6 Surprising Things I’ve Learned Since Becoming A Mum

My daughter was born a year ago and it absolutely boggles my brain how the purple, helpless, hiccupping bundle of squishiness that was wrestled out of my pelvis by a surgeon has become a standing, clapping toddler who just absolutely loves a banana first thing in the morning – in front of my very eyes. Here are some things I have learned in that year, which all surprised me a great deal.

1. The ‘Just Wait Until…’ crew get started early – and they don’t go away.

“Oh, you think you’re tired now?! Just wait until you have kids.”

“Oh, you think you feel ill now? Just wait until the third trimester, did you know it comes back?”

“Yeah you just got married, of course you’re happy now. Just wait until it’s been a few years, then we’ll see.”

“A newborn? You think it’s difficult now? Just wait until they’re a toddler.”

“She’s sleeping through the night? Huh. Just wait until the sleep regression.”

“You think it’s difficult now? Just wait until you have a second one.”

And so on. And so on, and so on, and so on, forever and ever.

Go away.

2. Breastfeeding is amazing and natural – but by no means effortless.

Just because a mum is bottle feeding, that doesn’t necessarily mean she chose to. (Actually, if you see a mum breastfeeding, she might not have chosen that either – societal/parental/medical pressure is a thing, and so are allergies to formula). SO MANY issues can plague a new mum in her efforts to breastfeed, not least a low supply, caesarean drugs delaying the milk production, a tongue-tie in the infant, exhaustion from a traumatic birth, failure to latch, a lack of breastfeeding know-how and support.

A few new fun things I found out about in my heart-breaking breastfeeding journey that lasted four whole days was ‘D-MER’ – here is some more, better info on that – and the devastating discovery of ‘breastfeeding aversion’, which both resolved a paranoia I’d had for some time that I was totally effing nuts (I’m not) but also that I was likely locked in for life with it, and couldn’t breastfeed Melody or indeed any other child I might have, unless I was willing to sob and wail through every feed every few hours, for the next year and a half.

I wasn’t.

3. ‘Mum Brain’ is real – but it isn’t what you think.

I have been formally educated to within an inch of my life (and my credit limit) but once those pregnancy hormones hit, it means jack. I was lucky if for nine months I could remember my own name or blow my own nose.

However, once the snuggly sleep-thief was out and my blood supply was once again mine and mine alone, the change in me as a person was astonishing. Maybe it’s exhaustion. Maybe it’s lioness instinct. Maybe it’s not having enough time to even wash my hair properly or some other evolutionary benefit I haven’t yet discovered, but since having my daughter, I just do not care anymore. I do not care for pointless meetings without an agenda where I very clearly am not required. I do not care for clutter. I do not care for the timewasting enterprises surrounding property purchase and I am MORE than happy to tell the people employed in said enterprises my thoughts. I do not care for tiptoeing around the feelings of others if they have spent decades gleefully taking a bulldozer to mine. I just don’t care for it – I haven’t got time, or the patience, or the inclination. And I am so, so much happier for it – and if I’m not mistaken, the people around me are happier too.

4. Nothing you do is enough for some people.

And by that I mean this:

Three weeks after me and my husband first started seeing each other, we started getting questions about when we were getting married.

The second he proposed, everyone wanted to know if we’d ‘set a date’. (Date didn’t even matter anyway as it turned out #LoveInATimeOfCovid19)

When we set the date, and as our wedding approached, no one wanted to talk about the wedding anymore, it was all ‘when are you having a baby?’ (Joke was on them – I was already pregnant and seconds from vomiting at any given moment).

When I was in the post-natal ward not even 48 hours after having our daughter, I was asked by another postpartum mum if I’d have any more.

Every woman I know – relationship or not – gets the same crap.

Sigh.

5. The more you think of yourselves as primitive cave people, the easier it’ll be and the more sense it all makes.

Here’s the thing about human newborns: they haven’t read the parenting books. They don’t know what a motherhood-and-lifestyle TikTok influencer is or that some adorable person in a cottage in the Cotswolds makes GIGANTIC SILK BOWS to fit a newborn head for some reason. They haven’t heard of sleep training or Yale locks and safety chains and they don’t know that they actually live several stories up in a tower block and therefore an intrusion is actually quite unlikely.

All they know is – a tube used to feed me directly into my belly without me asking, which has now gone, and if I am left alone, a woolly mammoth will eat me.

That’s it. They want boob and to hear another heartbeat so they know they’re not alone, and that is literally it. That’s not to say it’s not incredibly difficult to provide constant boob and body warmth – you might have other kids to tend to, you might need to actually go to sleep yourself at some point, and of course eight thousand relatives simply must come and see the baby and have a cuddle and tell you howshattered you look but the answer to the question we’ve all screamed into a pillow at 3am at some point, i.e. why won’t you just calm down and go to sleep??? – is more often than not, they think they should be in a cave with mum and it appears to them that they are not.

Reminding ourselves that our baby was a primitive, running-on-instinct, ape-descended, carbon-based life-form (don’t tell the Deacon baptising her on Sunday that I said that) with no method of communication apart from crying helped us understand the world through her eyes. It didn’t make the 3ams any less unpleasant, but it did help us to understand why they were happening, and we learned to be a little cave family until she was old enough for Hey Bear.

6. All the clichés are true. ALL. OF. THEM.

They grow so fast.

Make the most of it, it’ll be gone before you know it.

Life will never be the same but there’s nothing like having children.

The days are long, but the years are short.

You’ve never known a love like it.

You feel differently when it’s your own.

All of them. I politely smiled to their faces and rolled my eyes when these people were gone all through my pregnancy. Yes, yes, it goes fast, okay, I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for that.

My baby is one. She learned to breastfeed, drink from a Tommee Tippee bottle, sleep through the night, smile and laugh, eat cauliflower puree with a spoon, clap, sit up, crawl, stand, splash, say Mamma, Dadda, Bah-Bah (not sure who or what that is tbh), play nicely with other children, steal food straight out of the mouths of other children (with apologies, Hazel), eat Cheerios, crawl away while having her nappy changed and play peek-a-boo games.

She was only born yesterday, and yet tomorrow, she is one.

Life has not been the same, and it’s true – I’ve never, ever known a love like it.