Becoming a mother made my life worse

But (you saw this one coming) I'm glad about it.

Yesterday was what I would, once upon a time, have considered a busy day, and now regard as A Day. I got home from a trip into central London. We’d been to the transport museum (I’d wanted a gallery but I knew the toddler mood wasn’t going to withstand it) had lunch with family, then got back on the tube and arrived home where I promptly put said toddler down for a nap.*

Once she was safety dispatched to her cot I lay down on my bed, still lightly hungover from several glasses of Chardonnay the night before, and tired from the day. I looked at the clock and calculated that I had 90 minutes to nap, and do all my silly little word games (Wordle, the Mini, Connections). I could hear my boyfriend pottering around downstairs, reading or listening to elderly men talk nonsense about football on a podcast. The house was at rest, and I felt enormously, deeply happy.

If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d have had to get up at 7am, host a visitation for my ex with my daughter, then go and do a child focussed activity at a museum, and that I’d only have 90 minutes of the entire day to do what I wanted, I’d have thought that sounded absolutely shit. Like properly miserable.

I never liked having demands on my time. Part of my freelance career was always about wanting endless hours to write and create and be at one with myself. But the thing is, I never did. I create for the same number of hours as I ever did. And I’ve realised, two and a bit years in, that in making my life dramatically harder, I’ve also made it somehow easier.

The hallmark of a weekend for me pre-kids was over planning. I was terrified of empty spaces (despite at this point still being fairly happily married). I’d invite people over for every possible slot which wasn’t filled with going out to see other people. Weekends would be a lie-in, a lunch, drinks, a dinner, repeated over again. And then I’d reach the start of the week and procrastinate. I’d sleep until ten on a week day and feel guilty about it (which is silly because there’s no morality to sleep). I’d put work off until the last minute and hate myself for it. My bedroom would be a tip and I’d have no excuse not to sort it out because I had endless time.

Many of my friends are child free by choice and I have no doubt in my mind that it’s the right choice for them (not that it’s my business either way). But occasionally I hear people talking about their fears about having the babies they do want to have, about losing their freedom and not having as much time and not being able to do whatever they want whenever they want. And I want to try to explain that that might actually make your life better.

There are a handful of people (both men and women) who I’ve encountered over my life who I think would benefit enormously from having a baby, or at least a fairly needy pet. There is something liberating about being unliberated, about being forced to think about something or someone else before yourself. The poet and philosopher Jemima Kirke was once asked during an Instagram Q&A ‘What advice would you give to young women lacking confidence?’ She replied: ‘I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much’. And that’s the kind of Mean Matron advice a lot of us need. I do think about myself too much, but I thought a lot more about myself pre-motherhood and in my case, having a kid was the slap I needed to do a bit less of it. I’m not suggesting it’s the tonic for everyone, but for me it was.

There are lots of reasons that my anxiety and mental health generally are better since I’ve been a mother, but one of them is that I have a perpetual motion throughout the day. The trendy internet mental health advice of the noughties was always ‘don’t worry about showering! Don’t worry about getting out of bed! It’s okay to eat takeaway in your pyjamas’. Everything you wanted could be packaged as self care. We all know now that’s bollocks. Your mental health will only ever be made worse by days on end of eating nutrient light food in a dark room while damaging your spine and torturing yourself with social media.

All through my life I’ve had periods of productive mania, where I buy a new journal and claim I’m a changed woman. That I’m going to walk five miles a day, reply to all my emails as soon as I get them, get up bright and early and cook wholesome food every day. None of it ever lasted until I changed the fabric of my life by making it objectively much worse.

Now I have less time, less money, less freedom, dramatically less sleep - less of everything I built my life in value of. And I am happier. Harder is easier, it transpires. Plus now I always have an excuse when I do screw something up.

I want to tell anyone who wants kids but thinks it’s going to suck that it absolutely will suck. I hear people say time and time again that it’s worth it ‘for your kids’ but it’s not that - at least not for me. It’s not like she’s the free gift which justifies the purchase, but rather that ruining the lovely, comfortable, luxurious life and replacing those things with boundaries and expectations has - to my continual shock - made me a much happier person.

*People on TikTok seem very keen for their children to drop their afternoon naps. You will prize mine out of my hands. I am 32 and I still need a nap on a Sunday afternoon, I see no reason my child should be any different.