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On motherhood and...The Morning After


You stumble around in your dressing gown, stunned by how different everything looks in the watery dawn. Your sleepless eyes survey the detritus of the night before, scattered all over the house in a series of unlikely places. Your top is stained and your mouth tastes like metal. You stare at your reflection in the bathroom mirror, eyes black and wide. Your skin seems a different texture, your hair a different colour. In your clumsiness you smear toothpaste on the side of your cheek instead of getting the brush in your mouth first time.
You know this feeling. This is the feeling of floating around the house aged 22, at 10am, after your birthday party, full of chemicals and a nascent but palpable dread.
Or, it’s the feeling you get when you’re on buckets of codeine and you’ve been up all night nursing a tiny baby at home for the first time ever. Turns out, Irvine was wrong – today, ‘choosing life’ doesn’t feel wholesome, it feels a lot like choosing hard drugs and sleepless, wired nights. Which I might have been better at when I was 22.

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