Untethered: CLAIRE TONTI on mothering, creation and melody (now with fixed audio!)

***Argh! Mercury is in retrograde which explains why the audio I uploaded earlier this week of this episode somehow removed all the music and left either giant blank spaces or a very strange affect on Claire's BEAUTIFUL song that closes out this episode! I have fixed it now so please don't be put off!***

Naarm based singer-songwriter, podcaster and mother Claire Tonti joins me for a soulful exploration of matrescence, the state in which seismic shifts in identity occur after transitioning into motherhood. Our conversation traverses the raw and unspoken narratives of becoming a mother, from the societal pressures and emotional rebirth to the profound connections (and trauma) forged in the throes of childbirth. We promise a journey that honors the stories of mothers everywhere, especially those facing the unsung complexities and challenges of this transformative life chapter.

Navigating the symbiotic dance of family life and creative expression, Claire and I share candid anecdotes about partnership and the mental gymnastics of balancing parenting with personal passions. Our discussion illuminates the beauty and trauma of birth experiences, the systemic issues in childbirth, and the deep spiritual journey that accompanies bringing life into the world. Listeners are invited to reflect on the strength and resilience inherent in motherhood, the ancestral bonds that are strengthened through this process, and the importance of creating space to process and honor these profound experiences.

We delve into the stark disparities of maternal care – contrasting the empathetic midwifery that many experience and others do not while also addressing the harrowing realities for mothers currently under siege in Palestine. This episode is not just about the personal; it's a call to awaken our collective conscience to the plight of humanity worldwide. With Claire's evocative song "Free" ringing in our ears, we're reminded of the power and courage it takes to embrace and express our true selves, highlighting the universal thread of humanity that binds all mothers together. Join us for this heartfelt episode that promises to resonate with anyone touched by the extraordinary journey of motherhood.

Please be advised this episode contains discussion of birth trauma, genocide and witchcraft.

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To find Claire's event information, see here: https://www.clairetonti.com/events

To listen to Claire's album 'Matrescence', go here: https://open.spotify.com/album/0jU1LTnSMuxDk22ei4lGOn?si=nnsk5tR5S76TsLVCTyOSqw&nd=1&dlsi=31f41d15338a4e73

To follow Claire's podcast, go here: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/tonts/id1571257105

Chapters

• 0:00 Exploring Motherhood Through Matrescence
• 15:47 Navigating Caring Responsibilities and Birth Experiences
• 20:54 The Trauma of Motherhood
• 33:46 Maternal Care and Global Humanity
• 43:41 The Magic and Reverence of Life
• 58:05 Interview With Claire Tonte

Transcript

Clementine Ford: 0:00

Hello everyone, and we are back with another episode of Untethered with me, your host, clementine Ford. Untethered, as you may know, is a show about untethering from social expectations, from the stories that we tell ourselves and from the ways of being that we maybe once were but that no longer work for us. One of the things that regular listeners to me and followers will know is that I'm very passionate about motherhood and passionate about respecting others and not in a sort of wishy-washy, mothers of the most important people in the world even though we won't fund them, kind of way but genuinely respecting the incredible, majestical, spiritual, mystical thing that all people who grow and create human life and pass it into the world do and then are called to do in the raising of those lives. My guest today is one such woman. Claire Taunty is an arm-based singer-songwriter and mother of two little humans. She is also the CEO of the media company Planet Broadcasting and host of the podcast Tontz, where she interviews people about their stories, about their expertise and about feeling deeply human about their lives.

Clementine Ford: 1:12

In February 2023, claire released her debut album Matrescence, which is a collection of 11 intimate indie folk songs exploring the complexities of mothering through her own story and the stories of the women that she has been privileged to hear and learn from and speak to and connect with. She joined me for a wide-reaching conversation about motherhood in general, about creativity, about the period of time referred to by Matrescence, which is the incomprehensible, irreversible shifts in emotional complexity and in thoughts and feeling that happens after someone gives birth, and about the negative side as well of pregnancy and judgmental behaviors, and how we as people really begin to untether ourselves from the expectations of what mothers should be, about how mothers should act, about how people should even give birth and become more fully the mothers that we begin to know ourselves as and to question our place in the world and the kinds of life we are raising, whether it is in our children, whether it is in the world around us, the environment, or in ourselves. Just a little heads up. A word of warning this episode does discuss birth trauma, there is a brief reference to postnatal depression, and we also go in depth into the genocide in Palestine and the impact on women and children, because, of course, we cannot have a conversation about motherhood and children and the treatment of both of those groups of people without discussing the abject disgrace that is the abandonment of the Palestinian people.

Clementine Ford: 2:55

Remember, if you like untethered, you can subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Rate and review it. Share it with your friends. Podcasts really do get out there by word of mouth, so please, if you are enjoying it, then share it and feel free to let me know what you think as well. You can email me on clementinefordcom at gmailcom, and you can also become a paid subscriber to my sub step, where you will get bonus content, including regular episodes of the Dear Clementine style format where I give advice to people on matters of love, relationships, friendships, work, etc. Etc. All of that coming from your favorite mother on the internet. You can subscribe to that on the sub stack app. My username is at clementinef and you can also find it in the liner notes of this episode.

Clementine Ford: 3:37

Now let's get untethered. Let's just step back for a minute, because normally I would introduce you and then we'd say hello and so on, but we were already halfway through a very passionate conversation and I was like I'm just going to press record on this. So then we got some period chat, which is great, but let's go back to the beginning. Claire Tanti Tonts, welcome.

Claire Tonti: 4:48

Thank you so much, Claire. Thank you for listening to what a beautiful introduction.

