The brutal truth I learnt in my first year of being a parent that no one warned me about

Before becoming a mother, I’d never seen intense exhaustion until my friend came to my house with her toddler after he’d skipped his nap. We stood in awe as he threw away one of his sandals, tugged down his pants and then ran around in circles, laughing hysterically. It was cute until he finally snapped.

That was when he threw himself to the floor and wailed. His bright red, wet face made noises I’d never heard before and, as I desperately ran around the room looking for child-friendly things in my child-free home to distract him, I noticed that my friend, his mother, just stared into space. She’d seen this universal shift before, and she knew she didn’t stand a chance of curtailing it.

I snapped into problem-solving mode. “What’s wrong with him? What happened? Is he in pain? How do we fix this?” I squinted in the face of the cacophony from the small mess of a human.

She looked confused, as if she couldn’t hear him at all. She raised her eyebrows and smiled gently. “He’s just overtired,” she sighed. “Happens at least once a day, usually about …” She looked at her wristwatch, which was on upside down, so she had to contort her arm at a horrible angle to read it.

I was bamboozled. Overtired? This seemed like an unbelievable overreaction to being knackered. When I was really zonked, sometimes I’d cry in my Corolla hatchback in the work carpark, but I always kept my pants on. I thought to myself, “This kid really doesn’t cope very well with being tired. When I have kids, mine won’t be so melodramatic.”

Sorry, did I just hear every single mother in the whole world scoff? Because every mother has had to listen to smarmy childless people proudly declare what kind of parent they will be, while knowing that as soon as they do have kids, all these declarations – “I’ll never let my kids watch screens at a cafe.” “I’ll never let my child order a babyccino, and if you ever see me do it, kick me!” – will fly out the window.

Before we had kids, my partner Lukasz and I also relished judging parents. Every childless person does it – it’s the law. We are all allowed to experience the heights of pre-kid smugness so we can feel the catastrophic fall from grace as soon as we procreate.

For instance, friends of ours who had a one-year-old couldn’t meet us for lunch one day because it was their daughter’s sleep time. We pretended we understood and praised them for being such thoughtful parents to their lucky princess. But what we actually meant was that we simply couldn’t believe this tiny human had such control over two grown adults.

Becoming a mother taught me some pretty rude truths very quickly – one of which was that I handle exhaustion about as well as that pantless tiny tyrant in my kitchen from way back when. There is an enormous divide between actual reality and what we’ll call “Tired Brain Reality”, in which I have no idea what the actual f--- is going on around me.

My tired brain has made me look like a dead-set dickhead countless times. Like the time I planned to quit a god-awful cafe job in spectacular fashion, only to ugly-cry in front of everyone. Or the time I planned an inspiring literature class and ended up explaining in great detail what my kids look like when they vomit.

I’ve never known exhaustion so intimately as when my baby Olive was born. While she is a delightful kid now, she was a real arsehole of a newborn. She cried endlessly, never smiled or said thank you, and didn’t let me sleep for what seemed like forever. I felt like a shell of a person trawling through the streets looking like someone coughed me up.

Olive was underweight, and I couldn’t work out why – all I seemed to do was feed and walk her, often at the same time. Turns out there wasn’t much milk in either tit; she was using me as a human dummy and starving. If humanity lives much longer, I hope female tits evolve to become transparent, so struggling mums can see if there’s milk in their cans or just dust.

On one of my many, many aimless walks around Brunswick, Melbourne, with a tiny screaming baby strapped to my chest, I was so tired I felt physically sick. My body ached, my dry eyes stung and everything sounded like I was underwater. I could hear my heart beating, and my breathing became shallow, even though, thanks to the endless walking, this was probably the fittest I’d ever been.

I was unravelling, a feeling that became even more familiar as sleep became a distant memory. I looked as good as I felt, too. In inner-city Melbourne, it was hard to tell whether I was a new mum or a hipster who’d just spent 16 hours drinking at a bar lock-in and found a baby on the way out.

My baby screamed, my skin throbbed and my brain spun, and soon all of this set me on a path to sheer fury. I stormed down the road, wondering why the hell no one had thought to warn me how bloody exhausting this was going to be.

For the full term, advice was given to me every damn day. So many tips and words of warning.

During my pregnancy, unsolicited advice was thrown at me daily. On one occasion, soon after I had announced to my boss I was pregnant, I was at a work afternoon tea when an older male colleague, with whom I’d never had a conversation, explained that when the baby gets constipated – “and she will” – I should insert parsley into her anus. Thanks for the tip, Rocco.

For the full term, advice was given to me every damn day. So many tips and words of warning. And yet, on this grey Melbourne morning, as I tore up the pavement towards Princes Park, I couldn’t for the life of me remember anyone telling me about the complete and utter lack of sleep I would experience.

This made me livid. It seemed to be the only warning I needed. Labour was grim, but it only lasted a day. Breastfeeding was tricky, but formula was an option (as I discovered when I finally learnt that my opaque tits were, in fact, useless to a hungry infant). No sleep was the part that crushed me.

As I picked up my pace, the fire in my empty belly grew. Why did no one tell me I wouldn’t sleep again? Where was the warning? Where was the advice on how to handle it? As the betrayed voice in my head grew louder, I spotted a heavily pregnant woman waiting for the bus. I stopped in my tracks. I was going to save her.

Now, this is where my brain severs all ties with actual reality and succumbs completely to “Tired Brain Reality”.

The Tired Brain narrative went like this: I looked like a glowing earth mama with flowing shiny hair and a white linen dress. I had a sweet cherub sleeping peacefully on my plump bosom, showing no signs of stirring. I floated over to the woman, who was silently pleading for my advice.

I said, “Hello, sister. You’re about to embark on the most majestic journey of love and nurturing. Your heart will swell, and you will love that baby more than you’ve ever loved anything in your life. But remember, you will miss sleep so profoundly that you’ll wish you’d slept more during this part, so go home. Work can wait, but sleep cannot. Go and sleep.”

And she squeezed my hand, smiled at my sleeping angel and said, “Thank you so much. You’ve changed my life forever.” And I floated away.

However, the actual reality went like this: Across four lanes of traffic, I saw a pregnant woman patiently waiting for the bus, minding her own business. Without skipping a beat, I yelled, over the sound of my screaming newborn and idling cars, “Hey! This is so bloody hard! Pregnancy is exhausting, but when it is over, it is hell. You should go home right now and sleep because you will never, ever get to do it again when that thing comes out of you!”

And, with wide eyes, she looked around her, looked back at me and said, “Um … I’m not pregnant.”

So, to the poor woman I scared half to death while making her feel like shit: I am genuinely sorry.

Edited extract from I’m Not Mad (Anymore) by Bron Lewis (Affirm Press) out now.

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