Motherhood is one of the great obsessions of our age. Everyone seems to have an opinion, even those who will never experience it (men), and those for whom it is a distant memory (grumpy old ladies). Whether you breast-feed or bottle-feed, give birth naturally or deliver by Caesarean, stay at home or return to work, the impression is that whatever you are doing, it's almost certainly wrong.

The most curious aspect of this is that much of the pressure comes not from some patriarchal conspiracy, but from women. Even the National Childbirth Trust recently stated that it wants to see the use of epidurals during labour reduced by 40 per cent to “boost traditional births” - aka “agonising pain”.

Most confusing of all is what a friend of mine calls “the conspiracy of silence”: the abyss that exists between what people will tell you about having children and what it really entails. The truth is, as my mother once remarked darkly, that if women thought properly about having children, no one would ever give birth again.

Here then are ten things about motherhood that no one will tell you.

1. Bottoms
Motherhood, especially in the early years, is a scatological business. You will find yourself responsible for more dung than the keeper of the elephant enclosure at London Zoo. As a result, things that would once have made you gag are now mild inconveniences. At 3am, when your youngest, all snuggly next to you, covers your side of the bed in a wet, warm pool of wee, you don't leap out and strip the sheets. Oh no: you stagger to the bathroom, grab a few towels, cover the wet patch and go back to sleep. You get to the stage when having “a little bit of wee, Mummy” on your trousers is normal. You will get used to sharing a lavatory cubicle with at least one other person, sometimes two or three on an outing. With a son you will, at some time, have to hold his willy when he goes to the loo.

2. Partners
You know those frazzled couples you used to see around at weekends? The ones who don't appear to have washed or ironed their clothes? They call each other “Mummy” and “Daddy”, even though they once had names of their own. Their vocabulary now consists of a series of stock phrases: “You can't have another Lego Star Wars Space Ship”; or “You can have an ice-cream, but only if you eat your broccoli.” Don't get too cross with these couples. Remember, they've been up since 6am and they probably haven't had sex for, ooh, about a thousand years. And crucially, one day that might be you.

3. Making a fool of yourself
It doesn't matter how cool you are, once you have children you will snort like a piggy-wig, neigh like a horse, run through the park shouting “Here comes the wibble-monster”. Sometimes this can be liberating. Other times it's just very, very embarrassing.

4. The body
Despite what the manuals tell you, pregnancy is not a return journey. Your back may go; your arches may fall; you will get brown spots on your skin. There may be whole areas of your body that you no longer recognise: Caesarians leave you with a weird stomach overhang; a natural birth means you will never again perform star jumps with confidence. Pilates, yoga, Power Plate. All these help. But unless you work at it like Madonna, you will never be box-fresh again.

5. The school gate
For some, an opportunity to display to the world their offspring's brilliance. For others, a Dantesque vision of Hell. You'll know which within seconds of your child's first day at nursery.

6. Celebrity mothers
The only secret to the marvel of the celebrity mother, with her flat stomach, her 6in heels and her sexy husband, is this: 24-hour childcare. Don't believe the hype.

7. Single friends
It can be hard, not to say very dull, for your childless friends when you turn into a milk-obsessed insomniac whose idea of spontaneity is giving her baby puréed avocado instead of banana for tea. Your friends' obsession with the banal issues of life, such as whether to invest in this season's new jump-suit, can seem absurdly indulgent. Besides, you are secretly jealous. Yet if you can both curb your tongue, a childless friend is often the best a mother can have - someone to talk to about the important issues in life; someone who will remind you that you once had an identity of your own and that there is more to life than school admission procedures.

8. Sleep
Unless you happen to be SAS trained, there is nothing that can prepare you for the effects of the prolonged sleep deprivation that comes with having children. They will wake you once, twice, three times in the night; if you have two, they will wake in relays, so as to inflict maximum damage. Should you attempt any sort of alcohol-based evening celebration, you can guarantee that the children will wake an hour and a half before they usually do, with twice the energy.

9 Birthing pools
If you like the idea of sitting in your own bodily fluids, then fine. If not, well, not. I know a man who had to perform an unpleasant fishing operation using the kitchen sieve during the later stages of his wife's labour. He has never recovered.

10. The Fear
The most agonising aspect of motherhood is the terrible fear that you may lose your child. With the fear comes guilt, worry and, occasionally, panic. There is little you can do about this, except push it to the back of your mind, avoid listening to certain news reports - and pray that it never happens to you.

What we learnt the hard way

“No one explains to you how unnerving it is to be faced with this tiny replica of yourself, and all of your faults. I can be quite stubborn and argumentative and it's shocking to deal with someone who's absolutely the same. I say to my son, 'you don't have to win every argument', but they drink in your example. I think he's being unreasonable and then realise he is just doing exactly what I do!”
Diane Abbott, MP

“If only I'd realised that, no matter how hard I battled, I would lose control of my life. Before I had children I think I believed that, with a little discipline and organisation, I could be in charge. I couldn't grasp that motherhood isn't like that - you can't schedule croup or projectile vomiting or a tantrum. You just have to go with it. I fought that randomness for a while, but I've admitted defeat.”
Mary Nightingale, newsreader

“No one told me how painful it is once you start breast-feeding. It's like having two rocks on your chest and it hurts like hell. Midwives suggest Savoy cabbage - it stinks but it does work. So you're sitting there with cold cabbage from the fridge flat on your chest to take away some of the pain. Having a baby is definitely not sexy, but you really don't care.”
Alison Lapper, artist

“All moveable objects will never be where you think they are. I never know where my hairbrush is because someone's taken it, there's no Sellotape, the scissors are never where you normally keep them. At first I found it intensely irritating, but after a while you become quite sentimental about it all. Apart from those high-pitched screams - I've never got used to those.”
Daisy Waugh, writer

“The one thing that nobody explained to me was the lack of sleep. I was someone who liked a lie-in, so being up every two hours was certainly interesting. People said to me, in that mumsy whisper: 'You have to try to sleep when the baby sleeps.' But if I did that nothing would ever get done. When would you put a wash on, or eat, or have a cup of tea?”
Edith Bowman, DJ

“One minute you're happy soaking in the bath, wondering what life would be like with three in the house rather than two, and before you know it you're crawling around on all fours trying to entertain the new baby and dreams of soaking in a long, hot bath are just that - a dream.”
Ruth Kelly, MP

Chloe Lambert

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