PERHAPS I SHOULD have had more foresight. Aged 40 and eight months pregnant, I viewed my impending motherhood as a fantastic new adventure and spent little time dwelling on the potential challenges.
I figured that since I knew how to work hard under pressure and manage my own time, being a mother would be in the realm of the familiar. When people told me it may be difficult, I thought of multi-tasking and overdue deadlines. When they said I'd be tired I recalled late nights at work and early starts the next day. I reasoned that women had been having babies since the beginning of time - so what could be so hard?
Two months later, as the initial euphoria began to wane, I found myself exhausted, anxious, and utterly overwhelmed. Nothing I'd read or that anyone had ever said to me even remotely prepared me for the tiredness, the absence of personal time or the delicate balance of vulnerability and responsibility I now felt. It was as though I'd woken up on another planet and needed a manual to survive.
On good days my daughter slept well and a degree of normality existed, but on bad days we slid into a tussle, she not wanting to be put down, me having no time to take care of myself.
To make matters worse it seemed that all the other mothers I met were coping marvellously - radiantly taking up the mantle of mother and shrugging off their old life without a care in the world. Did no one else find it shocking that there was so little time to do anything but tend to the baby? Did no one else feel unreasonably tearful or too shattered to think? And was I the only one who wanted to talk about these things?
I wasn't of course. My feelings were quite normal. It was just that no one had warned me that I was up against the baby conspiracy - a conspiracy between women all over the world that leaves new mums feeling as if they've been kept in the dark about the realities of motherhood.
