What A Midlife Madam Knows About Sex

So you're listening to a Mother Mia podcast. Mamma Mia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land. We have recorded this podcast on the Gadigul people of the Eora Nation. We pay our respects to their elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Raight Islander cultures.

Hello, Sealed Section listeners, Thank you for letting me pop into your ears. My name's Holly Wayne Wright and I've got something special for you today. It's an episode from our podcast, Mid Conversations with gen X Women who are anything but hosted by me, and in this episode that we're popping in your feed, the reason we thought that you might like it in particular is it's a frank,

Here.

It is our very frank mid episode with Antonia Murphy. Ask for what you want, know your ground rules, and do not budge. Age is experience, and experience is hot and comforting and kind and hot. Say what it is you need and ask for what you want. It's not always about sex. It's about touch and connection and wanting to be wanted, and for some people some of the time it's as essential as breathing. But sometimes it's about sex, of course. Just ask for what you want. Welcome to

So please just ask for what it is you want.

Hello, I am Holly Wainwright, and I am mid midlife, mid family, mid blush. This is a first for us on mid Today, I'm interviewing someone who's already been here sort of. A few weeks ago, I spoke to the incredible Australia actress Rachel Griffiths about her midlife sabbatical, about having been on all ends of Hollywood, about actresses aging, about the role she's currently playing on our screens, a woman called Antonia Murphy in a show called Madam. And

She's going to tell me.

Today how that set of events led her to opening an ethical brothel in a tiny coastal town. I know it's not what everybody would do in that situation, but hey, Antonia has a very specific story. Sex work is decriminalized in New Zealand, so there was nothing illegal about what

I promise stay with us.

You're going to hear stories about the men who were dropped off by their mothers or their wives, a surprising fact about the preferred age of the women. About the worst thing any parent can imagine happening happening to Antonia. And generally you're going to be with me in the presence of a woman who looked at how you're supposed to carry on when you're a midlife regional mum and

Oh sure, I think I know which one it is. Go ahead.

I think this article kickstarted a few things. I think it was after reading this maybe that the TV people contacted you.

Is that correct?

An article that got optioned?

Yeah? So are you right? Bye?

Mom, I'll see you tomorrow morning. It's eight am on a Tuesday, and my workday probably started out a lot like yours, packing lunchboxes, making sure the kids eat a healthy breakfast, finding socks and shoes, and homework. But when my nine year old daughter Miranda kisses me goodbye to catch the school bus, she knows I won't be home until long after bedtime.

That's because I'm a pimp. More politely, I'm.

The Madam of the Batch, a feminist escort agency I own in the North Island of New Zealand. So let's get this part out there so a mid audience know what we're talking about. An ethical pimp, a feminist escort agency.

What's that and how did it work?

Well?

I mean, let's be clear, I used the word pimp in that article because I was deliberately being inflammatory, right, I could they have thought, yeah, readers, readers on words. But what I meant when I said and still say, that we were an ethical and feminist escort agency is that we were constantly guided by consent at every stage of the process. The women were always in control of who they saw and what they would and would not choose to do with that client.

And that went.

From making the booking to allowing him into the room, to every step of the way during the appointment.

And if for any.

Reason he left and didn't pay, if they had taken off their clothes or sexual contact had started, I would pay them out anyway, So nobody was ever worried about all I've got to go through with this dodgy booking because I have to pay my electrical bill kind of thing.

So you are, as the listeners will be able to tell from your accent originally from America, from the West coast. Yes, But by the time you open the batch, you're living in a tiny town, like not in Auckland, but like a in a little country town in Northland, which is a beautiful part of New Zealand. And you're there, your marriage is rocky, falling apart at this particular point.

You've got two kids.

You do your start doing your research, knowing you want to open a an escort agency, but you're starting from nothing. How did you learn that you know the sort of rules and guidelines that you've just spelled out for us that made this a feminist, safe place to work for the women. How did you learn that's what you wanted to do?

So women always exchange information with each other, whether they're talking about something legal or not. Right, I think at every stage in my life, I've always had a woman or a girlfriend who I could and get the honest

Married to my husband, I sent him down to a.

Couple of places in Auckland, like so called good brothels or escort agencies to check it out, and he came back and he said, oh my god, it's so depressing, Like it's you go into this place. It's sort of lit by these cheesy Christmas lights. There's like a vinyl couch that gets wiped off between bookings. He's like, there's a lot of glitzy gland me stuff that's supposed to look elegant and classy, but it's just makes me sad, like, oh, I think we could do things a bit better than that.

