I had my first baby a long way from home. I missed the support network of family and old friends. My son was a terrible sleeper, and the sleep deprivation nearly broke me. I don’t think the difficulties of adjusting to life with a newborn baby are well enough discussed.

In my current role, I have a fantastic mentor, Professor Abi Curtis at York St John University. I discovered Liz Berry’s poetry in an anthology Curtis edited about early parenthood called Blood and Cord, which contains poetry and short stories about love, loss, grief and loneliness. I liked Berry’s poems so much that I bought The Republic of Motherhood to read more. The titular poem sums up the time in my life when I felt the most untethered:

“In snowfall, I haunted Motherhood’s cemeteries, / the sweet fallen beneath my feet – / Our Lady of Birth Trauma, Our Lady of Psychosis. / I wanted to speak to them, tell them I understood, / but the words came out scrambled, so I knelt instead / and prayed in the chapel of Motherhood, prayed / that the whole wild fucking queendom, / its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty, / and all the souls that were in it. I prayed and prayed / until my voice was a nightcry, / sunlight pixelating my face like a kaleidoscope.”

The novel I have enjoyed reading most this year is Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, which is also about how hard early motherhood is, another work of genius as far as I’m concerned.

First published online in Granta and available to read here. Collected in The Republic of Motherhood, Chatto and Windus, 2018