"I missed my old life, its freedoms, spontaneities and full nights’ sleep" - Kate Maxwell on the unspoken maternity leave identity crisis

I’m sitting on the sofa in my kitchen, my week-old baby girl in my arms. We're both crying. She can’t produce real tears yet – this is one of the things I’ve learned about babies in the last week – but mine more than compensate. It feels as if I haven’t slept since she was born, and every cell of my body is exhausted. I’ve had enough of this new life. I want to leave the kitchen, this house, my baby.

I was lucky: I didn’t feel that way for long; a few hours, that was all, and then the black cloud lifted. But while I never felt another moment of regret, I’d be lying if I said the rest of my maternity leave was pure bliss.

There were blissful times, of course. When I stroked my baby’s fuzzy head and we looked at each other and I felt an overwhelming surge of joy. When she smiled or did something new – grabbed a rattle, rolled over. When my boyfriend picked her up and they danced around the kitchen together. Most of the time I remember feeling content – the missing pieces of my life had slotted into place.

When, despite telling myself I had no business feeling that way when I had a beautiful baby I loved and had longed for, who had arrived when I was 37 and had almost given up hope, I sometimes felt bored. I had been a travel editor: now, my world had shrunk to the streets around my house and some days I didn’t even get that far. I didn’t have the energy to brush my hair, let alone get the baby ready and push the pram out of the door.

I missed my old life, its freedoms, spontaneities, full nights’ sleep. I missed my job – the sense of achievement, the approbation I’d derived from it – I worried that my maternity cover would be better at it than I had been. It was so much a part of my identity that I barely recognised myself without it. I wondered, as I changed another nappy or squashed my nipple into a breast pump, where the woman who had led a team, given travel advice on breakfast TV, walked through Manhattan as if she owned it, had gone, and whether she’d ever come back.

Not my partner, or my best friend. What would they think? That I didn’t love my child? That I was a bad mother? I was honest about the socially acceptable struggles: the lack of sleep and showers. But I kept quiet about the existential, who-the-hell-am-I-now stuff.

Three years later, I started writing my first novel, Hush. The idea for the book came from conversations I’d had with friends when I lived in New York in my early thirties. We’d all had jobs we enjoyed, and we were starting to think about having children, but we were single: the city’s notorious dating scene had not thrown up any life partners, so we talked about alternative routes to motherhood: egg freezing, sperm donation, adoption.

As it turned out, I met the love of my life two weeks after I moved back to London. But I often thought about those conversations and the direction my life might have taken. How much more challenging it would have been to raise a child if I’d done it solo, without a supportive partner to pass her to at the end of the day; how much lonelier I would have felt. I thought, too, about the friends who’d told me they hadn’t been hit by the love-at-first-sight feelings they’d banked on when they’d given birth, and the shame and guilt they’d experienced as a result. I thought about all the things we don’t talk about when we have children, including what we lose by becoming parents.

From this came the character of Stevie, a woman who decides in her late thirties to have a baby on her own using a sperm donor and IVF but finds the experience completely at odds with her expectations and former life. Hush, which has just been published by Virago, is a coming-of-age story not only about motherhood, but also about the fulfilment we derive from careers and friendships.

I hope my book will spark conversations about the realities of early motherhood and the stew of emotions it can produce; that it will help women to be more honest about what they don’t feel in those early months, as well as what they do.

In my opinion, it’s this conflict that makes a natural mother, not the ability to switch off an old life and all it entailed and step gracefully into a completely different one.

My children are now seven and five. They’re the funniest, sparkiest girl and boy imaginable and the most engaging company. Unlike my character, Stevie, I did feel intense love for them when they were born, but it has magnified – after all, we know each other now. Watching them grow and develop personalities, weave words together, catch a ball, learn to read, is pure joy, but it's all happening too fast. ‘Do you want me big and small?’ my son asks when I try to explain this to him, and I tell him, yes, that’s exactly it.

Writing my novel, even when I’ve had to squeeze it in pre-dawn, before the kids wake up, has been by far the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done. As for my day job, I’ve swapped the office for freelance work, which means less money but more time at the school gates. It feels like a precarious juggling act; the house is always a mess, the laundry is piled to the ceiling, my after-school snacks wouldn’t win any health food awards, but I wouldn’t change it. Still, I get misty-eyed when I think about New York and the six years I spent there. And from time to time, I miss being able to throw on a jacket and stroll out of the door without a backward glance.

Hush by Kate Maxwell is out now.