And so the.

Batch you end up opening is in a motel and you make it bright and breezy and like a beach almost, like, well, that's what a batch is in New Zealand, right, is a beach house. And so everything from the inception of what it would look like and feel like to the way that the workers.

Were treated was very different.

I was really interested in the process that you were just talking about about the research going and talking to women.

You talk to a woman in.

The sex industry who tells you that it's all about being a madam or a sex worker is all about hold your power, she said, And I'd love you to talk a bit about what that means, because to be honest. When I read examples in the book of where you helped you thought about that and implemented it. I think it's something that all women sex workers are or not could get a lot better at. Does it kind of.

Mean whole know you're worth?

Yeah, I think that's part of it, and we can get into that part of it too. In that I learned a lot from the men about asking for what you want and not being afraid to ask, even if it comes off as a bit cheeky.

But I think.

When she taught me about hold your power, I think there's a reason why madams traditionally have been sexually unavailable to the clients for the most part, and often older, so that culturally they're considered no longer sexually interesting. Right Because I had on regularly, I would get proposition by clients. They would try to find their way in around the cracks and ask.

All, will you see me? I'll pay top dollar? How much would you charge? How can I please? Please? Please? And what that's about is they feel like if they can conquer.

You sexually, then they've won you over and they don't have to play by your rules anymore. So I think it's that's why it's so, That's why I think that madam position has existed traditionally, is that you need a woman in charge who is sexually unavailable and completely unmoving in her ground rules.

That's interesting what you just said about how age plays into that, because it is true, of course that the stereotype of a madam in my mind is definitely she's older than the women who work who do the sex work. In your experience, I mean, I want to I'm going to get to all the things you've learned about men doing in that process.

But is there an age cut off? Do you feel like not at all?

In fact, when you said that, I wanted to jump in because the lady who made the most money at our agency was older than me. And the reason why well, there's a few reasons why she made the most money. She was highly professional, and she organized, and she would come in with a large Duffel bag for what we called her day at the office because she had back to back bookings of these elderly gents who would book her for two and three hours at a time, and she would put on a different lingerie.

Outfit for each one, and there was very little sex. It was largely companionship. But she was really intuitively kind. She was so genuinely kind. People really responded to that, and she made the.

Most money, so it really And the other reason is that a lot of these guys who come and see sex workers, if they're in their seventies and eighties, they don't want to see a lady in her twenties. They're like, my granddaughter is in her twenties. That makes me feel like a pedo. So there really isn't a cutoff, I would say in age for sex work, and quite often

Who's the youngest?

Because what that means is is either a he thinks that women's quality degrades with age, which is a big red flag, or more likely B he thinks he'll have a better chance pushing her boundaries if she's young.

Absolutely, and there is an experience in there with a man like that. Just back for one more second to hold your power. One of the first times in the book that you like you think about doing that is when a client is trying to talk you down on price. And this is what I'd love to get to about that idea of saying what you need and what you want trying to talk you down in price. And this is when the batch has just opened, and so you're kind of like figuring it out and you were like, no,

The people pleasing the man pleasing reflex?

Oh, it was really hard to deprogram ourselves from that. I can still remember.

You know.

We had a confirmation text that we would send when people made a booking that said you must park in this place, arrive on time for your booking, do not arrive early, do not arrive late, and so on. And the first draft I looked at it and I saw that we'd started almost every sentence with please, and I was like, we got to take the pleases out of this one, because I'm not asking them, I'm telling them.

So that was really a process for us to work that out.

And yeah, I mean it became quite clear early early on, so early the men would would push back on the rules, and also they would always ask for discounts and then and then not always, but very often they would want to know, can I do this? Can I do that? How about three of this? How far can I go? How hard can I say bad words?

Yeah?

With you hard? Can I fuck her?

Things like that, I mean, sometimes quite gross, But I think a lot of them just thought they were being clear about the boundaries and they wanted to make sure they got the best deal possible for their money, which, Okay, it annoyed us, and sometimes we laughed uproariously about it, but also like, why.

Don't we do that more as women?

I don't know about you, but me personally, Like even the least I negotiated on the motel. A year down the line, it was quite clear that I had made some mistakes in my negotiation where I could have I could have had that motel ticking along at a much better clip, but I just hadn't. I hadn't pushed back with the landlord because I think I thought if I pushed, he'd yank the whole thing away, which is not the case.

Right, I know, but I mean such a stereotype, but I know it certainly is true of myself and lots of midwomen. I know in particular that's what they're afraid of.

