Reality

My big word for all mothers is SURRENDER. Nothing in your life will ever be the same. You will never eat, sleep, work, cook, clean, write, play, sing, pot, sculpt, paint, dance, create, talk, shop, dress, listen to music or make love again the same way so move on. You won't finish a sentence for at least eighteen years (to be calculated from the birth of your last child) and you will probably not chose what to watch on TV for that long either. By the time you do either of those things you will have forgotten what it was that you wanted to say or what it was that you wanted to watch. SURRENDER.

Also you will probably never go to the toilet without being called again, either in person, on the phone, or on Skype, or whatever new technology comes along making the word 'call' obsolete. Your children will be able to holograph themselves right into the toilet so you can attend to their most urgent needs right there in the loo. SURRENDER.

Pregnancy, Labour and Birth are REALITY chapters in themselves, not to be spoken of lightly here, so we'll just move on to homecoming. The first three days may have been manageable with baby sleeping lots and apart from grazed nipples and other charming bodily functions, (fluid pouring out of every orifice, blood, milk and tears), your little bundle of bliss may stay asleep for another four days – its unlikely, but possible. Still a week is all you're going to get at most, so get ready. (Unless of course you have an exceptionally fat bottle fed baby with no digestive issues whatsoever, then you can consider yourself blessed and sleep now, before she turns eleven. When she turns eleven, all hell will break loose, no matter how content and sweet she was as a baby, so enjoy her now, and rest assured that your time will come). For the rest of you, after a week, baby wakes up, after ten days she has her first growth spurt and from that day on, your life(apart from about seven minutes a day when she collapses on your neighbors shoulder) is a living hell. SURRENDER.

If you're breastfeeding, be prepared for the most excruciating pain each time your milk comes in and for a series of very embarrassing moments where you look like your boobs went to the gym without you. At any time you may sprout gallons of milk in public, enough to fill a bath, and your baby will chose that exact time to sleep so solidly that you would have to play really bad Grunge on full blast to wake her. By the time she finally comes round, which could take about forty minutes, (yes you could have made yourself a toasted cheese sandwich and a shot of Brandy if she wasn't using you as a mattress) your milk will have leaked all over your new quilt cover, the one you so carefully chose with your partner before you were married - when you were still in love. It's all over, the marriage, the milk, the quilt cover, get over it. SURRENDER

I am not for one minute proposing that you leave him, or her or it. You are going to need that quilt cover to wipe up the vomit, you are going to need him to, yes hold the baby while you make yourself a toasted cheese sandwich and a shot of brandy, (he never gets its quite right) and you're gonna need that baby to hug you when she's four like no-one else in the world will ever hug you to make it all OK. You just have to get through the next four years, and then about sixteen more and then I promise you, there will be more, but by then, you'd be sick of that quilt cover anyway and hubby will be better at making toasted cheese sandwiches, and even though he's stopped finishing his own sentences, at least he will fill your glass with a good shot of Brandy at the end of the day because by then if he is still around, you should know one thing's for sure, he still loves you, and to that too you will have to SURRENDER.