Before our daughter arrived, I thought I had a fairly good sense of what motherhood would feel like. I’d read the books, listened to the podcasts, and had enough friends with children to consider myself reasonably prepared. I knew it would be hard. I knew it would also be amazing. I thought I knew what I was signing up for.
Turns out – I did not know exactly what I was signing up for.
Nine months in, I would say I am a different person – wiser, more patient, more present, and regularly more surprised than I ever expected to be. Some of what caught me off guard was hard. Some of it was funny. Some of it was so beautiful it’s difficult to put into words. Here are the ten things that surprised me most.
1. Maternity Leave Was Not the “Free Time” I Imagined
Before she arrived, I had plans. Exercise classes. A fitness routine. Working on hobbies. Starting a side hustle. Finally getting to all those things I never had time for during surgical training. I was so excited to have time “off” from work and do things in my “free” time.
Oh, how wrong I was!
What nobody tells you – or what you can’t fully absorb until you’re living it – is that a baby is a 150% full-time occupation that doesn’t come with breaks. The cycle of feeds, nappy changes, rocking to sleep, contact napping and starting all over again fills the day more completely than any job I’ve had. There are unicorn babies out there who nap beautifully and give their mothers long, peaceful windows of time. Mine was not, in the early months, one of those babies. And that’s fine – but the gap between my expectations and reality in those first few months was pretty significant.
Maternity leave is not a holiday I know now. It is one of the hardest and most relentless things you’ll ever do. It is also, as it turns out, one of the most extraordinary and I am so very grateful to have this time off with my daughter.
2. How Badly I Underestimated the Fourth Trimester
I thought the hard part of newborn life was the sleep deprivation. I was not wrong about that – but I underestimated everything else.
The fourth trimester – roughly the first twelve weeks after birth – took me off guard. The physical recovery from a C-section, the hormonal chaos of the early weeks, trying to establish breastfeeding and the relentlessness of cluster feeding, the identity shift of becoming a mother, the disorientation of days that had no shape – all of it arrived at once. It took me a really long time to feel better. Even longer to feel like myself again.
I wish someone had sat me down before she arrived and told me plainly what the fourth trimester actually involves – not to frighten me, but so I could meet it with my eyes open and without the added weight of feeling like I was failing. And more than that, I wish someone had told me to be proud. Genuinely proud. Getting through those first three months is no small thing. Your body has just done something extraordinary and is still doing something extraordinary. You are more remarkable than you know. If you’re in the thick of it right now: this is a phase, like every phase that comes after it. The beautiful and slightly bittersweet thing about everything baby-related is that it’s all temporary. It will pass – and one day, sooner than you think, you’ll look back and barely be able to believe you did it.
3. Missing Her the Second She Goes to Sleep
This one I still haven’t fully made sense of.
You spend the day pouring every part of yourself into this small person. By the time bedtime comes around, you are done – touched out, exhausted, counting down the minutes to the moment you can sit on the sofa, eat some food in peace and just be a person again. And then the second she’s asleep, you’re sitting there scrolling through photos and videos you took of her that afternoon. Missing her. Already looking forward to the morning cuddles.
The contradiction is complete and makes no logical sense whatsoever. And yet here we are, every single evening, without fail.
4. The Mental Load That Never Fully Switches Off
Before having a baby, I thought of myself as an organised person. I am still an organised person. I am now an organised person with a second, parallel brain running constantly in the background tracking nap windows, food intake, the last time she had a proper poo, the GP appointment next Tuesday, whether we’re running low on nappies, and when I last washed the muslin cloths.
The mental load of motherhood is real, it is relentless, and it doesn’t clock off. It’s there at dinner, it’s there on the rare evening out, it’s there at 2am when you’re not even sure why you’re awake. Managing it – systems, shared responsibility, writing things down – has become one of the things I invest most in.
5. The Strange, Unexpected Loneliness
Motherhood was something I wanted very deeply. I love being a mother. And I have still, on certain days, felt profoundly lonely in it.