Clementine Ford: 4:52

It was a real privilege for me a few weeks ago to record an episode of your podcast Tonts and talk about motherhood and all of the various emotional and physical and mental challenges that are thrown up by it, and how society in general doesn't give a fuck about mothers. In terms of the untethered nature of this conversation, I am so curious to hear from your perspective because you're obviously a hugely creative person. You're a teacher as well, you run a podcasting company, but you're also a musician, and I would say not just any old musician, but a musician who quite courageously in lots of ways, writes about motherhood, and that might sound to some people like well, what are you talking about? It's not courageous to write about motherhood.

Clementine Ford: 5:39

People talk about being mothers all the time, but you're not really supposed to indulge the idea of motherhood as an interesting topic, as something where there would be a number of different dimensions even to explore within it, because people think that we talk about mothers a lot but what they mean is we're annoyed by mothers a lot. They don't actually have, generally speaking, we don't have in society generally speaking, much of an interest in really exploring motherhood and the enormous ways that it shifts and changes your perspective on things and also, quite literally, in a physical way, tears you apart and leaves you to put yourself back together. And then all the emotional stuff on top of that, obviously. Your first album is called Matresense, which is about motherhood as a state of being, in the same way that adolescence is, and I'd love for you to talk a bit more about what that means.

Claire Tonti: 6:38

On the outside, I want to acknowledge that there's a deep sense of pain for a lot of people who want to have kids and can't, or as mothers, I think there's an idea that, well, you're celebrated as a woman if you become a mother and you kind of fulfill the role that society has dreamed for you. And so, particularly around Mother's Day and those kinds of things are not incredibly painful for people who may not be mothers for whatever reason within their life, and so there is an idea that, yeah, we talk about mothers all the time, we celebrate them, but actually what we celebrate is a false sense, I think, of motherhood, of putting them on a pedestal. And I don't know about you, but I felt like I've got two kids eight and three and I was a primary school teacher, so I really thought I was going to just lean into this whole motherhood role. I was going to love every bit of it. I thought I'd earth mother way through my birth, and I found the opposite to be true. I felt like and I know now, having written this album about Matresense, I know a lot of women feel the same, but at the time I didn't realize that there was so many other women who felt this way a deep sense of loss of self and identity. Once I had my son. I loved him fiercely, but I experienced a huge amount of trauma in the birth and also a sense that I no longer mattered, that me as a human, claire, with thoughts and feelings and an identity and desires and wants and messiness, and you know all the complexity that I held as a person, was kind of glossed over. I even found people calling me mum or mummy on the street rather than my actual name, especially old man. I found that quite weird. They give me parenting advice like, oh, mummy, you're doing a good job, or watch out for that snake or something, and so I really felt so at sea with it. And also now I know this word, matresense, which is coined by Dana FAL in the 1970s.

Claire Tonti: 8:36

She was an anthropologist and was looking at mothers through that lens and wanting to see physically what actually happens to us, to our bodies and our brains, and unsurprisingly, it happens to women. It's really under research and, as you touched on, it's actually as huge as adolescence in its size and scope and impact. You can now see if someone's given birth just from a brain scan alone, which I find so fascinating and back in 2016, this incredible psychologist and professor at Columbia University, aurelie Aathan, kind of revitalized the phrase because she was speaking to new mothers and they had no word to describe just how giant and monumental the shift was Like. What had actually happened to them was so profound and they didn't have the language for it. You know, if you speak to a teenager, we look at a teenager. We know they're going through such a profound shift mentally, physically, spiritually, what they wear, who they are, like we're trying on identities and hats, like they're going out of fashion. And I remember thinking I was really into punk music at one point and wearing my Doc Martens, and then the next minute I was really into Britney Spears and who was I? And I felt so much and I think we're used to thinking about teenagers in that way. But I think new motherhood is even more deeply profound because we're dealing with themes of loss of autonomy, trying to figure out our own identity. Our bodies have physically gone through a huge trauma, even if you're lucky to have a birth that goes very well, and you're suddenly grappling with this idea of death, of bringing life into the world and going to have a song with a lyric woman on the edge and I feel like that's so described to me what we talked about in our conversation on Tontz, to the idea that motherhood and birth actually brings you to the very edge of life. You kind of touch the void and you come back and if that's interrupted for whatever reason, that's also incredibly huge to deal with. You're dealing with a grief physically in your body you're trying to heal, but mentally you're also trying to what the actual fuck just happened to me and I think that conversation doesn't happen. No one wants to re Well, I now know people do, but I feel like culturally we're not supposed to say there's ambivalence in motherhood. There's a lyric in my very first song. I guess I'll go back and explain a little bit.

Claire Tonti: 11:02

I was a pollcaster and a primary school teacher. I had kids. I was running a media company with my husband who's wonderful, but I was facilitating his career the whole time From my choice. He was always saying to me you love music, why are you doing it? And I just always felt it was too big and too scary and didn't belong to me and my role was to be a facilitator of creativity for everyone else, kind of not really realizing that was probably culturally, what I've been handed, I guess, from society or for whatever reason. I shelved that idea. And then I had my daughter so she's three now during the longest lockdown in the world in Melbourne and, as I know, a lot of people listening to this are grappling with all of that homeschooling, trying to run a company, trying to keep everything afloat at the same time. It was huge.

Claire Tonti: 11:54

And then I got long, covid and I couldn't even watch TV. The light was too bright. I worked myself into the ground, thinking that that was the best way I could be a mother and be a person in the world was to just work until I dropped, basically, and putting everyone else's needs before mine in a lot of ways. And when I could no longer watch TV and all I could do was parent and I saw a naturopath is like you can't, you can't even go to the gym anymore. You need to really redo everything from the ground up.

