Am I a terrible mother or am I just on Instagram too much?

When my toddler is (finally!) In bed, I go downstairs, clean up the chaos of the living room, collapse onto the sofa, and do the worst thing any mother can do — I open up Instagram. Within a few minutes of scrolling, no matter how much I feel I’ve aced parenting that day, I feel terrible about myself. Especially when I compare myself to all the supposedly ‘perfect’ Mumfluencers or parenting advice accounts I follow (despite knowing better).

My new novel is all about the lies we tell about motherhood, and I really had to look at how the expectations given to new mums online differ from the actuality.

I know, intellectually, that social media is terrible for our collective mental health. I know it creates unhealthy expectations and a toxic comparison culture. I know that nobody is really their authentic selves on there, and yet I still find myself dwelling in the gap between the Insta-expectations, and the reality.

So, in an effort to put to bed the myths about motherhood, let me talk you through how social media has helped—and hindered—me in the early years of my daughter’s life.

Maternity Leave

Expectation: I imagined sitting in a café, eating cake, while my baby slept in a pram next to me. I thought I could even use the ‘break’ to set up a side hustle.

Reality: As a self-employed writer, I quickly realised I couldn’t actually afford to take maternity leave and ‘returned to work’ after three weeks, which was as deranged as it sounds. I spent most of the first year of my baby’s life, rage-crying from sleep deprivation, covered in milk and vomit stains, and I think she ‘napped in the pram’ once and only because she had a fever. I wrote my latest novel, an arson whodunnit set at a baby shower (spot the metaphor), in a pitch-black room while my baby slept fully attached to my nipple as that was the only way she’d sleep. Cake did get me through though, to be fair.

Sleep

Expectation: There are few parenting topics more divisive online than the issue of infant sleep, and exhausted parents will most likely find themselves down internet wormholes at 3 am after their sixth wake of the night, clicking on an advert for a robotic cot or organic lavender spray. Alongside this, there are many, many, accounts preaching the importance of totally-responsive, attachment-led approaches to sleep that involve letting the baby use your breast as a dummy throughout the night while you bedshare, reassuring you that ‘they will usually grow out of this by aged six’ – like that’s a nearby goal.

Reality: I was delirious with sleep deprivation. Depraved. Unreasonable. Hallucinating at some points, and crying almost every hour. Yes, my baby was being responded to, but she was being responded to by a totally unhinged parent. I eventually caved and hired a very expensive ‘holistic sleep consultant’ who then refunded me the money when she, too, couldn’t work out how to get my baby to sleep. Using the age-old Nora Ephron wisdom of “everything is copy” – I wrote a severely sleep-deprived mother into my book. Though the novel is a whodunnit and therefore involved intricate planning, I have no memory of writing it as I wasn’t sleeping in long enough bursts of sleep to get any REM. Eventually, thankfully, we found Sarah Carpenter, co-host of the Sleep Mums podcast, who taught us gentle and responsive sleep training techniques that actually worked for us. But I still have two unused tubes of organic lavender cot spray if anyone wants one?

Gentle Parenting

Expectation: We are the generation that is going to break the cycle. We are doing the work. We are going to re-parent ourselves and then become experts in self-regulation, and calmly name our child’s feelings, and validate those feelings all the while holding firm boundaries.

Reality: Naming a toddler’s feelings when you’ve just told them they can’t have any chocolate buttons is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. As for self-regulation: well, you might manage it on the first tantrum of the day, but, by the fifth, when you’re in Sainsbury’s and your kid is screaming so hard security starts worrying you might’ve kidnapped them…well the only obvious response is to get on the floor and start crying with them.

Bounceback Culture

Expectation: I am a feminist! Diet culture is horrific! Bounceback culture is toxic! I am going to love and appreciate my body for the miracle that it is and the life that it grew. I am also…looking at all these other pictures of other mothers who are posting pictures of themselves in their pre-baby jeans, days after their six-week check-up and hating myself.

Reality: Diet culture might be horrific, but it’s powerful, and I am one of those women who found pregnancy changed my body quite drastically, and permanently. And it’s embarrassing to admit how hard I’ve found that. Even after weaning my daughter, and upping my cardio and healthy eating, my body has determinedly stayed larger, and I have not found enough accounts talking about this. Also, feminism, yes, but nobody talks about the practical side of post-partum body changes. Buying an entirely new wardrobe from scratch is expensive. Learning how to dress an entirely different body type after thirty-seven years of knowing what suits you is discombobulating. Where is this content? I need it!

Christmas

Expectation: You gotta make those precious memories! Matching pyjamas. Homemade gingerbread that you ice together. Immersive light shows. Santa’s Grotto. A front porch that looks like it’s been staged for the Selling Sunset Christmas special. Taking them to an expensive show with a snow machine. Ditto Christmas markets. And, now, apparently, according to loads of people I follow, we’re supposed to take our kids to actual Lapland too?

Reality: I had a wake-up call the other day, when, after my toddler’s nap, I was trying to get her out of the house to some “Grotto train thing” I’d been told about, despite the fact she’d spent the morning at a festive craft fair. She refused to leave the house. Flat-out, no-negotiation-possible, call-that exorcist-in-again refused. And, through her tears, she stopped and said, heart-breakingly, “Mummy, I just want to stay in and play with you.” And I listened. I really listened, and said, “OK honey, let’s play.” Then, for two full hours, I gave her the present of totally child-led play that had nothing to do with Christmas, but, by the end of it, she was glowing like Baby Jesus in a manger. It was such an important reminder to me, that all our kids really want for Christmas is to be seen, heard, and loved by their parents. I have no photos of those two hours we spent playing together…but my memories of that afternoon will last forever, and hopefully hers will too.

The online advice that has actually been helpful

I saw a parenting Instagram post earlier this year about time travel that really stuck. It said, whenever you remember, take a moment to think about how much you’ll long to travel in a time machine back to this moment when you are older. I used to hate the people who told me I would ‘miss those baby snuggles’ when I had a newborn because I was finding things so difficult, but they were right. Now my child (mostly) sleeps, she rarely cuddles, and I yearn sometimes to return to those moments sitting in the dark, her gently suckling at my body. Listening to Slipping Through My Fingers by ABBA also does the trick. It’s not about pretending the hard bits aren’t hard, because they are. But, I can sometimes realise how magical every day is as a parent. Last week, I watched my daughter race ahead down a path, giddy with excitement, because we were going to feed the ducks, and I did the time-travel trick and felt so holy with gratitude that it was basically profound. And, yes, it was the same day that I later cried on the floor of Sainsbury’s, but that’s parenting—highs, lows, and learning how to let go of the noise and trust your instincts.

So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne is published in hardback on 16 January 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton, and available to pre-order now.