My 1st year of motherhood: expecting the unexpected

1. Introduction

Exactly one year ago, I gave birth to my son. I won’t be exaggerating when I say that it’s been the most intense year of my life, full of experiences, discoveries, challenges and changes – a year that has given me plenty to think about. So, on his first birthday, I decided to put some of those thoughts into words.

I love my son more than words can say. The day he was born was, despite very challenging circumstances, the most beautiful day of my life. Motherhood comes naturally to me, I adore watching my son grow, and I miss him when he’s at daycare, impatiently waiting to see photo updates in the daycare app.

And still, I will say this – I am NOT a baby person.

I am not a yummy mummy. If anything, I’m a yucky mummy, a chaotic mummy, a riotous mummy. This first year of motherhood has taught me to fully accept and embrace that. But it’s also given me a new perspective, which I’d like to share.

2. The fence & defence

For a very long time, I was very undecided about whether I wanted children or not. At some point, I even got together with a man who was absolutely sure he didn’t want to be a father. To paraphrase Carrie Bradshaw, who was asked why she was willing to give up a baby for a man she hardly knew – I didn’t want to give up a man for a baby I hardly knew I wanted.

The idea of having children terrified me, as the examples of motherhood I saw around me were not particularly encouraging: relationships deteriorating after having a baby, friends complaining that their lives were complete shambles, and some even openly regretting their decision to procreate. I can’t help but feel that, at some point, society shifted from the notion that motherhood is something every woman wants to questioning its value and purpose. While previous generations of women would play the game of pretending that having children is all roses and sunshine, now I feel it’s the opposite: I see people actively discouraging others from pursuing this route by proclaiming how impossibly hard and stressful being a parent is (r/regretfulparents has 67k weekly visitors, the discussions being marked by intense frustration, anger and deep regret). Not to mention the growing fear of climate change, overpopulation and global crisis, which fuels the anti-children narrative – I see a lot of people commenting on how selfish and irresponsible it is to start a family in the current state of the world.

So I was very scared. There is no way of knowing how we’ll experience motherhood, so it’s an enormous risk, and something one cannot undo. And perhaps if I hadn’t met my husband, I would have stayed on that fence and never made the leap.

But I did, and I’m glad.

Perhaps this is because I am not someone looking for a peaceful routine and a quiet lifestyle. I am naturally driven by challenges and change. As an artist, I want to keep discovering and unveiling new ways and ideas. As a painter, I examine the world with curiosity, and I draw from the kaleidoscope of experiences and feelings, including – perhaps particularly – the hard ones. I see life as a never-ending path of learning, self-development and slowly gaining wisdom. I am energised by novelty and variety – and this is the very definition of raising a human.

So I will defend motherhood as an experience worth pursuing. Not because it’s natural, “right”, or socially endorsed, but because it’s an incredibly enriching experience of growth and rediscovering the world and ourselves.

I remember the first time my son started taking an interest in the things around him. It was late December and he was lying on his back on the changing mat, still too small to do much besides stare. Beside him, a little clip-on lamp threw a shadow onto the door. His eyes found it. The shadow moved; his eyes followed. For a good few minutes, this was enough to completely occupy him: a patch of darkness sliding across a white door.

We started incorporating shadow play into our nappy-changing routine. A mundane task became a tiny theatre. It made me think of Christian Boltanski’s Theatre of Shadows, and I realised that perhaps this is what artists and babies have in common: both are capable of looking at an ordinary object and refusing to accept that it is ordinary.

A few years ago, I gave an interview in which I talked about how art teaches us to see things in a new way, from a new perspective. I talked about the fact that we get very easily used to the reality around us – we look without noticing, we act and move around in default ways, almost like robots. A commute to work becomes just about getting from A to B, and since we know how to do it, we listen to music and podcasts, uninterested in what is going on around us.

Artists challenge this state of indifference by recreating reality through the filter of their own sensitivity, and help us see something with a fresh pair of eyes. A bowl of fruit becomes a fascinating object in a Picasso painting; a motorway takes on a new look through David Lynch’s lens. My son is therefore like a small artist showing me his own take on things.

In a room full of toys, he’ll crawl towards a crumpled piece of cardboard, a set of keys, a metal spoon, a sock lying on the floor, and play with those. It makes me laugh thinking of all the interactive toys being pushed as “the” thing to help children develop their brains. I prefer to let my boy find things and make his own games. And I watch him with awe.