Claire Tonti: 12:29

These songs started to come to me while I was resting and then I went to a women's circle run by my friend, erin, who runs kindred women, and she asked us to visualize in a meditation what we wanted to call into our life, and I wrote down in this little journal I want to bring music back in and it brought me to tears, which sounds strange if you're not a music person, but it's so deeply within who I am. And In that same meditation I had a vision of this huge ball of energy and I could hold the bottom of it. And for years I'd had these visions a kid where I'd be getting smaller and smaller in a room and the room would be ever expanding. I'd be swallowed up by it. And For the first time, at 37 or 36, and I could. I felt like maybe I could hold whatever this was. And Then I went home and the first lyrics to my first song, this mother thing, appeared in my journal, which are all about that ambivalence in motherhood.

Claire Tonti: 13:27

The, the chorus is will you go but also stay, will you grow but also never change. This mother thing is full of scars, and physically, I think, scars for me, but also mentally as well, as beings full of love and joy. But it's, it's like what's in the universe, the dark and the light together. And I've I have developed a cough because of long coverage. So I found a singing teacher and I told myself and we tell ourselves a lot of stories, I think. But I told myself I was going to deal with the cough as a prokast you can't be coughing during interviews but really I was going because I wanted to sing again and I'd studied it at uni.

Claire Tonti: 14:11

But I felt like I was so at the beginning and that kind of study was classical singing. It was kind of what I thought I should be perfect, polished. All of that and our culture, I think, wants us as musicians or as artists. In some ways, that idea of being perfect is so deadening for people who are creative and limiting. And this, and I think it's the same in motherhood.

Claire Tonti: 14:35

So anyway, a fan of singing teacher she's wonderful, bianca Finn and she heard one of my songs and said you're a songwriter. And I said I'm not. And she's like no, you absolutely are. And so she asked me to take my songs to her nephew, ekl Finn. He's a music producer and so he thought I think he was gonna get one, a mom coming with a couple of songs, he'd polish them up and that'd be that, and Instead it was like I'd let the floodgates out of this woman who was just so desperate. My therapist he's amazing said I was like a thirsty bird At the edge of like it was, like it was so painful being stuck in this shell that the only way is to like burst out at the gate. And so I, as soon as I knew that I had this kind of avenue, all these songs started coming and and eventually I just kept working and working like I've never worked before in this deep focus. I know we've talked about having similar kinds of brains. I've never been diagnosed at HD, but there's a lot of things I resonate with, and that deep hyper focus was one, and I finally gave myself permission to fully embrace my art. I'm also very privileged in that I've worked to build the company.

Claire Tonti: 15:47

My husband was able to take on a lot more of the caring responsibilities and at the same time, we'd kind of negotiated. We did this thing where we wrote down a list of all the things I was carrying as in my mental load, and he did the same and we could really see what it was that I was carrying and he was then able to take on more, which I think is fundamental and I say that to a lot of young women I speak to now that Choosing, if you are going to have a partner choosing carefully and then having someone who is able to Negotiate that with you is kind of everything. If you want to have a family and kids and Want to be able to have an artist you know being an artist or have time, that's really the crux of it is having a Situation where you can then be able to negotiate that in a way that allows you time. Or, as I often did, I'd write with my voicemail on on my phone while I'm doing the washing, while I'm talking to the kids, you know, in little tiny increments of time, snatching them where I could. That 11 songs later and it was a I felt like I Some of the songs came so quickly. It was like being in a meditative state where they I didn't write them down, someone else would, and then I had no idea. I made it for me because it was a dream I'd had for a long time, but I didn't know whether anyone else would resonate with them.

Claire Tonti: 17:16

There's a particular song on my album called self which speaks into the birth trauma I experienced and I know you said the most beautiful thing to me. You said it was like you heard me sing that at Fed Square and yeah, it was like you touch death or something and come back from it, which I know sounds strange, but I feel like that song when I sing that there's just so many times I Felt in the room. Other women deeply understand me and my experience and when I wrote it I there was no birth trauma inquiry that's happening now in me, south Wales. I didn't know it was so common, like one in three women.

Claire Tonti: 18:00

I didn't know I was walking in in that birth into a system that was broken, that Despite these incredible people who work as midwives, they're often Curtailed by the system, by what they can do, and that birth is actually a deeply spiritual experience as well as being a physical one. I mean that you meet yourself in so many ways and so when I started contracting, a Sound came out of me like a singing, and the midwife in that room asked me to basically shut up and get back on the bed and you'll exhaust yourself and don't make any noise and and and what's weird about that too is I think if I'd been screaming and paying she wouldn't have said it. I don't know why I feel like that, but because it was this deep, like kind of low humming sound which I now know actually opens you and is part of your nervous system kind of releasing to allow for birth to happen. It's actually, as I've spoken to a lot of midwives and do-alords now who come to my shows. They say it's a fundamental part of birthing.

Clementine Ford: 19:05

This idea that birth is a transitional thing, and not just because in the physical act of labor, you reach a point that they call transition, which is, you know, categorically one of the worst parts of labor, because it's where you you're really up against. As you said, you meet yourself, you meet your full capacity, this higher version of yourself, and I think I said this to you last time. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from a, a birth educator named Janice Dadelske, and she says whether you give a birth, whether you give birth at home in a bathtub surrounded by candles, or in a surgical suite with tubes coming out of your needles, a woman must go to that place between this world and the next to the mystery, to bring back the child that is hers. And I think about that a lot. And I certainly thought about that a lot in my own post-birth reckoning when I was trying to.

