This is the BBC.

Welcome to Late Night Woman's Hour with me, Emma Barnett.

Each week we bring together three brilliant women to chew over life, relationships, work, politics and culture.

In short, pretty much everything.

Here with me in the Late Night Women's Art studio are the writer and women's network found a women who, Otego Wagba,

the journalist, author and mental health campaigner Brianne Gordon,

and writer and guilty feminist podcaster Deborah Francis White.

Brini, motherhood and the shame of addiction.

It's quite a personal one for you, but what did you want to say about this?

I want to just talk about it because I feel like we fetishize mothers and they're sort of

supposed to be perfect and wonderful and I remember I got clean and sober over a year ago now. My daughter's

five and I remember thinking the thing that kept me in the process was very much the shame. I was like,

I am the only person

who, I'm the only mum who, who does this. And actually I went to treatment and the first

person I met was another mum who lived a mile away. When you say does this, what do you mean?

And you talk about drinking and, you know, and in my case, occasionally going back to my kind of

the drug, the drug sort of, the drugs that I took in my 20s, I think what really I wanted to, like, what I've noticed is that, yeah, it's more about that we expect motherhood to do for a woman what, say, rehab would do for somebody else, you know, and, and.

It's meant to purify you.

Yeah, there's actually this BBC drama starting,

soon.

The Cry, which is a kind of psychological thriller,

but Jenna Coleman plays this mother who is completely,

...