There are days – usually ones with no plans, no friends visiting, nowhere to be – where you spend twelve solid hours with your baby and still end the day quietly desperate for adult conversation. Not because she isn’t wonderful company. She is. But she doesn’t yet talk back in complete sentences, and there is something about a day spent entirely in the world of a baby that can make you feel slightly untethered from yourself.
Nobody warned me about this one. Loneliness in motherhood is not the same as unhappiness and it is absolutely not ingratitude. It’s what can happen when you go from a full, social, professionally stimulating life to days where your most extended conversation is with someone who communicates exclusively in grunts and pointing. It’s normal, it’s common, and far more mothers feel it than you’d ever know from the outside.
6. The Things You’ll Find Yourself Genuinely Celebrating
A successful, satisfying poo. Sleeping until 6am. Eating an entire portion of broccoli without throwing it on the floor. Waving at a stranger unprompted. Clapping along to a song.
I have celebrated all of these things with the kind of enthusiasm I previously reserved for significant professional achievements. I have texted my husband about them from the next room. I have called my mother. There is no milestone too small once you’re in it, and I would not have it any other way.
7. The Unexpected Confidence Motherhood Gives You
Something shifts when you’ve changed a nappy in a cramped airport toilet, settled a screaming baby on a ten-hour flight, navigated a foreign city with a four-month-old strapped to your chest, and functioned – reasonably well – on a cumulative sleep deficit that would floor most people.
You realise you are considerably more capable than you thought. I am more decisive now, more resourceful, less worried about what strangers think and far less thrown by things going wrong. I also have an almost complete disregard for my previous worries about minor inconveniences. Motherhood recalibrates your sense of what’s actually hard.
It has also increased my capacity in ways I didn’t anticipate. I am more productive with limited time, better at solving problems on the fly, and genuinely more efficient than I was before she arrived. I sometimes think about what I did with all those hours pre-baby. The answer, I suspect, is considerably less.
8. How Much More Present I’ve Become
I have always been someone who chases the next thing. The next exam, the next stage of training, the next achievement. My eyes permanently on the horizon rather than where I actually am.
Having a baby changes that – not by choice but by necessity. A baby is entirely present, and being with one pulls you into the present too. I’ve spent more time this year genuinely in the moment than in the rest of my adult life combined. Watching her figure out how to clap. Reading the same book for the seventeenth time and watching her face as if it’s the first. Crawling on the floor with her and bursting into giggles.
It is a gift I wasn’t expecting, and I’m trying hard to carry it with me back into the rest of my life.
9. How Time Can Move So Slowly and So Fast Simultaneously
The early weeks felt endless. The days were long, the nights longer, the repetition relentless. And yet I packed away her newborn clothes before I felt ready to, and I blinked and she was sitting up, and I blinked again and she was crawling across the kitchen floor at speed with enormous self-satisfaction.
The days are long and the months are short. I knew this was a cliché before I became a mother. I did not know just how completely true it was. With going back to work on the horizon, time seems to have suddenly sped up.
10. Seeing the World Entirely Through New Eyes
She saw bubbles in the garden for the first time a couple of weeks ago. I blew a stream of them towards her and she just stopped – completely still, completely silent, eyes wide – and then reached out to catch one with both hands. When it disappeared on contact she looked at her palms with such genuine bewilderment and awe. Then she broke into a beaming smile and flapped her hands with excitement.
Motherhood gives you the extraordinary gift of witnessing complete wonder at completely ordinary things – bubbles, raindrops, a bus hurtling past, their own reflection in a mirror. The world does not change. But your experience of it does, in ways I find genuinely difficult to describe and very easy to feel.
It is, without question, the best surprise of all.
A Final Note
Motherhood surprised me in more ways than I can count – and if this list has taught me anything, it’s that the surprises don’t stop. Every new stage brings something I wasn’t expecting: a new skill, a new challenge, a new ordinary moment that somehow takes your breath away.
Nine months in, I can say with complete certainty that nothing could have fully prepared me for this. And nothing could have prepared me for how grateful I’d be for it.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of the hard bits, I hope something in this list made you feel a little less alone.
Thank you so much for reading. It means the world. 🤍