Stacey June

Stacey June had a home birth in a birth pool for her son Bryn, who weighed 4.7kg (10.4 pounds) — larger than expected. Labour started while she was at lunch on a Sunday and lasted about 24 hours. She used a curated playlist to stay in her body, and Bryn was born underwater to a Beyoncé song. She believes a hospital would likely have pushed for a C-section given his size.

She says she tried not to form fixed expectations and instead let her baby 'lead,' responding to him rather than guessing in advance what he'd be like. She credits this partly to her fertility treatment journey, which forced her and her husband to surrender control and wait for the child to come in its own time.

She suggests examining whether your motivation is to give or to receive — wanting a child mainly to receive love or validation can make the harder, less rewarding moments of parenting more difficult, whereas starting from a place of wanting to give tends to be more sustainable.

She is planning a home birth with a birth pool set up where her kitchen table normally sits, planning to avoid hospital unless medically necessary, and intends to be away with friends near her due date before returning home to give birth.

She says her follower growth became stagnant and that she visibly lost followers when she posted about miscarriage and trying to conceive, even though she received private messages saying the content was helping people.

She says both can occur together; her approach is to treat the gut as a trustworthy 'mate' distinct from one's thoughts (drawing on the book The Untethered Soul), while noting anxiety isn't purely negative and can also carry useful information if you learn to separate thought from self through practices like meditation.

After about 7 years, Stacey says their priorities diverged — she got married and had other life changes — and despite pitching for radio and TV opportunities for years (including a TV show that fell through after 2.5 years of work), they didn't land the bigger jobs they felt they deserved, leading to what Tommy calls their 'consciously uncoupling.'

In the discussion with Tommy (who says he quit porn), Stacey argues porn can damage the 'connection' element of sex, especially important for women's pleasure, and agrees that stopping porn use can change a couple's sex life for the better, though she notes aggression and loss of novelty are only part of the issue.