Clementine Ford: 20:03

You know, much like you, I went into birth and labor assuming that I would nail it, not because I'm the best at everything, but I just felt so deeply connected with this kind of spiritual idea of what it means to be a woman. Um, and some people out there might roll their eyes at that. But I don't mean it in a kind of spooky, woody wellness way, but just this sense of deep connection with the women in my ancestral lines and also on a very sort of physical and superficial level, I felt like my body, which had always been a source of discomfort for me and, you know, insecurity, but that did have these kind of giant hips, I felt like well, they've got to be for something, you know I must have. There must be a reason for these. I honestly believed that I would, in a completely misguided, perhaps bordering on arrogant kind of way, that I particularly because I was a feminist and I was so deeply connected with women's issues, I think I genuinely believed I was going to go into birth with everything kind of covered, handled.

Clementine Ford: 21:20

You know, I did a hypno birthing beforehand because I didn't want to have an epidural, not because I had anything against, morally against drugs, but I was just terribly anxious about the idea that, um, you know, as a hypochondriac, I was anxious about the idea that I wouldn't have full control over my own body. So I was like I'm going to do the hypno birthing, I'm going to, you know, it'll just come out of me like a wave, I'll breathe the baby out and then, when I meet the baby, it'll be the most glorious, beautiful moment of my life. And, as you know, I've told you the story that the opposite was true and, like so many people in that experience, you know I would never say now, well, the problem is, of course, that we've medicalized birth and so no women should go to hospital to give birth, because I think that that discredits the fact that, you know, globally, the extremely high rates of maternal mortality globally are because there is a lack of adequate healthcare and often a lack of, you know, emergency intervention available. Um, but I feel like I definitely didn't expect to go into that experience needing to be induced, because I went 16 days over my due date and the longer you do it, the more they scare you with the stories, and some of those stories are real. Well, you know the stories themselves. These things happen, so of course you're scared. I didn't expect that I would hemorrhage on the table. I didn't expect that I, when my baby was born, that he would be covered in meconium so they'd have to, like, race him to the resus table.

Clementine Ford: 22:49

You know all of these things, that you have this vision, as you said, in your mind of what the birth process will be and you feel like I've prepared for it. I mentally opened, I've read all the books you know and I'm open to the experience as well, of some kind of spiritual ascension into what you know so many infinite numbers of people have done before me. But you don't prepare for this. You don't prepare for that moment where you meet the version of you that could die and the version of your baby that could die, and the life, the timeline in which maybe both of you die and no one is around after that to debrief any of that stuff with you. You're just expected to go home and suddenly start looking after this squalling creature who not for everybody, but for me, I mean I'm so glad that when you met your baby for the first time, you really felt that surge of love.

Clementine Ford: 23:49

I felt a kind of primal sort of need to take care of the baby. But you know, as I said to you last time, I still call my son in that period of time, the baby. I just don't. He doesn't relate to me as being my son. I felt like this is a defenseless creature that I need to take care of. But I didn't have any kind of. I was pretty honestly terrified of the whole situation, and no one prepares you for that either that you might meet your child and go. Well, I kind of hate that you did this to me. I kind of hate that you have left me with all of this trauma. I don't hate you for it, but I don't know how to reconcile the the the need that I have to take care of you and the belief that I have that I will soon love you, with the fact that you came into my life through this incredibly traumatic experience and I'm not even allowed to talk about it now because no one wants to hear that kind of thing. And and actually someone said to me I think you'll relate to this a lot someone said to me after the birth, when I was kind of grappling with all of those thoughts in my mind.

Clementine Ford: 25:02

Someone said if you were on a plane, you know, if you were flying to Paris, you'd planned this trip for nine months, saved up all of your money for it, you've gotten all of your holiday clothes. You had this vision of what your Parisian trip would look like. And then, somewhere over the course of that 14 hour flight, something terrible happens in the plane. Maybe there's a hijacking or, you know, like a disaster in which you think the engine's going to fall out, something that causes you incredible trauma over the space of three to four hours, four, five, whatever, whatever it might be. Finally you land, land in Paris, but for a period of that time, during that flight, you really believed, and you had reason to believe, that you would die and that it would be a painful, fiery plane crash, kind of a death.

Clementine Ford: 25:55

You land safely, get off the plane and you're just expected now to have a two week holiday in Paris and create beautiful memories and completely forget what happened. No one would ever say to you well, the good news is that you didn't crash and then you got to have that great holiday in Paris. You would be allowed in so many ways to debrief this trauma that had occurred and no one would say well, that happens to people all the time. People all the time like have traumatic experiences and get through them to get over it. You know it's just, but again it's like motherhood. Is this one thing where there's nothing that society loves to do more than to disparage the demographic of people who were responsible, literally, for rejuvenating the human species?

Claire Tonti: 26:44

As I was listening to you talk, I was thinking deeply about a book called Nutresence by Lucy Jones, and I want to say first I'm so sorry oh, as I, as I am for yours. I thank you it and I really think it's important to acknowledge that and hold that, because you go through that deep level of trauma and pain and if it had been a car accident, you go into a hospital people acknowledge it they, they kind of wrap you up in cotton wool.

Claire Tonti: 27:14

They say rest. They say restore yourself. Oh my god, how could that have happened to you?

Claire Tonti: 27:19

you need to relax oh my yeah, you just relax and now don't sleep and now feed your baby. Any feeding is not going well. Well, that's definitely your fault. And I would say one of the things I was told him the antenatal classes and I don't know if you resonate with this, but I thought I wrote all the notes, I read the books. I was like great, I'm just, I'm really gonna listen. And one of the midwives in that session well-meaning said well, all women can breastfeed some kind, just hack the pain. And now I know, as she was talking, she was talking about how, when she was feeding her kids, she had so much milk. At a wedding she had milk all over her dress and filled the fridge up. And I just A for a lot of reasons. One, I think when women give birth and they're like losing a huge amount of blood, like you did, we're so anemic and so depleted.

