Motherhood: Unmasked & Unfiltered
Motherhood: Unmasked & Unfiltered is the podcast for neurodivergent Australian mums who are tired of pretending they've got it all figured out. Each week, Melbourne mum Alisha Burns (ADHD, diagnosed later in life) and Sydney mum Rhiannon Henderson (AuDHD, diagnosed in adulthood) get honest about parenting, identity, hormones, overwhelm and the messy reality of raising kids while understanding their own neurodivergent brains for the first time. This isn't clinical ADHD content. It's two friends laughing, disagreeing and figuring it out in real time — masking, late diagnosis, rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), executive dysfunction, sensory overwhelm, the ADHD tax, PDA, PMDD and perimenopause, school-mum politics, and the mental load no one warns you about. If you've ever wondered why you're "too much," too sensitive, too chaotic or too inconsistent — or if you're raising a sparkly kid of your own — come for the "wait, I do that too" moments and stay because you'll laugh, learn why your brain does what it does, and feel a little less alone. New episodes every Thursday. And just remember — you were born sparkly.
Episodes
Both hosts have picked up a new hobby in the last week, and neither is remotely surprised. They are three weeks out from a Hong Kong Disney trip with friends and four small kids, which Alisha has turned into a full creative project: matching t-shirts made on her Cricut with iron-on vinyl, "Disney bounding" outfit plans, and bedazzled sneakers for the kids (and herself) so nobody is clip-clopping around the park in dres...
School holidays have just started for Rhiannon and are halfway done for Alisha, and both houses are full of big feelings. Alisha shares a car-park standoff over a seatbelt and a tearful rescue of a dead moth; Rhiannon talks about a daughter who can't decide on shoes, a mum who can't decide on dinner, and a lift being drilled in the building at the exact wrong moment. It's the perfect setup for this week's topic: dysreg...
Alisha plays support person for a friend's IVF egg retrieval, Rhiannon unpacks what happened when she lapsed on her GLP-1 microdose, and both reflect on parenting without repeating how they were raised.
This week starts with a genuinely lovely story: Alisha spent her morning as an emergency support person for a woman she didn't know, picked up from an IVF clinic after her eighth egg retrieval, because cli...
Alisha and Rhiannon check in on their September reset a few weeks late, swap DIY disaster stories, and get honest about sleep, self-care and why "new season, new us" rarely goes to plan.
It's officially the first day of spring, and the hosts are marking it with the September reset they promised a couple of episodes ago — with the honest caveat that by the time you're hearing this, it's actually a fe...
This week is a proper life-update episode, and there's a lot to get through. Rhiannon opens with a 20-minute saga about a UK-exclusive Stickman Book Week costume that went missing for days, involved a full panic spiral, an actual Etsy tarot reading, and a search through every storage tub in the house — before turning up in a laundry bag the whole time. Alisha, meanwhile, had her own Book Week near-miss involving ...
This week's episode starts, as most weeks do, with a confession: Alisha has spent all day on "productive procrastination" instead of launching her new membership beta, and Rhiannon decided the most urgent task in her life was mounting a wood pelmet above her window without drilling into concrete.
From there, the hosts get into the real theme of the episode: as spring rolls around, can they finally be...
Some weeks are just a lot. This episode starts with two very different-looking problems — one daughter who's suddenly refusing school, one daughter who's suddenly refusing food — and ends up in the same place both of them usually end up: is this a phase, is this the environment, or is this actually her brain?
Alisha unpacks her daughter's abrupt swing from loving school to dreading it, working ...
This week's guest gets it from every angle: Katherine "Kat" Richardson is a late-diagnosed ADHDer, a mum navigating her own son's likely neurodivergence, and the author-illustrator behind The Things Enid Can Tell You — a children's book about a sparkly-brained girl that never once uses the word "ADHD."
Kat and the hosts trade late-diagnosis stories that will sound painfully familiar: the report cards...
Ever bounced your leg under a desk, reread the same book for the fourth time, or needed total silence to concentrate but constant background noise to relax? This week Alisha and Rhiannon tackle stimming — one of the most misunderstood words in the neurodivergent world.
Both ...
Alisha and Rhiannon return after an unplanned break to get honest about ADHD time blindness, the ADHD tax, decluttering doom piles, and parenting two very different sparkly kids.
Sixteen episodes in a row, then... silence. Alisha and Rhiannon are back after an unplanned hiatus, and instead of pretending it didn't happen, they're unpacking exactly why it d...
You think you know us? Think again.
In this week's episode we're stepping away from the deep dives and getting a little personal. We asked AI to give us rapid-fire questions — then spectacularly failed at the rapid-fire part — and ended up somewhere far more honest and interesting.
From ADHD rage triggers to Disney dreams, impulsive purchases we absolutely justified, the tortured artists we tried to fix, and the things ...
Have you ever felt like you become a completely different person for one or two weeks every month?
Maybe you're more emotional, more reactive, more overwhelmed, less productive, or struggling with rage, anxiety or depression that seems to disappear almost as quickly as it arrives.
In this episode, Alisha and Rhiannon dive into the growing body of research exploring the connection bet...
Fresh off the annual Solo Mum Society Bali trip, Alisha and Rhiannon sit down for an honest post-holiday debrief.
What started as a conversation about forgotten chargers, unnecessary scooters and overpacked suitcases quickly became a much deeper discussion about neurodivergence, parenting expectations, mum guilt and what children actually need from a family holid...
This week, Alisha and Rhiannon are in full pre-Bali countdown mode.
With 34 solo mums and their children joining the annual Solo Mum Society Bali trip, the conversation starts exactly where you'd expect: doom piles, overpacking, last-minute hyperfocus, welcome packs, and wondering whether a third suitcase is really necessary.
But what begins as a chat about pa...
This week is less expert advice and more of a catch-up.
The kind of catch-up where one mum accidentally loses half a day to Pinterest strategy, another starts demolishing a bathroom at 11pm, and somehow both of them end up discussing friendship, parenting, school communities and why socialising feels so complicated as a neurodivergent adult.
In this ...
Why are so many women only discovering they’re neurodivergent later in life?
In this episode of Motherhood: Unmasked & Unfiltered, Alisha and Rhiannon are joined by psychiatrist Dr Clinton White to unpack what’s really happening with late ADHD and autism diagnoses in women.
From missed signs in childhood to years of being labelled with anxiety or depression, this conversation dives into how easily neurodivergence is...
Why does a delayed reply feel like rejection? Why does one comment spiral into a full identity crisis? And why do we care so much about whether people like us… even when we don’t like them?
In this episode of Motherhood: Unmasked & Unfiltered, Alisha and Rhiannon unpack one of the most intense and misunderstood parts of ADHD:
Rejection Sensitive ...
What if your child isn’t being “difficult”… but actually can’t do what you’re asking?
In this episode of Motherhood: Unmasked & Unfiltered, Alisha and Rhiannon dive into the reality of parenting neurodivergent children — especially when their brains work in ways that don’t respond to traditional parenting appr...
Ever bought something… lost it… then bought it again?
Or filled your fridge with “healthy food” only to throw it all out a week later?
Welcome to ADHD tax.
In this episode, Alisha and Rhiannon unpack the very real (and often expensive) ways ADHD shows up in everyday life — from impulse spending and forgotten bills to unused subscriptions, wasted groceries,...
This episode is not polished. It’s not structured. And honestly… that’s exactly the point.
Because this is what ADHD actually looks like in real life.
From losing essential podcast equipment minutes before recording, to impulse Kmart shopping, overstimulation at family events, rage-driving home for a disappointing soft serve, and late-night dopamine spendin...
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