Hello and welcome to Series 5 episode 1 of Out with Susie Ruffle.

First of all, hello, I hope that you're well.

I hope that wherever I'm joining you you're in a good place. First off, apologies from me for this

series being a little bit later than I suggested it would be at the end of the last one.

I hope that it would come out a bit sooner, but things have just been very busy,

and I've been doing my best to curate a series for you with as many people from different sections of the queer community

and with stories that maybe we haven't heard before and so whilst I appreciate it's been a little

bit longer than anticipated hopefully it'll be all the better for the time that I've had to curate it.

Some of you may know this because you might listen to Like My Do Friends, my podcast with Tom Allen, but part of the reason

that it's been so delayed is that for quite some time now I've been a mum, I am a mum and

Alice and I became mums a while ago and it's something that I didn't want to talk about publicly.

And I still don't really want to talk about it publicly other than to say that I am a mom and

I'm loving being a mom and we have an incredible daughter who I am just so in love with and I

wanted to share it with the listeners of this show mainly because I know that lots of you are

part of the LGBT-QA plus community, lots of you have maybe have children or are connected to our community somewhere,

or maybe you just want to be an ally, but I thought maybe some of you might be excited for me and some of you might be

hopeful of one day becoming a parent and maybe this visibility might be nice for you.

So, yeah, whilst I'm not going to talk about it

in a particularly public way,

mainly because I don't know whether she's a show-off like me,

yeah. She might not like her story being out in the public eye.

My wife Alice is is quite private and I think it's good to respect that about children.

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