10 surprising truths about having a baby

1. You don't have a clue what you're doing
You know how other mothers always look like pros? Well, I’ll tell you a secret: they're bluffing. I always thought that once you had gotten over the impossible hurdle of childbirth the rest would follow naturally.

You would just know what to do. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. You have absolutely no idea what you're doing with your first baby. But everyone expects you to know, so you fake it.

I remember being at a braai with my two-week-old. Someone else was holding her and she started yelling for no reason, as new babies often do. To my horror, they handed her back to me – like I knew how to make her stop.

I wanted to say: Don't give her to me! Are you crazy? Find a real mother! I still feel like that at times.

2. You have no spare time
This may seem obvious, but the term needs to be redefined. Before, "no spare time" meant not being able to go to the beach during working hours.

Now it means not being able to go to the loo because your tiny, tyrannical new boss doesn't like it when you put her down for longer than 3,6 seconds. So showers before lunch time become a luxury.

Having painted toenails a memory. Babies don’t like watching their mothers work out at gym, read or watch movies, so I still have not seen Fahrenheit 9/11 and my mother had to tell me about Brad and Angelina.

I have a vague hope that one day, in the future, I'll use my hairstraightening iron and wear clothes that match. But I'll believe it when it happens.

3. You're fat and you don't care (really)
Not because you're so enamoured of your baby that you don't notice anything else (including your thighs), but because, over the past year, you've been a spectator to your body performing the most extraordinary task imaginable.

For 38 weeks parts you didn’t even know existed stretched, adjusted and transformed themselves to create the perfect conditions to sustain and nourish a new human being. You didn't have to do anything but sit on the couch and eat Pringles.

Then, at exactly the right moment, your body turned on its engines and helped you push out this new life so that you could see, for the first time, how perfect your creation was. Amazing.

So you don't have Giselle Bündchen's midriff. Who the hell cares?

4. You're a bore (and again, you don't care)
I swore on my Dior clutch bag I wouldn't become one of those women who only talked about their baby. Well, I lied. And I'm not giving up the bag.

The thing is, it's not that I find her that fascinating a companion. It's just that she's so consuming it's really, really hard to be interested in anything else. Before, I would have relished details of B who divorced C after cheating on him with D.

Now the only thing that interests me is sleep: how much, how little and how often my new baby-wielding circle of friends and I are getting it. And now that we’ve learnt the happy secret of routine it’s worse. I drone on and on... and on... and on...

5. You don't suddenly become maternal
You're still you, just minus a sense of humour. Somehow, I was under the impression (fostered, in no small part, by the literature) that I'd experience some sort of personality transplant and come home from hospital content to spend my days smiling beatifically at my baby.

Or at least be less impatient, more motherly and not need as much personal space as before. What actually happens is this: suddenly you have a huge new job that you're expected to perform 24/7 – and you can't resign.

Is it fun, rewarding, fulfilling? Hell, no. The authors of baby books lie through their teeth. The first three months are bloody awful.

You're tired, cranky and in pain, and looking after a newborn is the most emotionally and physically draining – and relentless, frustrating and boring – thing you have ever done or will ever do.

Women who make the adjustment to motherhood with no emotional hitches are either in denial or have the imagination of chalk. It's hard. It's worth every second of agony, but make no mistake, it's hard.

6. Your boobs (sadly) do not become gigantic
They get leaky, yes, and uncomfortably full when hours pass between feeds, but my fantasies of finally filling out my vests were dashed.

Instead of going from champagne glasses to beer tankards, I have slightly bigger champagne glasses. And by the looks of things, a few more months of this and I'm going to be left with flutes.

7. Distribution of labour is by no means equal
You think gender roles have changed? Hah! This is how it is: you are the mother, therefore, you do the work. No matter how much you discussed it with your partner, how modern you both are in your thinking, when it comes to 3am feeds you are the primary caregiver.

My man is Scandinavian, straight from the only place in the world where feminism is more than conceptual, but it seems, in this area of life, times have not changed.

Nobody bats an eye when, at the first dinner party you host AB (After Baby), your man drinks a bottle of Absolut Kurant and dances on the couch in celebration of being a father while you're in the bedroom, pacing up and down to get baby to sleep before midnight.

Whether you choose to fight it or opt for peace on the premise that this, too, will pass, at least be forewarned. When it comes to your crying baby, you're right back in the 50s.

8. You become a nerd
Ask anyone: I used to puff away like Fidel Castro, given a good bottle of Merlot and a shot or four of tequila.

Now, if anyone has the temerity to light up within a kilometre radius of my baby's little pink lungs I become like a woman possessed. Even the concept of smoking infuriates me.

Likewise clubs, bars, trendy restaurants and other dens of iniquity where people have the audacity to drink alcohol and stay out later than 11pm.

I watch them stagger into coffee shops wearing last night's mascara while I haughtily sip my chamomile tea because I went to bed at 9pm and I already have a man and a baby, so I don't need to wear spiky heels and hang around filthy dance floors in pursuit of Mr Right any more because he's sitting opposite me eating organic muesli. To the strumpets: ha, ha, ha!

9. You'll never be free again
But not in the way you think. Having my first baby overseas with no family nearby to help, I used to agonise over how we were ever going to have a social life again.

Who would take our baby overnight so we could spend an evening alone together and get some sleep? When Sophie was a month old, my parents came to visit us in Sweden.

They stayed in a house nearby and it was decided they would take her overnight. I was delighted – I hadn't slept longer than three hours at a stretch since she was born.

We were going to order takeaways, watch a video and – bliss! – sleep a full night. In reality, I got home after dropping her off, spied a teensy-weensy little vest, burst into tears and cried until my exasperated husband went to collect her.

I have never been so surprised at myself, nor felt such a fool. My wise mother understood perfectly. She said to me: "The thing is, they're a part of you. And you know, that feeling never changes. Not as long as you live."

10. It's the biggest love affair you'll ever know
It's such a total cliché that I hesitate to add this part, but it has to be said: until you've had a child you simply cannot know what love is.

The intensity of what you feel for your baby is bewildering. It can leave you exhausted and longing for the peace of just the two of you. You want to get off the roller coaster – it's too much, too heady.

Babies are incessant and inexorable and they have the compassion of Idi Amin. But, crazy as it makes you, you would never trade motherhood, because it's life at its most lived – hard, complex and impossibly wonderful. You'll never look back.

What were the most suprising bits about becoming a mommy for the first time? Let us know by posting a comment in the comment box below.