Claire Tonti: 28:07

There's a beautiful word called postnatal depletion, and I don't mean it beautiful in the way that. Oh, what a lovely thing to say. But that phrase, I think, speaks into what a lot of women experience. We're so nutrient deficient and exhausted that in order to produce breast milk, our body needs to be given nutrients and rested and restored, and to then be given this baby that you can't feed. And if you've been told that kind of message, that breast is best, which is also bullshit.

Claire Tonti: 28:38

I know I shouldn't say that's quite controversial, but I think, however, you need to feed your baby so that you are well and they are well. That's how you feed your baby, Because it's so damaging. Then, when the advice is which is what I was given, and I had that midwife sort of line in my head all women can do it some kind of hack the pain.

Claire Tonti: 28:57

I'm a hard worker, I used to run marathons, I'll just push through. And the advice was well, now don't sleep, really feed on a two hourly cycle, so breastfeed and then give them, you know, express, and then give them formula, and then just do that over and over and over and over until eventually it'll just somehow magically work for you. And it never did. And I did it for four and a half months and it landed me in such a dark place mentally I was beating myself up internally why can't.

Claire Tonti: 29:26

I be like these other women that just like are overflowing with milk. Why does my baby vomit all the time? My son had really extreme reflux and I remember not being believed about that. I now know that that condition he has. He still has, and I knew at the time that no one listened to me and I think that's part of it.

Claire Tonti: 29:44

There's this sort of sense and I'm hoping it's different. A is down the track, but you kind of have to be lucky about the medical professionals you come up against. There's this sense of judgment and this sense of shame that you get placed with, however your birth goes. If you have a caesarean which I had with my daughter if you don't breastfeed and you formula feed, then if you do feed in a public place and the looks you might get just from every angle, you feel like you can't win. And I really deeply want to say to any women who are listening to this that, however your experience was, that is okay and you are beautiful and wonderfully made just as you are, and that's the lyric at the end of my song. Self says that you know that shame isn't yours to hold.

Claire Tonti: 30:33

Your body. Born this way, you are beautiful and wonderfully made, and I think culture wants us to not think that, like even the way our body looks after pregnancy, we all look different. I have a really big caesarean scar, you know, and I carry a lot of sort of shame about my way.

Claire Tonti: 30:51

My tummy looked for a while and I've really thrown that all in the bin after that experience, cause I realized that what my body can do is so much more than what anyone tells me about what my body should look like, and I think that there's so much joy on the other side of that and it feels quite radical to lean into that. But I did want to say to that book Mattressence by Lucy Jones is so excellent. She's a BBC journalist and she studied her body through pregnancy like she would any other case that she was looking at, and her previous book, losing Eden, was about her deep sense of loss of connection to the environment. It's an extraordinary piece of work and she brings that joy and that deep love and fascination with the natural world into her experience of Mattressence and it's extraordinary. She had postnatal depression and birth trauma and she writes in this way where she sort of puts motherhood in the context of a snake shedding its skin.

Claire Tonti: 31:52

You know, like there's and when snakes shed their skin they are an extraordinary amount of pain to do it, but they do it and then they leave that old body behind and move forward. And to me, the way she depicts motherhood in this kind of dark way she talks about how there's this idea that if it goes well and you do everything correctly, you'll have a beautiful natural birth and everything will go smoothly. And maybe that can be the case, particularly, I think, for women. It's important for us to feel safe, like a cat going into somewhere really dark, and I didn't know that deeply feeling safe was so important in that context. But even if you have all of that, you're more likely to be able to give birth in a safe way If you and I want to say this too, I think it's really important the research is showing if you have a woman or someone who's given birth, who deeply understands the nature of birth with you, like a doula, a midwife, a trusted person from through that anti-natal period to the birth and afterwards, as opposed to part of doula or someone to care for you and in our context that might mean that you pay someone as a doula or it's just continuous midwifery, but it's that sense of trust and safety that ongoing, actually gives you a better chance of not experiencing a birth like you had and like I had, really traumatic.

Claire Tonti: 33:14

However, even if you have all of that, as you know, statistics tell us globally things just go awry. And Lucy says in that book because nature is brutal and dark.

Clementine Ford: 33:24

None of us deserve to supersede that as a sort of a moral imperative. You know, these things, it's that whole why not you thing, why not you? Why should this not happen to you? I mean, if we can avoid these things happening because of adequate healthcare, of course. But sometimes things do just happen. And you know, the thing is, I did have continuous midwifery care, amazing midwives. I was in the cosmos program at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and I had I never dealt with an obstetrician. So my midwives were always very warm and really in touch with what I felt like I related them to them strongly and they weren't kind of I didn't have any of those personal experiences that you hear from some people of a particular kind of matron, a particular kind of thinking.

Clementine Ford: 34:21

But yes, of course I mean, it's just a no brainer to do something like that. You know people say like, oh, people do it every day. And it's like, yes, but usually not a million times, like I've had birth, I've given birth once, I would never do it again, and when I went to give birth I had never done it before. So when people say, oh, people do it every day, yeah, you know, people also are in conflict every day and it's traumatic. You know, we don't just write things up People are abused every day and we don't just say, oh well, it happens to so many people, just get over it. Like that's a monstrous thing to think. You know, this kind of this divorcing of people and individual experiences, and I do feel, at that point mentioning mentioning the military in particular given the nature of this conversation, it is relevant. You know, it's no more relevant than this point in this conversation to acknowledge that when we're having these conversations about how to better women's experience of giving birth, we're currently watching a genocide as a global community in which thousands of pregnant women are suffering, thousands of babies are starving, being starved, I should say, you know, when we think and when we discuss, as Western citizens, the very real issue of, you know, insecurity that's foisted on women for not being able to breastfeed, or for choosing not to breastfeed, or for whatever it might be. Breast is best, et cetera, et cetera, the same people. I wonder how many of the same people who love to kind of make the breast is best their mission are at all concerned about the lack of breast milk that is being able to be supplied to Palestinian babies right now, you know we can't discuss.