3. A question of time

I’ve always been fascinated by the subjective perception of time – i.e. how differently 60 minutes feels when you’re 10, 30 or 60 years old. Why, at certain moments in life, does it feel like time starts speeding up – or slowing down? Why can some days slip through one’s fingers, while at other times we’re capable of accomplishing so much in merely a couple of hours?

Unlike many young people, I’ve never felt that time is infinite, and old age never seemed particularly far away. The clock started audibly ticking for me when I was already a teenager, and I could very much feel each year being added to my tab of life.

From my mid-20s onwards, I’ve felt that time goes incredibly fast, and I started being more and more realistic about what that meant in practice and what was possible to do. I know that most things we plan to do take far more time than we anticipate, and that virtually all our to-do lists are impossible to complete – there are always things waiting their turn.

This peculiar relationship with time has been reinforced by my experience of motherhood. Now that I have much less of it, time feels completely different, and its value has quadrupled. Having very little time to myself means that I cherish it like never before. Suddenly, an hour, 15 minutes or even 5 minutes offers plenty of possibilities.

These days, I experience life in tiny fragments. Time rarely comes in a continuous stretch. It arrives in ten-minute pieces, interrupted by a cry, a nappy, a pump, a hand reaching for something it shouldn’t. Even when my son is at daycare and I happen to be at home alone, the three-hourly pumping breaks the day into sections. My time has become an archipelago of little islands, with very little mainland in between.

When my son is playing, he might be happy to occupy himself for 10 minutes before he needs my attention. Everything gets constantly interrupted. Multitasking is the norm. Tiredness is inevitable. But suddenly, the things I used to take for granted – spending half an hour with a book, or sitting at a café drinking coffee – feel magical.

The Buddhist concept of sati (moment-to-moment awareness) has naturally come into my life. When I’m alone, I’m much more mindful of these precious moments that I have.

These days, I have much less time, but I’m spending it better.

4. The art of not making art

One of my fears regarding motherhood was the fear of losing myself as an artist. There are infinite examples of women who abandoned their careers, including artistic careers, upon becoming mothers. And those who haven’t always emphasise how difficult it is to juggle both.

And it is. Instagram might feature these hip arty mummies swaddling babies in front of an easel, but the truth is that combining an art career with looking after a baby, especially in the first couple of years, is hard.

In my case, I haven’t even had a chance to try. The fact that I gave birth right before moving into a place that required heavy renovations, which my husband and I have been doing for almost a year, almost exclusively by ourselves and alongside our jobs (I work as a visual designer at TU Delft), meant that I had to take a break from painting.

I have been writing, drawing, designing and teaching art, but I haven’t stretched a canvas in a year.

On the upside, I have been renovating a space that will very soon be my studio. I can’t wait to get back to it, but I’m aware that my relationship with art after motherhood will not be like before.

This year, however, I’ve practised (and, dare I say, mastered) different kinds of art.

The art of distraction.
The art of soothing.
The art of putting to sleep.
The art of functioning on little sleep.

For a year, my days have been punctuated by breastfeeding or pumping. Every day, day and night, every 2–4 hours, I nurse or pump. In the early months, it felt as though I spent less time not nursing or pumping. Sometimes one nursing session would run into another, with a short contact nap in between. Life was little more than a sequence of feeds, naps and the brief intervals in which I could remember what I had been doing before the baby needed me again.

My nights are just like my days, if not worse – most nights, my son wakes me up every 2–3 hours to nurse, and I do so half-awake.

I’ve mastered the art of multitasking. Cooking while feeding my son, keeping him entertained and practising French on my phone. Taking my son out for a walk while shopping and talking to my sister. It seems that I rarely do just one thing.

I’ve mastered the art of calming my baby. We always have a hairdryer on hand, and a recording of a hairdryer on the phone. The sound of the pump, the hairdryer and the hoover has been the soundtrack to these past 12 months.

I’ve mastered the art of distracting my baby so he doesn’t start crying, try to turn on the changing station or attempt something that is dangerous. I sing, make sounds and faces, and often surprise myself at how well I’m able to divert his attention.

But the most important art I have been mastering is the art of letting go.

It began with my pregnancy. Due to it being abruptly shortened, I never had a chance to have a beautiful pregnant photo shoot, or to give birth with candles around. I’m never “done” with anything. There are always things left hanging.