But I could lose it all. I don't know if I deserve it. I don't know if I'm gonning. And it's.

A few of the conversations I've had on this show that have been enlightening is when people say, very often, when you ask for what you want, you get it.

Mm hmm.

You know, but it's all about how you do that I did. There isn't There isn't a moment in your book where which i'd like to think is known in New Zealand moment but maybe not where one man offers to pay and crayfish.

Is particular to New Zealand. But I wouldn't be surprise the burter is pretty calm.

I mean, I can tell you for real. Border for drugs is definitely yes.

Antonia and I are going to be back in a minute to talk about the kinds of men who pay for sex and the unconventional way in which she ended up with her now husband. It does involve somebody getting punched in the nose, just stepping back a little bit. You say that, and I felt a gen x camaraderie with you about this. You were sort of saying that you had quite you had an adventuress, You had a non conventional childhood, you say. I seen you rite When

My father decided this.

Was a good time to attend the Hooker's Ball at the San Francisco Higatt Regency with me swaddled in a blanket in the backseat of his car. It was nineteen seventy five. These things happened back then, and indeed they did. Our nineteen seventies upbringings were kind of different.

I think, and whearin as she got on the next flight home.

I'm sure she did.

But I think the reason.

Why he went to that is because my mother was sort of somewhat friends are at least friendly with Margo Saint James, who was a big sex worker rights activist and feminist in San Francisco.

So they were peripherally around that scene.

And I know my mother as a second way a feminist would talk a lot about the crossover between sex work and being a housewife.

For example.

I want to ask you about that too. But that's interesting because you also say in the book at some point that the rules you'd internalize from your dad were around like don't be a prick tease, don't wear a short skirt, don't do this and that.

So it's like they're conflicting.

You obviously had a sort of compared to a conventional straight lag childhood, a relatively what's the right word, I guess put me in there you go, But you also were still internalizing all that messaging that women, young women always do right about, like protect yourself, make sure you know, don't lead men on, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, well, I think a lot of that is generational.

So my dad was born in the twenties and my mom was born in the thirties. So even though my mom was a strident feminist, I think her attitude was like, look, if you you know, you show nipple and and wear a really short mini skirt, you're gonna get aggressive attention, so be prepared for that. It can make you, know, your walk home that much more dangerous. Nowadays, you know, people say, oh, it's not her fault, it's his fault. She should be able to wear what she wants, and

Your walk home a lot more complicated.

To be honest, it makes it's interesting because I have a fifteen year old daughter. You know, we would it's we're so much further along from this idea of like keep yourself safe, do your top up, as your dad would say. But there's a part of you that has learned those lessons yourself from being hyper visible at that moment where you become hyper visible and you want to kind of protect them from it, and it's it's complicated.

It is complicated, and in fairness, I think we've come a long way, and we've also taken a huge step backward with the amount of pornography that is so easily accessible in everybody's back pocket and that apparently everyone's watching.

From the age of ten.

I know, and I saw how that played out at the batch, and it was everything from asking for sort of further and further out fantasies and it would be quite clear when a certain fantasy was trending in porn, because more and more men would ask for it. Two men who literally could not orgasm having vaginal sex with a woman because they were so used to jacking it with porn, and so they got used to this very specific touch and they could no longer orgasm with a woman.

I mean, these ladies, they would I talk about it in the book.

They at first they would say, Oh, I don't want to see it. He's so old, you know, he's fifty. He's gonna smell like old man. And then they'd finally concede, and when they came down, they'd be like, holy shit, that was the best shag of my life, Like no, no one's ever been that that courtly with me before, you know, And he kept he was so important to him that I feel good. I mean they were just like baffled.

And I guess also that because that's a generation that hasn't grown up with the pawn in the pocket. It's interesting about this because I would imagine, I mean, so you were running the batch from in the sort of late teens, right the late twenty teens, and so you know, we are living in this in the iPhone world, we're living with pawn in the pocket. I imagine that Tinder only fans in those things are very much disrupted brothels and agency work.

Have they No, I.

Don't think so. I mean they may have. I couldn't speak to the before.

Times because I wasn't in the industry before, but I will say this, something that really surprises people outside the industry is how little sex.

There is in it.