Clementine Ford: 36:19

This is one of the things that is so important to me and I believe it's important to you too, and I hope that for every person listening to this, whether you're a mother or not, this connection that we all need to have as humans, as life carers you know, whether or not you're a life giver, a life creator, a life birther or a life carer is to recognize the importance of every single person. And it has been truly soul-wounding and, I think, has wounded me and every single other mother who cares about this issue and has been speaking about this issue. It has been incredibly wounding to see how, you know, irrelevant some children are to the world and irrelevant how irrelevant their mothers are to the world, and I feel like that's a kind of wound in my soul I'm never gonna get over is just seeing. You know, how can any mother in particular look at what's being done to the people in Palestine and Gaza and especially, and not feel every fiber of her being calling out? You know, I've remembered throughout this, the last five months after George Floyd was murdered and, yes, of course we had, you know, a smattering of very meaningless kind of acknowledgments, black tiles etc. Stuff that doesn't really constructively in any way change or challenge the systems that we're in.

Clementine Ford: 37:49

But there was also a proportion of white women like us especially who, at least momentarily throughout that seemed to take or at least pretended to take, more of an interest in our own kind of inherent racism and how we've been instructed into that.

Clementine Ford: 38:06

And I remember one of the things that they loved to say about George Floyd was when he called out for his mama, he called out for all mamas. Now the brutal state, sanctioned police violence that was used and perpetrated against George Floyd to take his life, that has been used against so many black people in America, should indeed be talked about and if mothers need to do it by saying when he called out for his mother, he called out for all of us. If that's how we get into that issue you know I'm obviously outside of the immediate circle, so I'm happy to be directed on that but if that's how people get into the issue, then get into the issue. But where are all those women now? Where are all those mothers now, when literally thousands of Palestinian children are calling out for their mothers who they'll never see again, calling out for their siblings, calling out for their fathers, even calling out for food. Where the fuck are we? How are we here as a people?

Claire Tonti: 39:06

Yeah, there's a deep sense for me in doing this work and I travelled to the UK and sung songs over there and in Ireland and Scotland and met some incredible women. Jacqueline from our brave hearts actually isn't, she's just incredible force on this issue and has completely re-examined the way she even speaks about motherhood now on her Instagram account. She's so deeply fighting this fight, I think, when we recenter mothers and this phrase keeps coming back to me all the time, and I thought it last year before you know what we're seeing in Palestine and in Gaza on our screens, and you know social media, which is also the strangest, weirdest thing to be faced with the worst of humanity and then, an ad for a clothing item.

Claire Tonti: 40:06

It's like an insane circuit.

Clementine Ford: 40:08

It's obscene.

Claire Tonti: 40:10

It's devastating. Yeah, it's just, it's so. The world we live in is deeply, deeply broken and strange, but I this phrase keeps coming back to me that when we recenter mothers and mother care, what we're doing is recentering our humanity. And how can we really deeply care for mothers if we're just caring for a particular type?

Claire Tonti: 40:34

of mother and I've worked as a teacher in a lot of different contexts. I've worked in Tanzania in a community there who had such a strong matriarchal presence. I've worked up in the Kimberleys in First Nations schools up there, and the way they have reverence for that matriarchal sense and gosh. There's some really challenging contexts I've worked in and seen the trauma that our intergenerational trauma passed through. I don't have any answers. All I can say is that, as an artist, that's why my songs, I think, are so deeply sad. I'm writing a new album at the moment and some of them are. There's joy in them too. There's so much joy everywhere even in.

Claire Tonti: 41:24

Palestine. You can see these people dancing. Because what do you do when you've got nothing left? You make art and poetry and you dance because what else do you do? Laugh, laugh at the depth and strangeness of the world that we live in. Sometimes.

Claire Tonti: 41:41

To alleviate some of that, I have a song called Hearts on my album that I wrote and it kind of came in and speaks into this sense of the time that we're in and how time. Often we think of time as like, really linear, and I'm not great with time turning up to things and have the sense that we've been here before, that we don't seem to learn, but that also we're all deeply the same. So the lyric is our hearts beating through time, these hands, yours and mine, beating, beating in time, same rhythm, same kind, and we're all the same fucking kind, like we're not us and them. We're those Palestinian women and children in the same way. We're not experiencing it, but we're all part of this living planet. There's only one of us here really.

Claire Tonti: 42:31

So if, as an artist and when you're channeling and I get really emotional, I find it really difficult to talk about because I'm not an expert and I think a lot of people feel that, but I but I'm a deeply feeling person and I'll show you this. I don't know if you can see my camera, but this image came to me while I was walking, when I was thinking of what image to show as my album cover, and for those who were listening it's an audio medium. It's me stripped naked and I've just got an open heart. And that to me on my chest, and that to me was how I felt when I became a mother, because you suddenly are feeling everything and I think how can we not be full of rage and deep grief and sadness for the way that the world is treating the Palestinians and overall, not just in Palestine, but that humanness, that idea of women and children, and that centering of life and sacredness, I wouldn't even just say for women and children, I would say for all living beings.

