Senior marketing leader and single mum of three Jaz Brace on sitting her final exams eight months pregnant, building a career around three kids, pushing through a presentation that ended with a hospital stay, and what she's learned about asking for help.

Full Show Notes Jaz Brace always pictured herself in a big London office, career first, everything else in the traditional order. Then she fell pregnant at 21, in her placement year, and sat her final exams eight months pregnant. She describes her first reaction as fear and dread, and the question that followed her for years: how do you still get to be you?

She went back to work early, built a career across agencies, and had two more children. Then a separation left her responsible for everything: the finances, nursery fees of around two grand a month for her two boys, and every school-sickness phone call. In this episode she talks honestly about running on autopilot through that period, telling almost nobody at work, and the ear infection she kept pushing through. She delivered a big online presentation before finally going to hospital, where the infection had spread to the lining of her brain. She spent two and a half weeks in hospital, unable to see her kids, and six weeks off work in total.

The conversation is as much practical as personal. Jaz walks through what a day actually looks like with three kids and a full-time senior role, why she'd rather spend the evening with them and work later, the village that holds her family together (including a free school minibus), and what she's had to give up: the gym, festivals, evening networking, and a social life that currently runs on lunchtime dates. She and Hannah also get into the gap between family-friendly policy and how managers apply it, why ambition doesn't switch off just because life gets harder, and what it means to be called "a mother" as if that's the whole of you.

Topics covered:

• Planning a career in a London tower block, then finding out you're pregnant at 21
• Sitting final exams eight months pregnant, and going back to work early
• Being told by a colleague that "mother" was her first and last job
• Separation, losing the day-to-day support, and doing it all alone
• Pushing through illness, an online presentation, and a hospital stay
• Learning to ask for help, and why mental health days still feel hard to take
• A typical day with three kids and a senior role: "organised chaos"
• Village life, the school minibus, and how much you can really ask of neighbours and family
• What single parents give up that dual-parent households don't see
• Policy vs practice: why a manager can make or break family-friendly working
• Why you can have it all, but not all at once

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Holly Robinson fell into the jewellery industry by accident - a Christmas temp job at 21 turned into eight years, and eventually the confidence to ask why she was building someone else's business instead of her own. Holly Robinson Jewellery was born from that question, alongside a motivator she's disarmingly honest about: spite. Raised between two households after her parents split young, with an entrepreneurial dad and hard-working mum modelling opposite versions of ambition, Holly describes herself as someone who's spent her adult life trying to prove something.

Then came pregnancy, and a 20-week scan that revealed her daughter's heart condition - the start of a run of trauma most people never face in one lifetime. Holly and her partner Nick drove to Bristol while she was in labour rather than risk a transfer. Their daughter had heart surgery at two weeks old. The night before she was due home, Holly collapsed with a seizure - leaving Nick, who'd never changed a nappy, to collect their newborn alone. Tests revealed a brain aneurysm. Holly spent years half-joking about "not being allowed to die" before finally being treated. She admits she's still never properly dealt with any of it - using work, her "safe space," to avoid going near it in therapy.

That instinct to bury herself in work is a thread through the whole conversation: three weeks of maternity leave, and - in one of the episode's most striking moments - delivering an engagement ring to a client's door the day after giving birth. Holly and Hannah get into the same "default parent" question every guest has answered, spite as fuel, the friction of an 18-year relationship built on brutal honesty rather than romance, and why Holly's biggest fear isn't failing - it's reaching 60 and wondering what it was all for.

Topics covered:

• Falling into the jewellery industry by accident, and building a business out of spite
• Growing up between two households, and how that shaped her drive
• Discovering her daughter's heart condition at the 20-week scan, and the birth that followed
• A seizure, a brain aneurysm, and years of not being allowed to die before treatment
• Using work as a safe space to avoid processing trauma in therapy
• Delivering an engagement ring the day after giving birth
• The "default parent" question, and defaulting in different directions with her partner
• Judging colleagues with kids before becoming a parent herself, and the guilt that followed
• Her biggest fear: reaching 60 and regretting the trade-offs

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Rachel Aitken describes herself at school as "the middle girl" - not top of the class, not bottom, just happily along for the ride. That drifting energy carried her through a law degree she hated, into PR in London, and eventually into a senior marketing role - successful by most measures, but never quite the thing that lit her up.

The turning point came during lockdown, watching interviews on TV and thinking she could do better. Early in her first pregnancy, she found a stranger on LinkedIn - Laura Crompton, who had an almost identical career history and her own BBC Radio Manchester show - and messaged her cold, asking for a coffee. She didn't mention she was pregnant, worried it would make her seem less fun. Laura suggested a Zoom instead, and by the end of the hour, Rachel was drafting a message to a BBC producer. Within a week, she was live on air — having told no one except her husband, who tuned in on the radio at home.

That leap became a second career built alongside a full-time marketing job, motherhood, and - as Rachel is candid about - a serious mental health struggle most people around her never saw coming. Diagnosed with PMDD and postnatal depression, Rachel talks openly about what it's like to be the person everyone assumes has it together, and why that assumption can be exactly what stops people from checking in. She and Hannah also get into the reality of chasing a broadcasting career on maternity leave, including one interview that went memorably, spectacularly wrong.

Topics covered:

• Growing up as "the middle girl," and how that shaped her sense of ambition early on

• Cold-messaging a stranger on LinkedIn — and being on air within a week

• Building a broadcasting career in secret before telling anyone but her husband

• Chasing interview opportunities while on maternity leave, baby in tow

• PMDD and postnatal depression — what it actually looked like day to day, and why nobody suspected it

• Being the "yellow" character everyone assumes is fine, and why that's often exactly who isn't

• Dual-career life with her husband, a doctor who also changed careers at 30

• Living in Southport with no family nearby, and what that support gap actually looks like

• Where she wants to take her broadcasting career next

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