I went into motherhood an oblivious idiot - and I don’t regret it | Emma Beddington

All the information about pregnancy and parenting can be understandably off-putting. It’s best to look at it clear-sightedly and, if you do decide to give it a go, accept that the path ahead is unpredictable, writes Emma Beddington

Can you know too much to have kids? “Maybe knowing too much about motherhood has ruined me,” journalist Andrea González-Ramírez mused on New York magazine’s The Cut website. She always assumed she would have children, González-Ramírez writes, but the “overload of brutally honest information” from the frontlines of millennial motherhood, and everything she knows about the horrifying rollback of reproductive rights, maternal mortality rates, the childcare crisis and the motherhood penalty, has left her deeply ambivalent.

Recent reports on birth trauma and grave failings in maternity care here in the UK add to the feeling it’s sensible to wonder if you’re ready to put your physical integrity, financial stability, mental health, or even your life on the line; at some level, we get the birthrate we deserve as a society. Plus, the news last week that pregnant women “shed grey matter” (“pruning” to prepare for caregiving life, the theory goes) wouldn’t win me over if I were on the fence.

I tell you what, though: you can also not know enough. When I got – deliberately, delightedly – pregnant at 26, the largest thing I had cared for was a rabbit (who was mean enough to take care of itself). I knew – and I can’t stress this enough – nothing about birth, babies, child development, the economic consequences or emotional demands of motherhood. I dived in with only the prehistoric internet on a clunky desktop computer to guide me.

Of course, I also read books. I should have read more: my second-wave feminist mother had shelves full of them and many points the fourth wave make about motherhood had already been passionately aired back then, from the need for free childcare to the gender gap in parental labour and what that does to women’s aspirations.

I also attended one hospital antenatal class (retaining nothing except one woman proudly telling us she had been her sister’s water birth “sieve holder”). But I went into motherhood an oblivious idiot. The birth bit was OK; the real shock was everything else.

I grasped the small stuff quickly – nappies, feeds, baths, sleep (lack thereof) – but the big changes became apparent only very gradually. That becoming a mother had profound socioeconomic consequences, and caring responsibilities would shape my place in the world. That whenever there was a “choice” to make about my post-kids professional life, it wouldn’t feel like a choice at all. That it was for ever: I’d assumed that my baby would become an entire, separate person. And he did, of course, and so did his brother, born two years later. But he also didn’t, for me – your kids live inside you long after they actually stop living inside you, or even in your house: my sons are in my head all the time. They don’t need and certainly don’t welcome it; that’s just how I’m wired (thanks, decreased grey matter!).

If I’d known more, might I have hesitated? Maybe, but I’m totally happy with the trade-off for everything my sons have given me. What really bothered me was watching my peers have children later in life and do a more careful, considered, compassionate job. They had more experience, perspective – an understanding that everything passes and a stronger sense of self. I would have liked my sons to have that version of me, rather than the one they got. I tried, but I was impatient, anxious, focused on trying to get an A+ in mothering, rather than doing the right thing for my kids. I wish I’d been mature enough to just enjoy and celebrate the miraculous fact of them.

Maybe this is just more evidence there’s no right time to be a mother – not in 2001 as a naive, bizarrely incurious twentysomething, and not in 2026 as an older, overly informed potential parent looking anxiously at an unstable and unfair world. No one has to have a baby, of course, but it would be sad if on-the-fencers who think they do want to be mothers are put off. I think the people best prepared for parenthood are the ones who look clear-sightedly at it – the risks, the inequities, the lifelong commitment – and think: “OK, no idea how this will play out, but let’s give it a go.” Because the one thing that is absolutely baked into parenting is unpredictability. That, and love. I hope my sons know they had – and always will have – that.

• Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist