Becoming a Mum and Not Loving It Straight Away | Honest Motherhood

Becoming a mum — and not loving it straight away

I didn’t love becoming a mum straight away.
And no one really talks about that part.

I wasn’t someone who had always planned to have kids.

I assumed I would, but it wasn’t something I had built my life around.

And I was genuinely okay with the idea that it might not happen.

What I didn’t realise was how much my life would change once it did.

The first Saturday home from hospital with my eldest hit me harder than I expected.

Everything felt different.

Gone were the long, open hours of doing whatever you felt like.

There was a baby in the house now — and everything moved around him.

It felt like my life was no longer my own.

And if I’m honest, I didn’t love it straight away.

Not just in an overwhelmed way —
but in quite a confronting way - a what have I done kind of way.

That part isn’t spoken about much.

It took time for things to settle.

Not just practically, but mentally.

It wasn’t until around five months in that I started to feel more comfortable.

Not because everything had become easy — but because I had begun to understand what my life looked like now.

The spontaneity had shifted.

There were no long stretches of reading, no dropping in on friends, no moving through the day without thinking ahead.

But something else was forming.

Slowly, without me realising it at first.

The smiles.
The recognition.
The way their whole face lights up when they see you.

It’s hard to explain until it’s yours - I thought I had it with my niece and nephews but this is different.

Finding a rhythm helped.

For me, having some structure mattered.

Something to move through the day with, instead of feeling like I was constantly reacting to it.

And over time, it started to feel less like something I had lost — and more like something I was growing into.

Not the life I had before.

But one I came to love in a different way.

If this is you, I see you and I feel you.