I mean, it may be different in the sort of street walker economy where people are paying for fifteen minutes in the back of your car or whatever. That's not the experience I can speak to. What we sold was minimum thirty minutes, most often an hour, sometimes two or three, and during that time there was like maybe five minutes of sex. So men aren't booking escorts, at least not at the price point and the time span that we were offering for the shag. They were booking for the

It's interesting because you'd think in this porn saturated world that you know that if anything, people were more, that there's more sex. But then study after study is saying that young people now are having less sex than they've ever had. Right, And anecdotally it seems to me, I work with lots of young women. Attitudes to sex and monogamy are still quite conservative in some ways, I think

What do you think about that?

Well, I think a lot of things. Some of the thoughts that came up as you were talking were, it's true we were shagging so much more than kids are these days, and we had the specter of aids over our heads.

I can imagine I know when as we came of sexual age with that idea and the fear around that.

I can tell you I'm not gen z and I'm old and cringed to them right. But the one person who will talk to me still touchwood is my daughter who's fourteen. And one of the comments that she's made which really resonated with me, is she said, I could be photographed, Like every time I'm out in public, I'm really careful about how I present myself because I could be videoed or photographed at any time or recorded, and then that can never go away, like it can ruin

It's forgotten.

It's washed off, like the cigarette smell on your clothes after a night at the clubs, right, they can follow them forever into jobs, any future relationship.

I mean, what an enormous.

Wait, No wonder that anxious. This is depressing, depressing. I wonder it's it's true, it's this. I wonder if we.

Could look back on our young adulthood and think we were allowed to mess up an experiment and have adventures in a way that they're probably not. I wanted to get back to two things, well many things, but we're jumping all over the place. But when you were running the batch, so you're also parenting three young kids, your oldest Silas had significant disabilities, your daughter Miranda's little and you had a brand new baby Matisse. So you were a hustling working mother, which was one of the real

Well?

I think a lot more than most people would think, because mothers need flexible schedules, and mothers who've been left alone with their kids need to make the money for the whole household because the vast majority of absent men aren't paying enough, right, so they needed to be able to make real money to run a real safe household for their kids. Sometimes they were in an educational program to launch themselves under professional life, so they.

Needed even more childcare and even more of an income to pay for that.

And you know, how are you going to make that work if you've only got a high school degree and the only jobs out there are for you with that, or like call center or working in a cafe for minimum wage. Like it's just that the math doesn't math, yeah, with that, which is why a lot of women, have mums in particular, have turned to sex work. And then I guess the other part of that question is like, oh, how do you reconcile your life at home with your

Well, there are some really interesting scenes in the book though, when you are sort of dealing with your kids, but your phone the phone was pinging with messages, and this bit I found really interesting. Well, it's near the beginning of your book, you're talking about you.

You've run quite a lot of.

The text messages you got sent, and they are quite shocking, Like if you're not in that world, they're quite shocking. So I'm going to read a couple albums. So you're you know, you're doing what you're doing with the baby on your boom and everything and you and you're getting messages that are like, hey, do you have toys or suck without a condom? Show me pussy face, tits and ass And you say, is this because this is obviously early in your experience, You're like, is this how they

I was reading it.

I don't think a lot of those messages would shock a lot of my midlife friends are on the dating apps, to be honest, they get a lot of that stuff, and that not from people who were looking to pay. But did you feel like you were getting, at least at the at the beginning, that you were getting an insight into the male psyche that was really disturbing? Do you and also do you think that is how they talk when they don't have to pretend that they respect us.

Well, look, I have four older brothers, so I think I had a bit of insight into the male psyche anyway, and they would talk and say all kinds of outrageous things about women when they were around me. I think that I think probably all men think those things. I think most men say them, and I think for many men there is no contradiction between that and the fact that they also respect women and their intellect. Like, I think you can want to slap that ass and then

And that. But still, even though.

I knew they were not trying to be offensive, it would it would just get, it would get. It would wear you down because it was like, oh, they just think of us as a collection of body parts. And so that's why very quickly we realized like the batch ran the best way, and we had three managers who each just work two days a week because we were just it would just be so emotionally exhausting to deal with that.

Thirteen fourteen hours a day.

But that's an interesting point you make that it's not that because when you wrote you know, is this how they talk when they don't have to pretend. I think that sometimes when a curtain is pulled back a little bit on that kind of language whatever, I can find myself thinking they hate us, you know what I mean, They really they hate us, and that's how they would like to see all of us all of the time. But that's a very simplistic way of thinking about it,

This is your job to.

Find them the person who possibly is going to fulfill their fantasy. It's not as black and white as good bad.

Yeah.

And I think that's a mistake that a lot of activists make when they talk about sex worker really people in general, when they talk about it without.

Firsthand knowledge of it.

Is you know, feminists in particular in Europe will say all selling women's bodies for sex devalues women, and it encourages men to treat us like objects to be used, and I think again, that's assuming that because a man wants sex with a woman, therefore he is a predator who doesn't see her as a valuable human being.

I don't think. I don't think that's the case.

I mean, look, there are jerks out there, for sure, and we had a few of them come to the batch. But for the most part, I think men have all people. I think have a need for sex and intimate touch and to feel loved and appreciated, even if it's an illusion.

But I think men really feel it like a drive, like eating.

There's a point in the book where you sort of run through this almost profiles of.

A few of the guys. I'm just going to find him.

Ben is a widower in his sixties who spent his whole life on his sheep farm. He is cripplingly shy, and he has a bit of a speech impediment. So these are kind of some of your regulars. Michael is a local salesman. Seems to be in a happy marriage, but he has an enormous sex drive, and his wife is agreed that he can regularly go to escorts as long as she doesn't have to hear about it. Eric is autistic, and he saves up his disability checks for his visits, which his mum drives him to and from.

Did you see lots of that?

Have you seen that kind of outsourcing of sex that's maybe depicted there by Michael the guy whose wife agrees?

Did you see a lot of that? And does it work?

Absolutely? I saw a lot of it.

And it's interesting to me when people talk to me about the threat that sex work poses to marriage, because

Needs met without putting their families at risk. Does it work? I don't know.

I have no way of following up and finding out if they're still married or divorced five or ten years later.

I can tell you.

That somebody I know and my personal life has done that and it has saved his marriage. That he says his wife told him explicitly that she was no longer interested in having sex, and they were in their sixties, and he said, I'm not ready to die yet. Now.

Your own marriage, which is talked about in the book of Course with Patrice, started in quite an unconventional way too. So you were married to the father of your two older kids and you opened your marriage.

Right.

Is that the right terminology, I guess. And Patrice went at some point from being your lover to your partner when you got pregnant with Matisse, and your husband went and punished him in the nose.

And then I don't know why I'm laughing.

That's not really funny, but it's just it's quite a scene. And then you say that your small town turned on you at that point. To a lot of people stopped talking to you, and I wanted to hear about your ins, and then you opened brothels. So I'm sure that, really, I'm sure that really sorted out.

All that judgment.

How did that community handle you in a way, and how did you learn to deal with those really entrenched conservative attitudes about both your personal and professional.

I'm not sure if it's a blessing or a curse how completely non confrontational quies are, because nobody ever said to my face that they disapproved of what I was doing. But it did hurt when friends just stopped, like literally just didn't call back, didn't email back, just just cut

And they just cut us out.

So yeah, that hurt would have Yeah, And you know, honestly, as an American, I'd rather they had had a conversation with me, because maybe we could have, you know, salvaged some of the friendships. But alas that was not to be. And I think I was so overwhelmed at the time with new baby and profoundly disabled child and two businesses and all the rest of it. I was on a go door to door and say, Hi, do you still want to be my friend? Like, I just didn't have time for that.

I had to simplify, you know, the judgment that you were copying for both for both that and then I assumed that it was public knowledge about the batch, right like the town all knew about the batch. Did you also cop a lot of judgment about that and did you care?

Well, it's hard to say.

I only felt the judgment when I tried to advertise, both for staff or for clients, or when I tried to rent to premises, and I was getting blocked at every point in the way. When I when counsel tried to give us the boot, that's when I felt the pushback. The rest of the time, people really just did not confront. I sometimes felt a bit of a chill in the air,

Yeah, absolutely absolutely.

It was obviously a service that was needed in that community, whether they approved of it or not.

So you didn't.

It wasn't like they're trying to run you out of town. It was just more like icy, an icy, like not looking at you in the shop.

Well, yeah, when we come back.

Anthonya tells me about her experience parenting a child living with a disability while also running a brothel. Stay with us. Everything changed in twenty nineteen. You lost your son, Silas. He died suddenly, and that obviously changed everything. You packed up and left and went to live in France for a year with your family. And you didn't go back, did you. You've gone back to New Zealand, but you've never gone back.

No, I have not been back.

I assume that there's a that's a massive life before and life after moment.

Yeah, well, I mean from Gaday.

For me, it was the years when I was parenting Silas, which were really hard. I mean, I love that kid, but it is so hard and isolating to have a child who is so profoundly disabled. He was basically nonverbal, he was incontinent. He would yell nonsense words repeatedly. And so you know, people people shoot you are either really uncomfortable or they shoot you annoyed looks because they think your child is acting out. They don't realize that he can't help it.

