I had no idea that I would spend most of my life as a mother feeding my children. When I think about it now, it's obvious. Of course that's what you do. That's all it is really, being a mother – feeding your children and giving them somewhere soft and safe to sleep. Everything else is cosmetic.
It was a horrible shock, the intensity of it. I'm a quitter, I like to give things up if they are hard or boring. The demands of breastfeeding were impossible for me: overwhelming, disastrous. Frightening. As soon as my eldest child, Kitty, cried from hunger following an insufficient breastfeed I smashed open the lid of a box of Aptamil and gratefully put away the uncertainty of supplying her growling, insatiable belly with my own body.
Even the formula feeds stunned me, both with their regularity and their paucity. Can she survive on that? The clockwork nature of the feeds drove me slightly insane with the Groundhog Day-ness of it all - the having to be somewhere, with the bottle, sitting down, concentrating. But there was no other way that I could see to do it. If she eats this much during the day at the right times, she will sleep all night. And she has to sleep all night.
And then weaning. Oh God! Weaning! I feel sad for myself and for Kitty when I think about how clumsily I approached it. I was still so overwrought, confused, tired and strung out by the time Kitty reached weaning age that the thought of fussing about during Kitty's precious nap-times with an assortment of vegetable purées, which she may or may not eat, made me feel quite ill.
So I fed her rusks mashed up with milk and mixed with those fruity Ella's pouches. That is what she ate for weeks and weeks.
I compared her, endlessly, with other children – often with my sisters’ ravenous boys, who would suck down plates of pasta like they were soup, crunching through apples and sandwiches and pints of milk like waste disposal units. I would sit for an hour, coaxing Kitty to eat just one more spoonful of this or that. Please, I would think, please, please just eat this.
What on earth did I feed her? Risotto – I seem to remember a lot of that. Mashed up stews. When she could chew and swallow and stopped gagging on everything the madness subsided a bit. She ate egg fried rice, pasta, sausages, little cottage pies and then later, for lunch, tiny rectangles of cheese, raw vegetables, pitta bread, hummus. But didn't other children wolf down all manner of fishy horrors, and kale pasta sauces and broccoli? Sometimes Kitty would take a single bite of broccoli and then leave it.
I always felt tense at mealtimes. I despaired silently over thrown food, refused green things. I was probably cold and uncommunicative when she didn't gobble everything down in a starving rage.
With my second child, Sam, born two years and three months after Kitty, I might as well have been a different person. My expectations of my life were so different. I did not – I do not – require several hours to myself to sit on the sofa and stare at the wall in blank horror at what my life has become. Even if I have slept badly the night before, there is too much to do. And I don't mind doing it now. When I had Kitty I couldn't believe how often I was expected to cook. Now I am just so grateful that I've got all the correct stuff. When there is a quiet moment in the house I do not sit and stare, I put on my apron, I start chopping, cooking, blending.
I chopped, cooked and blended, chopped, cooked and blended, chopped, cooked and blended. I bought more storage pots and a special pen to write on the pots what was inside. Then I chopped and cooked and blended. Again, again. Repeat. Again.
And Sam responded, opening his gob for food. More, more, more! He was like a sideshow at a circus. Watch the enormous monster baby eat! Down went another spoonful, and another, and another! It's nothing I've done to make him such a dustbin, he's just a big boy and hungry all the time. But I do sometimes wonder if I did Kitty a disservice by not approaching her weaning in the same way.
And what of Kitty now, who is three? ‘Is she a good eater?’ they all ask, poised to devour the answer. ‘She is when she's hungry,’ I reply. But that really is the very prosaic truth. It is the truth for most children, I suppose. She eats what I would consider to be a totally normal diet for a three-year-old. She has pesto pasta once a week, she eats a variety of raw veg, fruit, fish fingers, roast chicken, chips, sausages, pitta bread, hummus, cheese, pizza. Every other day she'll take a bite out of some broccoli. You get the idea. Given free reign she would probably snack all day and for her main meals eat cake. On one or two bad days, she has done just this.
Sometimes I still forget, though, that my main function in life now is to feed my children. I was recently roundly shamed at Kitty's nursery for sending her in having not eaten any breakfast. I just wasn't concentrating one morning. ‘I really want a biscuit!’ she had howled on the walk up the hill. ‘No biscuits!’ I had screeched. She didn't want a biscuit, she just wanted her breakfast.
But there is always the next meal to reset the balance. And the next and the next and the next. Because that is the magical thing about children: they will always give you another chance to be the parent they truly deserve.
This is an adapted extract from Things I Wish I'd Known: Women Tell The Truth About Motherhood, published by Icon Books.