There are loads and loads of fantastic things about having a baby. But if you want the news about the hard stuff:
They are born and you suddenly realise: I have a new job with no boss or manual, 24/7. It starts right now, while you are exhausted and sore and have raging hormones and stitches in your nethers. A life depends on this new job-with-no-training. And while you are trying to familiarise yourself with its 24/7 requirements, relatives keep turning up and expecting tea and telling you you are doing it wrong. And your husband keeps disappearing to the gym and to work with no apparent awareness that you need a break from this 24/7 slog. So you start to fight with him and wonder if you should stay married and why he needs telling that constantly disappearing to do errands is not loving and useful because you have been housebound for a week and are currently looking forward to your root canal treatment just so you can sit in a waiting room and read a dog-eared magazine about racing cars in peace.
If you are lucky, you have what is known as an 'easy baby' - they sleep through the night after a few weeks, feed well and are generally contented. Mothers of easy babies can be smug and think they have it all sorted. That they are better mothers. Or you can get a challenging baby. These ones cry all the time. All. The. Time. They never sleep. They wake up every hour but feeding and cuddles won't settle them. They make you feel like the shittest mother on earth. After a few weeks of this broken sleep you understand why sleep deprivation is used as torture by the cruellest nations. You start to make mistakes - you can't remember if you gave the baby their medicine (challenging babies are often ill, so there are sudden middle of the night hospital visits and health scares.)
If you try to have a shower, the baby shrieks, so you don't. If you try to go to the loo, the baby throws up and nearly chokes on their own vomit, so you don't. You make a coffee but by the time you have fed, changed, dressed the baby it is cold. So you make another but by the time you have attended to the baby's new rash, remembered it's time for the baby's weigh-in at clinic, it is cold. You reach 4pm and realise you haven't yet eaten.
You decide to get dressed nicely to go to a mother and baby meet up and the baby pees all over your dress. You change the dress and the baby does a poonami that leaks all over his best baby grow. You bathe him, dress him again, realise you have poo all over your second best outfit and now only have jeans that are too small because your stomach is still a marshmallow but you squeeze into them and then the baby shrieks because you are running an hour late and it's feeding time, So you give up and cry because once again you have spoken to no adult. Then your husband breezes in having done things like buy a coffee and read a newspaper on his commute and you feel murderous with jealousy at this leisurely lifestyle.
I hope lots of mums will tell you this is an exaggeration. In my own experience, this is such a sanitisation of the hell of babyhood with one NT child and one ND child, that I don't want to scare you further. If I'd only ever had babies like DS1 I would be smug and think I was just a capable mother and other mums were being drama queens. If both my babies had been like DS2 I might well be in an asylum or dead by now. I'd certainly have split up with DH. My guess is most babies are mid-way between the two, so tough at times, sleepless at times but easy at other times.
On the bright side, they grin and chuckle and gurgle and hug you and are delighted with the world and are so cute to look at and so fascinating and say the funniest things and have interests that make you learn more about the world and see it in a new way. They love you so much, they think you are a goddess. And then you catch breath and they are adults with jobs and partners and lives so radically different from your own you aren't sure how it happened.