Clementine Ford: 43:41

If we truly revered motherhood as a species, if we respected motherhood as a channel for life as opposed to revering individual you know, yummy mummy types, like if that's all just capitalist bullshit but if we really respected the idea of a pulse of life, a heartbeat of life. Breath goes in, breath goes out, the cycle of change. You know, life begins, life ends, but it continues to move then there's no way we could look at the earth and all of its interconnected species, whether or not that's animals or plants or mushrooms or trees Like the fact that we know scientifically that trees communicate with each other in their root systems under the ground and that mushrooms communicate with each other. To me it reminds me of the milk ducts and how the milk ducts operate on a root system as well, and if you can breastfeed or if you don't have normal struggles to breastfeed. I also just quickly as a side note, to anyone who's listening who has experienced that or still has any lingering shame. Firstly, I completely echo Tance's thoughts on that. You know that it's not just just let it go, just let the shame go.

Clementine Ford: 45:05

I was a formula fed baby and I think I'm doing okay.

Clementine Ford: 45:09

You know, if anything, maybe if breast milk was meant to make me stronger, it might have actually been quite destructive for the world.

Clementine Ford: 45:18

I certainly didn't suffer from malnutrition as a child, but for those who are interested in how the breast milk works, it's sort of like it's like a root system underneath the areola that passes messages between the milk and the baby, so that if the baby is unwell, for example, the baby's saliva back channels into the milk ducts.

Clementine Ford: 45:44

Obviously they're open to like release milk. The baby's saliva enters the milk ducts and scientifically, genetically, biologically, encodes the milk with what it needs to up the baby's immune system. So the milk then is informed by the immune system of the baby. So it's this very symbiotic relationship between the mother and child that we need to start applying to our idea of being here on this earth that you know, we put into the earth what we need from the earth to survive and the earth provides, and then we fucking burn it to the ground. You know it's such a disconnected view of things and I think in the context of this conversation, I think it really betrays, on a macro level, this incredible disrespect that we as a human species have developed for the ebb and flow of life and for life as a form of magic, you know, a form of magical conversation.

Claire Tonti: 46:50

Completely. It's magic. I think part of it goes into the noticing of the tiny things. I keep talking about Lucy Jones, and I just think I really encourage everyone to go and follow her on Instagram. She wrote this book, matresens, but what she does in it? She takes a little magnifying glass out into the woods with her and she looks at these tiny slime molds that are electric blue and electric pink and looks at the tiny, tiny things in nature, and it's a practice that I bring into my own life.

Claire Tonti: 47:19

I spend a lot of time with trees, have friends with trees that I visit a lot along the river and I wrote a lot of my music out there, because once you start noticing, it's utter magic the way life unfolds, the way it knows. The trees know that one of the hottest days in Feb this year I went with my daughter and a really close friend and some of her kids to the Redwood Forest in Wolverton and there weren't a lot of people there because it was such a hot day, but it was so cool and we spent the time in the creek there. And this phrase the trees know comes back to me so often because they do their deep roots go so far into the ground. I saw a beautiful naturopath this morning. Actually, she wrote a reading for me and an energy healing and she said what you need to do is go as expansive as you can.

Clementine Ford: 48:10

Ground your root chakra Quite exhausted at the moment.

Claire Tonti: 48:13

Yes, exactly, ground it and expand just as deeply internally as you do externally, so you're totally grounded like a tree is. And yeah, I agree, if you look at those spider webs of you know milk ducks, you look at the rivers from when I was thinking about flying in a light plane over the Kimberleys you see these rivers running through.

Claire Tonti: 48:37

They look like the milk ducks, they look like our veins, they look like the leaves. You see these same patterns everywhere, because they're all part of it. I'm so not interested anymore in pretending that that's too woo woo or too strange or complex or like oh there she goes again. You know just, of course, it's much. The world is much more magic and strange and mysterious than we can possibly understand. I mean, the Dragonfly, for instance, has been coming up for me a lot and I didn't realize this.

Claire Tonti: 49:10

But Dragonfly larvae that we were collecting by that creek drill a hole in their own head and then the Dragonfly literally crawls out of its own body in this kind of alchemy of water where it's in so much pain that the only thing it can do is burst out of its own head. Then it sits on top of this empty casing, expands itself out and then takes flight and turns into one of the most incredibly agile insects and predators in the natural world. And the way they see their wings, everything. I spent a lot of time looking at the one YouTube and watching these time lapses, but I just think, god, if that's not magic, what is you know? And I just am constantly in awe of it and I think we need to be in reverence to it hugely.

Clementine Ford: 50:02

I feel like if we respected more those, that relationship, when we would be in such a better spot as a species. But we've completely divorced ourselves from the interconnectedness of things. And I love that. You say that you're kind of just not interested in being embarrassed about the woo stuff. I think the woo stuff can be very dangerous. I think it can uphold really oppressive systems. When it's, you know, white supremacist woo or capitalist woo, whatever it is like, it can definitely be bastardized and exploited and I don't like that at all. So I understand that kind of impulse to be separate from it. But like you, I'm more and more lately no longer going to shy away from the fact that I have the spiritual realm and I'm interested in the spiritual realm and I feel connected to all people and all things because of that. You know, hence the tarot and stuff.

Clementine Ford: 50:52

But even with that, it's like when you do witchcraft using natural ingredients. You know if you grow your own herbs, you ask the plant before you cut something off the plant, you ask the plant if you can please. You know if they mind you cutting it and you're supposed to use your intuition and you know. Rarely I suppose people would be like well, the rosemary. Bush doesn't want me to cut any of its leaves off, but it is an act. Even if you think that that sounds ridiculous, I would urge people, as a practice in the world, to make a habit before they do a little snipping of any kind of herb off of a plant or pick a flower, whatever it might be, just as a practice, begin asking permission of the plant, if it's okay, because you'll probably go ahead and do it anyway, but it starts to ha ha, plant a seed, but it does start to plant a seed in your mind that we are a system of living things and we don't just get to reign supreme over living things because they can't speak back or because they can't, you know, because we need the herb right now or we need this or the other.

