, uh, hold on a minute you're not going back to your different, your, you know your initial self, you're like rediscovering this new person. My number one piece of advice is always self-care. Yeah. Because when you integrate self-care within your daily activities, you have that time for reflection and Self-awareness and that is when you can actually truly discover this new person that you have become. Um, so I think from like an emotional kind of perspective, there's that, but we also have the [00:30:00] psychological benefits of it. And they've done a research study where they followed mums in the first kind of six months postpartum, and they showed that the mums who took 30 minutes of self-care per week with three times less likely to develop postnatal depressive symptoms

Louise: 30 minutes per week.

Dr Renee White: I mean per week. And it didn't even need to be consolidated. Yeah. And like in the study, like their version of self-care, and I'm doing bunny quotes for, if anyone's just hearing this audio only is like taking yourself to do the grocery shopping. Yeah. Which. You know, wouldn't be my top three of like self-care. But if that's all you can manage, go for it. Like grab the keys, run to the car and go. But I think, you know, when I'm talking to mums and preparing them for motherhood, [00:31:00] I always get them to write down something that you can do for self care that takes one minute, three minutes, five minutes, and 10 minutes, because in some, some days you're gonna have just one minute, like, I'm sorry, but like you're gonna have a barnacle baby. They're gonna be teething or whatever, and they're just gonna be like, no, you are not putting me down. And so the one minute could just be like sitting on the chair, feet on the ground, rounding yourself, doing a little bit of like box breathing or whatever it is for the one minute, whereas 10 minutes, or if you can manage more, could be like taking your shoes off, getting out into the grass, feeling nature, putting on a podcast, whatever that looks like.

Dr Renee White: I think it's really important that you try and integrate something for yourself per day. But I will put a caveat in that, in that I know there's a lot of people who are gonna be sitting there going, yeah, right renee, like, how can I possibly do that? I [00:32:00] am absolutely exhausted. I don't have help whatever it is, it comes back to having a conversation. With your partner, your support person, your neighbor, whoever it is, and saying, Hey, I would really like to be able to sit in the garden for 10 minutes, or go for a walk for 10 minutes, or have a nap for 10 minutes. Do you think you'd be able to look after my baby? You know, you need to be able to schedule the timing and be really intentional and clear with what your expectations are, 2:00 PM tomorrow I wanna do X, Y, Z. Can you make that happen for me?

Louise: And I think it's also about understanding and recognising that it's okay to do that. Yes. Make you a bad person for carving that time out. What actually means opposite Yeah. Is that you're a better, a better person because you, if you are depleted, not getting any support or even just as you [00:33:00] say a minute, five minutes to yourself, then it makes much harder to cope. And I think, yeah, that's a really good point that you make. Yeah. I think managing your energy levels as well is also falls into that um, you know, total exhaustion is completely normal, we all experience it, but just understanding what your boundaries are and, and being quite clear on that, you know, you are quite specific to, say two o'clock for this amount. Yeah. Just knowing that it's okay to say no to things and not try and do all the things that perhaps you used to do because you're actually exhausted, and just kind of leaning into that as well, I think's really important.

Dr Renee White: Yeah. Protecting your boundaries is like is a whole, is a whole conversation we have in postpartum planning and we're often or not, like I, I joke in it like we have to have a bit of humor, but like, I literally sit there with couples and I go, um, I'm just gonna give this to you now [00:34:00] here is your permission and here is your permission to say no to someone, even if you have planned something two weeks in advance, it's the morning of and you're so excited, but you are absolutely exhausted. Like you have been up all night and you're finally getting like a couple of hours to have a nap, but you know that person's on their way. I was like, here is your permission to tell them I'm really sorry, but we're gonna have to rain check. Yeah. Because like it's not the end of the world. Like they'll come back another time. It's okay to say we're just not good today.

Elisha: You know? Yeah.

Dr Renee White: It's alright.

Elisha: Yeah. I think that permission. Is important. I think if I had have had that when I was. In my early stages of postpartum, if somebody had have actually said that to me, if I'd ever heard those words, I felt relieved.

Dr Renee White: I know, wouldn't we all? God.

Louise: Well, thank you. Yeah. Love to hear. My pleasure there. So many words of wisdom [00:35:00] and thank you for being part of our conversations around the unspoken truths of modern motherhood. I think yeah, it's definitely kicked us off in the right direction.

Elisha: Definitely. And I think the only way we can see these changes take place is by conversations, conversations going out into the ripple effect of, you know, wherever they go and hopefully just more and more of these conversations will actually make changes. So thank you for being part.

Dr Renee White: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr Renee White: If you loved this episode, please hit the subscribe button and leave a review. If you know someone out there who would also love to listen to this episode, please hit the share button so they can benefit from it as well.

Dr Renee White: You've just listened to another episode of The Science of Motherhood proudly presented by Fill Your Cup, Australia's first doula village head to our [00:36:00] website, ifillyourcup.com to learn more about our birth and postpartum doula offerings, where every mother we pledge to be the steady hand that guides you back to yourself, ensuring you feel nurtured, informed, and empowered, so you can fully embrace the joy of motherhood with confidence.

Dr Renee White: Until next time. Bye.