Ah how we forget the agony of the early Baby days. If you meet a mum who says: “Oh I had a lovely birth and Johnny was such a good baby….” you can be sure her child is now three and she has simply forgotten.

Most of us do. I had a lot of conversations about the total memory wipe-out of everything up until three minutes before we started to say: “Isn’t it amazing how we forget everything about those early days…”

Being Old Mum does not assist the remembering process anyway and as I am convinced nature blots out the horror with some kind of devious cocktail of hormones and neuron-blasting to ensure you continue to procreate, I knew if I didn’t write it down I too, would end up saying silly things like: “ Oh its much easier than you think.”

So, those early new baby days are awful. Just horrid. An extract from “By the rivers of Baby Poo…” (as yet unpublished. Much of the wobbly panicky writing is illegible and there are strange stains in key places on the pages) but this did make it:

The worst day was when Andie came to see me and found me weeping silently on the sofa. On his greeting, I simply held the yelping bundle up to him like some tormented biblical martyr, utterly unable to speak. Many things crossed over his face as he tried to assess whether I had slipped into permanent insanity or whether it was a brief hormonal storm that might pass.
In the end he simply swept up the baby and took him off into the garden to be properly cuddled and soothed with a Scottish protest song. Baby loves songs with political or historic themes you see. Horsey Horsey has not cut it for some time.

Old Mum suffers more than Young Mum, physically I suspect. Her uterus does not boing back as swiftly and her muscles wearily knit back together over months instead of days. More of a slow cast on than a romping row of stockinette if you like.

But I know, young or old, those Early Baby days can last a lifetime. You have this ghastly leaden responsibility for a human life , no control over it and no clue what to do. Your brain is mashed and you can’t get out of the seat without holding your bits together in your hand so the stitches don’t fall out. And don’t even start me on boobs. There is another section on this – or I am sure there soon will be.

So don’t listen to your new mum friends with their freshly washed hair and ironed clothing telling everyone at the baby groups how “lucky” they have been or…deep breath…how “good” Johnny has been, because I promise you neither are true. She is suffering just as much as you, she’s just a little better at hiding it from the world….