The Subliminal World of New Motherhood
"And then in a moment she was awake again, needing burping and changing, and there was the question of how to eat lunch, and how to wrest a toilet break from the indeterminate period between now and whenever she next fell asleep." — Helen Jukes, Mother Animal
I felt Helen's words quite literally in my body. If you’ve lived it, you’ll feel the quiet devastation and realism stitched into every word. The key words for me are ‘in a moment’ – it truly conveys that state of flux of caring for a child, a newborn but also a toddler and even with a 7-year-old it feels like those moments of ‘not caring’ are so fleeting.
If you haven’t experienced this, it might sound poetic or exaggerated. But for so many mothers, especially in those disorienting early months, this is not exaggeration. It is memory. It is muscle. It is the moment-to-moment survival of early motherhood. I remember all three of mine. It did get a little easier by the third in some ways, but it did not in this feeling of you caring 24/7 and quite literally keeping a new born human alive.
The shock of caring for a newborn is something few people are truly prepared for. There’s no HR induction, no clear metrics for success, and no breaks. Truly, there are no breaks. Just relentless demand, unpredictability, and a tiny human whose needs obliterate any semblance of routine.
In those early days, even your most basic needs become luxuries. You learn the art of patience through necessity, not choice. A distant dream of enjoying a hot meal in one sitting, the luxurious memories of using the bathroom without rushing or guilt. A tactical operation requiring coordination and contingency plans, and often a bouncy chair to have a shower, where even after all the techniques, you may not have the time to tend to your hair. You begin to delay gratification in ways you didn’t know were possible. Not because you want to, but because you must.
This slow, often invisible erosion of personal autonomy can be jarring. One minute you’re a fully functioning adult with a career, adrenaline running through your veins, excitement of achievement, negotiation on professional topics, and the next, you’re measuring success by how long your baby naps or whether you managed to brush your teeth before 2pm. Or, you are trying to figure out if it worth risking waking the baby up to go to the bathroom, or if you are safer to stay strapped on with a baby napping on your chest and your bladder will just have to wait. It’s disorienting. It’s humbling. And it’s deeply lonely. It’s also pretty weird.
What makes it super super weird, and I wrote about Emma Barnett’s new book – Maternity Service – a few weeks ago, Helen’s book has a similar view on how a mother sinks deeper into this weird underworld, at the same time, life outside of maternity leave/service continues as normal.
Your partner might head back to work, stepping into a world of structure and productivity, deadlines and adult conversation. They may be exhausted too, navigating a new role as a parent while carrying professional pressure, but they are often still seen. Still anchored in a world that has recognisable rules and rhythms. The can walk, get a train, use the bathroom, without this constant nagging feeling – how many minutes do I have for this? Is she/he crying?
The mother (and for non-birthing parents, the primary parent who is staying with the newborn) are submerged in something else entirely.
You live in a subliminal world. One that’s measured not in outputs or outcomes, but in feeds, cries, naps, and learning on the job with no onboarding or induction process. It’s a world governed by instinct, trial and error, by closeness, by love that’s so visceral it hurts, and by a kind of mental load that no one else can quite see.
And this, quietly, is often the beginning of a divide.
It’s rarely spoken about, but many couples experience a subtle shift in the early days of parenthood. While one parent re-enters the public sphere, the other stays in the private, often isolated sphere of caregiving. One talks to colleagues, the other sings lullabies and wipes bums. One tracks goals and meetings, the other tracks wake windows and feeding patterns and tactical showers.
This divide isn’t about love or intention. It’s about lived experience. About how the world values different kinds of work. About how we’re still catching up, socially, structurally, and culturally, when it comes to recognising the profound work of early motherhood.
It’s been studied that although the millennial couples have every intention of a 50/50 division of labour when the baby comes, it gradually erodes under the rigged system.
So many mothers I work with describe this strange tension. Grateful, overwhelmed, exhausted, emotionally full yet personally invisible. Keeping a brand new human alive with no break, no applause, and no road map.
This isn’t a complaint, it’s a reckoning. A call to bring visibility to the invisible. This is what Helen does SO beautifully in her book. To honour the psychological work and radical levels of patience of new motherhood. To name the reality that millions of mothers live through, often in silence, often with a smile that doesn’t quite reach their eyes.
Because when we name it, we can start to shift it.
We can invite more honest conversations between partners. We can build support systems that don't just look supportive, but actually lighten the load. We can start designing policies, workplaces, and cultural narratives that understand what it really means to step into the subliminal world, and eventually emerge from it changed, wiser, more skilled (not less!) and deserving of recognition.
And perhaps most importantly, we can remind every mother that she is not alone.
Not in the surreal sleep-deprived days. Not in the thousand acts of patience. Not in the quiet strength it takes to delay her own needs in service of someone else’s survival. Not in the sublime, unseen labour of love.