There are emails that have been waiting for an answer for weeks. Laundry migrates from one chair to another. There is always a screw, a paintbrush, a box or a piece of something in the wrong place. Shelf brackets find their way into kitchen cupboards. Pieces of half-peeled masking tape haunt me from behind door frames. We have dozens of cans and tubes of construction foam, Hi-Tack glue, silicone, acrylic and various other substances whose exact purpose I can no longer remember. Boxes of hammers sit next to cans of tomatoes in the pantry. My to-do list has stopped being a list and become a small ecosystem of unfinished things.

This is motherhood, at least my version of it. The wabi-sabiness of my life is something I had to learn to truly accept.

5. The show must go on

There is a persistent idea that when you enter motherhood, your life goes completely on pause. For a while, everything revolves around the baby; the things you used to do are postponed until they are “old enough”, “sleeping through the night”, “eating solids”, “out of nappies”. The assumption seems to be that at some point, life will resume.

In our case, we challenged that.

We don’t have a car, we travel almost everywhere by train. And yet, in his first year, Teo has been to Germany, Poland, Finland, Estonia, France and Monaco. I’ve taken him to museums, galleries and (loud and messy) parties; in Poland, we took him to a Butoh festival. He has slept in trains, restaurants, shops and exhibition spaces. Sometimes he falls asleep while we’re out shopping, sometimes at a gallery, sometimes at a friend’s house. We don’t have a special routine that requires us to be home at a particular time. He sleeps when he’s tired, wherever we happen to be.

Breastfeeding has made this particularly literal. I have breastfed on trains, planes, trams, park benches, S-Bahn platforms, perched on some strange ledge next to the till at Rossmann, sitting on street monuments. My husband is now a master of changing nappies in extreme situations, like a the floor on a packed train, in the space between the carriages, when there’s no way of pushing through the crowd to get to the toilet.

There is something wonderfully undignified about parenting a baby in public. You improvise. You make do. You put a changing mat down on the floor of a moving train and get on with it.

At some point, breastfeeding stopped being an activity that happened in a particular place and became something my body simply did wherever we happened to be. And having a baby stopped being something that required us to arrange our lives around him. He simply became part of the life we already had.

Only recently did I discover that there is actually a name for the way we’ve been doing things. The Possums sleep programme advocates responsive sleep and allowing babies to sleep when and where they need to, rather than organising the entire day around rigid sleep schedules. Apparently, we had stumbled into a parenting philosophy without knowing it existed.

Perhaps this is another version of letting go and one of the things motherhood has taught me: not putting life on hold until the baby is ready for it, but letting the baby come along for the ride.

The show must go on. Or perhaps there was never a show to stop in the first place.

6. Yummy (and yucky) mummies

As it happens, I’m part of several WhatsApp groups. As a closeted introvert, I find network groups challenging to my mental capacity but I have to admit that they are useful. My favourite ones are the Clothing Loop groups – people passing on bags with clothes, toys or books that they no longer need. As my husband and I are trying to be as zero-waste as possible, this is a fantastic way of reducing the amount of stuff that ends up in landfill – and it saves us money.

But the “mums” groups? I have them all muted and rarely open the discussions.

The obsession with the kids, the newest book / brand / device, the smugness and know-it-all, “I-do-it-better” sense of pride is something I cannot stomach.

I’m not a yummy mummy – never have been, never will be.

My son was born when we were in the process of renovating the flat we had bought in my late pregnancy, which we had naively thought would be finished by the time we moved there. Twelve months into the process, and we’ve just about finished the “big” jobs, with a lot of little things still left to fix, install, organise, buy, etc.

As a result, my son has spent his first year growing up in a building site.

Sawdust settles into the corners. Smoothing-compound dust travels from room to room. Flakes of old paint appear wherever we thought we had finally got rid of them. He has learned to sleep through drills, hammers, grinders and sanders – the percussion section of his infancy.

But he seems to find the whole thing rather entertaining. He watched his daddy chopping up skirting boards with great interest. He observed us lying on the floor, two geologists examining the surface, trying to work out, using a piece of fishing line, exactly how uneven it was and where, and to make it level with patches of various materials in different thickness. He watched us knock cement off the window sill as we tried to make space for the new wooden one, and listened to the sounds of MDF boards being unscrewed from underneath the floor, followed by the unmistakable thud of a crowbar hitting something it probably shouldn’t.

Sometimes we’d put him in his rocking chair and he would sit there watching us like a tiny site manager, inspecting his builders. The house was a building site, but to him it was also a theatre: things were constantly being taken apart, moved, hammered, measured, cut and put back together. There was always something happening.

