Opinion | The Feminist Podcast That Lets You Eavesdrop on Mothers in Therapy

Meanwhile, the influencer economy has given mothers who want to express themselves on the internet new incentives to Instagram-filter their lives. As Sarah Pulliam Bailey wrote in The Washington Post last year, the “biggest stars of the mommy internet now are no longer confessional bloggers. They’re curators of life. They’re influencers. They’re pitchwomen.”

“Motherhood Sessions,” by contrast, explores aspects of parenthood that don’t easily lend themselves to product placement. One episode focuses on a woman who thought she didn’t want children, gave into pressure to have one anyway, and thinks she might have made a mistake. Another features a woman trying to negotiate joint parenthood with an abusive ex and feeling shame that she and her child can’t afford to live without a roommate. There’s a woman who hated pregnancy but whose older wife wants a second child, and a woman pregnant with her second child who fears she won’t be able to handle two kids.

Through their interviews with Sacks, which are edited into episodes of roughly a half-hour, the women delve into their mixed feelings about motherhood, their guilt over those mixed feelings, and the shadows cast by their own childhoods. “These are things that are hard for people to admit in any medium,” said Sacks.

“Motherhood Sessions” is not the first podcast to let listeners into the therapeutic sanctum — in 2017, the couples therapist Esther Perel started “Where Should We Begin,” in which she records sometimes agonizing conversations with people struggling in their relationships. But the raw, voyeuristic intimacy of the form still feels novel and a little risky.

Sacks’s subjects volunteer to be on the show — she puts callouts on parenting message boards and Gimlet’s social media accounts — and they’re screened to make sure they know what they’re getting into, and that it’s not the same as medical treatment. But while their names are changed, the voices and the details of their lives are not, so they’d likely be recognizable to people who know them.

For some of them, that’s part of the point. “I do think a lot of people who have come onto this show are very eager for the people in their lives to hear the episode, to hear that their experience is validated by an authority figure,” said Sacks. “That there’s nothing wrong with not being sure if you want to be a mother, and that you can love your child and not like motherhood.”

Toward the end of her session, Joni described how, when friends came to visit her, she’d break down crying, and they’d tell her that they’d felt similarly disconsolate when they were new mothers. She wondered why they hadn’t told her about their experiences before. “We talk about everything,” she said, “but this one thing that people don’t share.”