Clementine Ford: 51:58

You know, even if you, I know that some people will listen to that and go well, that's why all feminists should be vegans and I don't disagree morally with that argument. I think that there are some groups of people around the world for whom that is, it is less easy to do that, but also they have a less factory based, industrialized system. But I think even then, even if you do eat meat as I do. I'm not a vegan. If you eat meat to, without sort of saying to people, say grace, say grace to God before dinner.

Clementine Ford: 52:30

You know I understand some people who are religious will still do that, but maybe just offer up some thanks anyway.

Clementine Ford: 52:35

Make that practice always in your world of offering thanks for the things that you have, thanks for the blessings of food, thanks for the blessings of the plant. If that doesn't convince you, then you can buy these contraptions on the internet, now that they're like prongs, like electrode prongs, and you put them, they're attached to a speaker and you plug the electrical prongs into the soil of your house plants and through the speaker, over the course of the day they sing to you the electricity that runs through the plant as the plant grows, as the plant wilts, if it needs water, as the plant thrives, as the plants sort of like relaxing in the sunlight, because of course they live in creatures and these electrical nodes convert that activity in the soil into sound. So we can actually hear our plants growing and singing to us. We can hear the sound of all things and I think that that is a form of magic that science enables us to tap into and don't forget that's a complete guarantee for having home friends and family should.

Clementine Ford: 54:06

I've really, really loved this conversation too and, like I said, I'd love for you to come back and, you know, maybe we could even talk about doing something similar to the mother first, but in a small scale, just like getting mums to hang out and do their crafts and crafts together, learn how to be creative or learn to unleash their creativity. I love that.

Claire Tonti: 54:30

Yeah, it's funny you say that I actually have got some funding and I'm doing a festival of mattressents in the UK, etc.

Clementine Ford: 54:38

When Lucy.

Claire Tonti: 54:38

Jones yeah, in June we're putting on two days of poetry, art, music and deep conversation science about that.

Clementine Ford: 54:47

That's amazing. Well, there are some listeners to this. You know, some of my followers are from the UK. So if you're out there and you're in the UK and you're interested in attending you know two-day festival on mattressents in Exeter in June, then check out the liner notes because I'll pop the link in there.

Claire Tonti: 55:04

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'll be playing my album too. I'm in Dublin and I'm heading to Cardiff. I'm playing at the Everyone Festival there, which is a huge festival. All about womanhood cycles, hormones, men and boys, cancer, all of those things. I'm singing there in June to June 15th, and then I'm doing a show in a little place called Abergevaney in Wales. This beautiful poet, william Redwood, has written a poem, a book of poetry about motherhood, called you Remind.

Speaker 3: 55:35

Me of.

Claire Tonti: 55:36

Swift and the Swift bird is a bird that migrates and flies for weeks and weeks and weeks, awake, with one eye shut when it sleeps and to hear about the world, which is constantly awake, so where there's a little place where I'm singing there and then I'll be singing in Exeter in the UK. That's the 21st and 22nd of June and I'm looking for funding to do a mattressence festival here in. October in my hometown, but we'll watch this space, clint, you never know.

Clementine Ford: 56:07

I'll definitely watch this space. Claire Taunty, it has been truly a pleasure to talk to you and to know you and to share just emotional solidarity with someone else who sees motherhood the way that I see it and who wants to bring the majesty of it to others and the rawness of it and the realness of it in the way that you do. Would you object if, as we close this podcast out, if I played one of your songs? I think I need to ask your permission just for like music rights? Yeah.

Claire Tonti: 56:45

All the things amazing. I would love that. Thank you so much, Clint. I would absolutely love that.

Clementine Ford: 56:51

And you can all listen to Mattressence at the link in the Align-O-Notes by the album. Follow Taunts's work. She has a podcast. Probably you're where, I'm sure, taunts the podcast. Taunts, you're a beautiful human and I am so glad that you joined me today and I'm very glad that you're in the world.

Claire Tonti: 57:10

Thank you, I feel the same. It's just in order for your work. So, gosh, we could just turn this into a big love fest. Yeah, I know, I know, I feel so honored to be talking to you, and I've admired your work for such a long time, so thank you for being in love and thanks for human Three.

Speaker 3: 57:35

One, two, three go Freedom. We want all of it. Spent so long being good girls, Come breathe through it. We're gonna rip it up, we're gonna tear it down. This K2 one is in no longer Fits our crowns because we are fire and we can be free.

Clementine Ford: 58:01

We can only You've been listening to Untethered with me, your host, clementine Ford. My guest today has been Claire Tonte, a singer-songwriter, podcaster and a podcast media company owner, an incredible, all-round woman who I truly love with all of my heart. Remember, if you like Untethered, then you can subscribe to the show so that you never miss an episode and if, as I said, you are interested in becoming a subscriber to get additional bonus content, you can check out the liner notes of this episode. Hit the link, go to Substack and subscribe to my username, which is at clementinef, and all of those subscribers will get access to a very special Bestie Only bonus podcast with me and Claire Tonte of me reading her tarot cards. So if that's your kind of thing, then tune in. This is Claire Tonte singing Free from her album Matressence. Thanks so much for being with me today. In the meantime, stay untethered.

Speaker 3: 59:52

Finally believe we can learn all the things that they told us we should be. We can be free, we can be free, we can be free. We can be free, we can be free, we can be free. Yeah, do it Again again.