WHAT I'VE LEARNED ABOUT MOTHERHOOD, BY AUTHOR HOLLY BOURNE

They always say nothing can truly prepare you for having a baby, and yet I used to slightly wrinkle my nose up at that saying. I spent a year working in a nursery when I was younger, I had nieces and nephews, and I always ended up surrounded by kids at family parties reading them stories. How different could it be looking after my own child?

Like a lot of pregnant women, I spent nine months fixating on the trials and tribulations of my pregnancy. The all-day sickness, the carpal tunnel, the deranged cravings for full-fat milk at 3am. Then there was the almost near-constant thought of the birth itself – looking down at my swelling stomach, wondering, “how the heck are you going to get out of there? And is it going to kill me?” Very little consideration went into how I’d actually look after the baby on the other side. So, of course, yes, when my daughter arrived, it turned out the saying was right – nothing could truly prepare me.

In Matrescence by Lucy Jones, she refers to the term ‘nurture shock’. A term that newly postpartum parents go through in those early newborn days, as they learn how to take care of a baby. The word landed so powerfully with me. It perfectly summed up the significant…yes….state of acute shock I was in after the birth of my daughter as I confronted just how difficult it is to keep a baby alive, let alone alive and thriving.

The cluster feeding, the near-constant nappy changing, the burping, the rocking to sleep for every nap and night time wake…How you have hardly one minute for yourself. During my fourth trimester, I once dared to wash my hair, something I hadn’t attempted for six days, and mid-hair-wash, my breasts started leaking milk in that weird sentient way breastfeeding boobs do, and I’d run out of the shower, suds still in my hair, to find my baby wailing in hunger and desperately latching on my husband’s nose.

Those first six months are beyond overwhelming. I’d dissociate quite often while breastfeeding, fantasising about my past life and grieving the most simple of freedoms. Taking a sick day, getting a train somewhere and looking out the window, saying ‘yes’ to literally any commitment without having to first think “CHILDCARE”. And this nurture shock continues as your child gets older, although it definitely lessens and you adjust. You move onto weathering the weaning, and the sleep regressions, and the nap transitions and the potty training, and the bedtime routine. Mothering is just very… relentless, but, also, as we know, so very magical at the same time. I tried to explain this disorientation of nurture shock, and how it combusts with this huge love for your new child, in my novel, So Thrilled For You.

“That’s the biggest headfuck about motherhood – there’s no going back. There’s no trail period of refund with a receipt. You can’t possibly imagine how ridiculously hard it is, and, when you do, it’s too late. You can’t go back to before, and, because of the ludicrous love you feel for your life-ruining baby, you wouldn’t want to anyway. Even though you would, but you’d like to keep the baby too. Maybe suspended in some special fluid somehow, that keeps it warm and safe and fed and loved and alive, while you can still be you…”

What has changed my worldview more than anything since becoming a mother, is this nurture shock. And, though it was initially overwhelming and destabilising, it’s now become this beautiful filter through which I view the world. I now look at every single person I pass, and think “You used to be a baby once.” Everyone I sit next to on a train, or come across in work, or who queues with me at the self-service checkout at Sainsburys…I look at them and I imagine their nights of cluster feeds, the nappies they had changed for them, the burps a parent massaged from their stomach, the way they were poppered-up into babygrows and then rocked and lulled and shhed and lullabied to sleep.

With every human I see, I now also see the sheer intense effort that went into growing a baby into this human. The love, the sacrifice, the juggling, the laundry, the financial sacrifices, on and on it goes. Every single person on this earth exists because a woman grew them in their body, stretching her own organs around them, and birthed them. The sheer power of mother. It’s made me realise why, politically, we’ve always been so keen to control and legislate women’s bodies – because it scares us how much power we have, how utterly we are needed for all of us to survive.

Now, whenever I watch an amazing film, stare at a beautiful painting, or admire a sky-scraper building, I don’t just marvel at the person who made them, but also the mother who made the person who made them. None of the world would exist without mothers, and therefore mothers should be cherished, and celebrated, and protected for the vitally important work they do.

Holly Bourne is the author of So Thrilled For You (Hodder & Stoughton). Her book is available in your local independent bookshop and signed copies available via Waterstones.

If you’re looking for thoughtful Mother’s Day Gifts, view our selection of beautiful gift boxes here.