Try as I might, I’ve never been able to keep the house clean, and the best I could do was make sure he wouldn’t swallow a screw or nail. Meanwhile, the clothes bags I get from the Clothing Loop gang are full of beautifully ironed clothes, and I can’t help but wonder: who the hell has time for IRONING?

Not the yucky mummy like me.

7. Them nappies

I love the fact that we’re living in a world where more and more people are free to confidently make a choice whether to have children or not. And I love the fact that more and more women decide that they don’t want to be mothers.

Why? Because motherhood is something you need to really, REALLY, want.

Not because “it’s time”, “I guess it’s something everyone does so I might as well do it too”, “maybe this will fix my marriage” or “what if I regret not having kids”.

Motherhood is a life-changing event, a massive compromise on everything, and a huge sacrifice. You can’t try it on like a new pair of shoes.

But aside from my feminist stance on having full autonomy over one’s life (and body), I’m happily witnessing the growing number of child-free individuals also for purely selfish reasons: I can socialise with people whose lives don’t revolve around nappies.

A lot of people told me that as soon as you enter motherhood, it is very important to make friends with people who have children. And while I generally enjoy meeting people and making new friends, I’d hate to do that for the sole purpose of having one shared topic.

As it happen, I have very few friends who have small kids; I rarely socialise with mums with babies. I don’t necessarily want to spend two hours talking about your baby’s sleep routine and what food he eats and spits. I also don’t necessarily want to hear about how well he’s sleeping at night.

Because, in my opinion, for a long time in a child’s life, a lot of things are a lottery. Some babies are easier, others are difficult, and there’s nothing I can learn from other parents, as it’s pure luck that their baby sleeps through the night and mine doesn’t. And frankly, I don’t want to be incentivised to compare my situation to theirs, especially if I’m notoriously sleep-deprived.

But also, I don’t think these routines around the baby are interesting to anyone who is not the parent of the given baby.

So I’m very grateful for having child-free friends that I can talk to about everything BESIDES children.

8. On hating kids

In her article, Actually no, you don’t get to dislike children, Jessoe Cunniffe writes:

Imagine discriminating against an enormously diverse group of people, based solely on their physicality. Or mental ability. Or age. For most of us, such sweeping, unfairly critical judgements are reprehensible. So why is it socially acceptable to say you don’t like kids? To be clear, I’m not talking about not wanting kids. That’s fine. Deciding to have children is about far more than whether or not you like them. No, I’m talking about people who actively dislike children, for the very reason that they are…children. Honestly? I don’t think it’s any better than misogyny. Or racism. It’s just more widely tolerated, because kids are visibly inconvenient, noisy, messy, snotty – and this somehow gives us license to say “ewww” about literal human beings. More than that, uniquely vulnerable human beings, who are relying on adults like us to show them the way.

She quotes Kathleen Massey, who wrote a similar article after seeing her friend tweet about how he’d like children to be banned from flights.

Of course, it can be distressing when you’re sitting close to a baby who’s crying loudly on a plane. But perhaps it’s worth putting yourself in the position of the baby itself – and its parents. This baby is not crying out of spite. It has no idea that your flight is supposed to be peaceful, or that you have a headache, or that you’ve been looking forward to two hours of uninterrupted reading. And if you find the noise annoying, you can’t begin to imagine how stressful it is for the parents.

(On that note, I’d like to thank all the lovely strangers who helped me comfort my son when he was crying hysterically a couple of times onboard a Boeing 737.)

“Nothing I have done in my numerous decades drawing breath (including the time I vomited on a bouncer’s feet in the middle of Mardi Gras) has earned me anything near the level of visceral dislike I experience while existing in public with a toddler,” writes Skye Sclera on Substack (drawing parallels between children’s behaviour and adults with ADHD).

I’m lucky in the sense that where I live, in the Netherlands, children are generally welcome in public and our son attracts smiles, waves and often lovely comments from passers-by. Motherhood feels welcome, encouraged and cherished. But I have been to countries where Sclera’s experience is not uncommon, and that stings.

Perhaps having a child changes something fundamental about the way you see other children. They stop being an anonymous source of noise and inconvenience. You start seeing the person underneath – the tiny, unfinished human being who is still becoming someone.

Children are the future.

Maybe this loud, snotty boy who is kicking the back of your plane seat will one day find a cure for cancer – or help fight climate change.

I don’t know if my son will find a cure for cancer, but he for sure is my future.