I think we have a ways to go. I mean, that's another taboo.

We have a ways to go before we're fully accepting of THELED.

And so there's just a lot of pain wrapped up for me in that town.

I think the way that you write about with such honesty about parenting Silas, mothering Silas will make a lot of women I'm sure they say that to you already, but will make a lot of parents feel very seen because I think I think you like you. You bring You're very I mean as in all of the book.

Totally And thank you for saying that, because I feel like that that the book does make tries to ship away a little bit at that taboo that we have around disability, and it's bo is exactly the right word for it. There's another writer, Andrew Solomon, who writes brilliantly.

From the Tree Fall from the Tree.

Loved that book.

He says, there's a tendency that people have of calling them pillow angels. You know these Hugh at the time was writing about I think a pair of twins that were so profoundly disabled that they couldn't even sit up on their own. They were basically lying flat on their backs with the tube in their bellies to feed them on pillows. And I can't remember if it was the mother the people around them calling them pillow angels.

I thought, wow, that's so what.

It is is it's a racing of the child, and it's a racing of the parent. Because look, Silas could be a real little shit sometimes like every other kid, and that's part of his humanity. He has the right to be a little shit. And I have the right to feel really unhappy about going into his room every morning and changing an adult sized Pooh, you know, and

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and they don't want to hear They don't want to hear your story about that, you know, I'm so playing on an animal level. I think that's exactly right. I think people don't want to look at it, which is like, deep down don't want to look at that experience, which I really appreciated it being in the book. You did go back to New Zealand though, And I'm really interested in post batch life because obviously you've written this book, and this book has been adapted into a

Is it really real?

It's great?

But so how did life play out post that did you.

You.

Obviously you all went back to France. I can't imagine what a difficult time this was COVID hits.

But you did go back to New Zealand.

Why did you go back to New Zealand And how has life changed since you wrote the book?

Well, I mean the quick reason why we came back to New Zealand is that we both have shared custody of children with partners. Of course you do short of abandoning those children, which I could never do.

We need to be in New Zealand of course from them.

But really the only other option I think for me would be France because the United States I feel less and less American.

It's been sixteen seventeen years now.

Did you write the huff Post essay and it got optioned for the movie? But had you'd already been you You've sailed through this book that you always knew it was going to be a book, really, this Batch Adventure?

Oh right, yeah, so you were asking me about life since then, I always wanted to write about it, and I had been writing about it during the time of running the batche. I would jot down notes and I would talk about it whenever I could to a couple of podcasts and so on, because I thought what we were doing was really important and low key revolutionary, actually putting the power in the hands of the sex workers.

Near the beginning of the book, you're like, you're in this little town in New Zealand and you're kind of going and you've got these little kids, and as discussed, you know, life isn't easy, and you're working out what to do. And you say, when you're young and w you make choices on a whim because you think everything is reversible, and then one day you realize it's not. And that's one of the things about aging that I

How do you feel about it?

Do you regret being there? Do you wish that life had been different already? Glad that it played out the way it did.

I think it has to play out the way it does.

I mean, look, if I was gonna tell you one regret, I'd say, I wish I hadn't dropped out of university level chemistry because I was really getting interested in endochronology. But I think, look when my husband left and I was so terrified, and I had all these kids to take care of, and Patrece, my now husband, said he would be with me and help me raise this child.

But I didn't know if he was stick or not.

I think something rises up in mothers in particular, or we just go nothing gonna put my babies in danger, and I just I was able to find a strength of a hundred wildcats.

And I'm not flexing here like that.

I think it's I think it's a physical brain reaction when a mom is backed against the wall.

And I'm proud of what we did, and I think I did it because I was backed up against the wall. So yeah, I think all that bad shit had to happen.

Thank you so much, Anthonia. It's been a really good conversation. Friends. This has been the last traditional episode of season four of mid We're going to be back in your ears in April, and until then, I want you to keep your ears free for a few little treats that might drop your way in this feed. Also, I asked you last week to rate and review and please continue to

Follow us on instert and send us.

A cheeky DM at Mid by Mamma Mia or me at Waynwright, Holly, and last, but not least, if you want more MID conversations about sex, scroll back to our conversation with Leslie Morgan, who got divorced at forty nine and embarked on quite the sexual adventure, or with the author Julie Cohen about coming out as bisexual as a married mom of forty. Both of those episodes are in our feed, And of course, a massive thank you to

And I will see you next season. Bye,