The Birth
Expectation
There will be gentle whale music playing. You will be wearing grey Boden loungewear with your highlighted, freshly washed hair loosely tied back from your face. You will turn to your partner, smile softly and say, “It’s time,” then your baby will glide from your vagina like a Calippo ice lolly from its cardboard pouch. Your baby will be handed to you looking spotlessly clean and free from gut dew and uterine residue. You will love them immediately and name your new addition after an English aristocrat who your husband’s family are probably distant relatives of. Within hours of the birth you’ll be back at home doing yoga on a mat laid on your real oak floor and slathering yourself in Clarins moisturiser while your husband lovingly feeds the baby a bottle filled to the brim of milk you expressed earlier from your very comfortable boobs.
Reality
You will likely swear and/or shit yourself. Whale music could not be further from your mind and you may well end up maiming your well-intentioned (but bloody annoying) partner who thinks that awkwardly rubbing your back will serve to in any way alleviate the most excruciating pain in the universe, and the slight problem of getting something watermelon-sized out of an orifice more suited to a small-to-medium satsuma. Your baby will be born disguised as one of your internal organs and if you choose to feed the baby from your very uncomfortable boobs, he/she will remain there for at least the next 45 days. Your living room floor will be unrecognisable with its new layer of poo-stained sleep suits and nipple pads that are littered everywhere and you will count getting dressed as a monumental achievement.
The Next Five Years
Expectation
Your child will be immaculately clean and dressed exclusively in Boden and Joules clothes. Your life will be a happy balance of playing with wooden, educational toys and attending baby sensory classes and child-free evenings at expensive restaurants with your other half. Your child will answer you cheerfully when you call him/her in from playing imaginatively in the garden and politely and agreeably wash their hands thoroughly before settling down to eat a dinner of toasted linseeds on a bed of kale, washed down with a smoothie made from wild berries you all collected from a nearby forest earlier in the day.
Reality
Poo becomes the theme of your life. You’ll clean it, talk about it, 'Google' it and probably inadvertently eat it at some point too. You quickly discover that Boden and Joules clothes, whilst beautiful to look at, don’t magically repel mud from the garden or bright orange poo so you may as well save a few quid and stick with supermarket pieces until the mud and poo stages pass. Your children will bicker, brawl and attack each other and become intolerably cranky from 4pm onwards each day. Despite your best efforts, they will refuse to eat anything that’s not chicken dippers or sausages and you will have days where you feel like an utter failure of a mother, and possibly, human.
One more thing…
Expectation
You will love your offspring a lot.
Reality
You will love them more than a lot. You will love them with every cell of your body. You will think of the happiness of no one else. And those days you feel like a failure? That’s only because you’ve tried so hard and care so much. Chin up mama, you’re doing great.
