On this episode of the Love Your Villain podcast (Season 2: Parenting Is No Effing Joke), Ila sits down with Laura, a birth coach and mum living on a homestead in Peru.

Laura opens up about how her villain shows up when family gets under her skin, re-parenting her inner little girl while raising a headstrong three-year-old, and the quiet power of apologising to our kids.

Together they explore free birth, birth trauma, intuition and body autonomy, and how a religious upbringing shapes the way women relate to sex, pleasure and their own bodies.

Raw, honest and full of heart.

Why are so many parents left to carry it all alone?

In this episode, Ila responds to the comments on her episode about rage and parenting, and to the Lindsay Clancy case, to ask a hard question: what happens to parents when there is no village?

She talks about the parts of motherhood we rarely name out loud: the grief of miscarriage, the hormonal aftermath of birth, the guilt of splitting your attention between children, and the pressure to cope without asking for help. She also shares her own experience of running out of time to have children, and the grief that came with it.

From there, the conversation widens. Why does society have so little tolerance for a crying baby? Why is apologising seen as weakness? Ila traces these back to a lack of emotional literacy passed down through generations, and shares why she wrote Love Your Villain: to help break the cycle of emotional abuse before it reaches the next generation of children.

This is not an episode about excusing harm. It is about what becomes possible when we meet suffering with compassion instead of shame, and when adults learn to sit with, identify and label their own difficult emotions.

In this episode:

• Why miscarriage and postpartum struggles deserve far more acknowledgement
• How isolation and a lack of support wear parents down
• Why a crying baby triggers us, and where that comes from
• What a personal experience with a partner's suicide attempt taught Ila about pain and escape
• Why emotional literacy in adults is the real protection for children

Content note: this episode discusses suicide (including a description of an attempt), infant and child loss, miscarriage, infertility and postpartum mental illness. Please take care while listening. If you are struggling, reach out to your local crisis line or someone you trust.

This episode of Love Your Villain gets honest about what happens behind closed doors. Host Ila Casselman sits down with a father of two daughters, married 20 years, to explore sexual shame, masturbation, porn, and the religious conditioning that follows us into marriage.

We unpack avoidant attachment, the freeze response, and how purity culture shapes intimacy. Plus: kink as a healing modality, consent and power dynamics, parenting and sex education, and why dads should talk to their daughters about periods.

A raw, funny, deeply honest shadow-work conversation about pleasure, shame, and breaking generational patterns for parents and couples. Explicit content.