Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I - Charlotte, hi! - write about my life as a mother of three small children - Poppet (m, 4 years), Pickle (m, 3 years) and Peach (f, 8 months.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.
Here's how it goes with kids. You get pregnant, you throw up for three months straight and then you have a horrific birth that results in stitches and you can't sit down for weeks and your breasts get one infection after another until they're rendered useless, and then you get postnatal depression. Your child is perfect but you feel like a failure and so you work on yourself until you barely recognise the mother you were when you started and then you give them a brother and a sister and although their births are something akin to beautiful and their breastfeeding journeys are more straight forward you find yourself exhausted, still, more so, even, because all you do is give give give and they take take take which is how it should be, because they’re babies, and you worship the ground their tiny feet walks on and so you don’t mind the sacrifice because it’s not a sacrifice, really, it’s a gift. The littler ones struggle and so you co-sleep and you babywear and you take no time for yourself for years but it's OK, because watching them develop and grow is soul nourishing and you think "you reap what you sow" and you get on with it, losing sleep and your career and your social life and collagen, and at times it feels like you’re wasting away but it's worth it because they're yours and you're theirs and nothing will ever come close to the bond that you share.