“I have nothing to complain about, so why I do feel like the walls are closing in on me?”

I didn’t see it coming and maybe that’s the issue. It was a spilled bowl of Rice Crispies that pushed me over, which feels ridiculous in retrospect. Who cries over spilled milk?

But there I was in the kitchen, cortisol coursing through my veins and I knew it wasn’t about broken crockery and low-level mess. It never really is about the small thing that brings the whole house of cards tumbling down. 

Even writing this feels deeply uncomfortable. There is no issue, which is, perhaps the issue. I’ve never been happier or felt safer. Olly, my husband and I both met post-divorce and he’s shown me the true definition of love. It’s coffee in bed in the mornings and time to process my every waking thought in the evenings.

We have a daughter together, we have a lovely home, we are living our happily ever after – if the fairytales allowed a blended family narrative.

My life is positively brimming with privilege.

There is nothing to complain about. After years in the wrong marriage, this is the calm after the storm and, perhaps, that’s where the problem lies. Despite all the joy, it’s felt muted in places. Like I am almost watching myself play at part instead of feeling it.  

I don’t care about ‘winning’ right now. I don’t need a crown or accolades     

I don’t know when sunshine started slowly ebbing away but it was as my daughter’s sleep regressed to the point where all I felt was bleary-eyed numbness. Gurning smiles from her didn’t raise an equal smile in me. I’d be watching my eldest play a game of football and I found myself blankly staring at the horizon instead of her goal.

I was fleetingly not in the room. But it wasn’t a code red situation or reason to raise the alarm – and so I kept just dismissing it as tiredness. It’s our default setting to keep calm and carry on, regardless.

But the truth is like any mother, I’ve carried so much – pregnancy, breastfeeding, the emotional and physical needs of a household – that somewhere in it all, I stopped carrying myself. My joy was inextricably linked to the success and happiness of others. And of course that’s natural. What mother doesn’t want the world for her family?

But what about my joy? My ambition? My fitness? I didn’t have time for the relentless ferrying, managing, bathing, cooking for them, let alone myself.

I don’t think we are even close to understanding the hormonal and psychological damage postpartum. Even in the safest of houses, it can feel like the walls are closing in. The more you fight it, the more compressed it becomes. For me, it was a vice-like grip around my lungs, holding back a guttural scream.

And perhaps a peace needs to be made with matrescence. The fundamental shift we go through, that’s akin to pubescence, when that first newborn cry pierces the hospital air.

A recognition that motherhood is paradoxical. Because I’m more resilient than I’ve ever been and, yet, more knackered; I’m stronger and weaker. Happier and in places sadder. There are extreme highs (first gummy smile) and debilitating lows (screaming from teething), but maybe that’s the point.

I don’t care about ‘winning’ right now. I don’t need a crown or accolades. Or even a dinner on the table that isn’t fish fingers, chips and peas. I need a vaguely good sleep and space to process the single biggest thing any human can go through: birth. And that the ‘supermum’ myth is just that. An unachievable and unhealthy benchmark.