Why do we romanticise pregnancy?

It is literally such a trauma for the body, and even without complications, a woman’s body is never the same.

I love my son more than life itself, and I would never wish to be without him; he is the reason I wake up in the morning (literally 😂) but that is not to say that having him comes without its costs.

I wish I had known that having a baby would mean my hips stopped working, and that my abdomen would split open, and that getting my butt muscles to work would feel like the challenge of the century to me.

More and more recently I feel that we do women a big disservice by romanticising pregnancy – we should prepare new mothers, not just for the sleep deprivation and the worry that their child is still breathing when they sleep as still as a statue at night, but also for the reality that their body will not ‘bounce back’ for months and sometimes years.

Having a baby is a joy that cannot be described and I would not swap it for the world, but it is not good enough to say ‘you have no idea whats coming’ or ‘you wait and see’. I know everyone’s experiences are different, but I wish we would talk about them and be more truthful than we are. It is not helping anyone to hide the hard bits.