My Wild and Sleepless Nights: The brave, raw Sunday Times bestselling memoir

The midwife says I should include a lot of whole grains and oily fish in my diet. I nod a silent lie to her over my blue notes, because I know these things will make me want to throw up from a very dark and deep place inside me.

We haven’t told anyone about the pregnancy for weeks: partly because our family is such a palpable chaos that having a conversation alone is very rarely possible, but also because having a secret Pete and I alone share is valuable.

The supine days of late pregnancy that I dreamed of vanish like a mirage, evaporating in the summer heat

since their father was luminously important in their lives but mostly absent.

I have rushed to get here, peeling the children from me and flinging Dash into Pete’s arms, so that I arrive sweaty and frizzy and feeling flayed.

She was luminous with a bliss that wiped out the exhaustion and physical demands of a difficult birth and a baby who struggled to feed.

At this point in my pregnancy, the opening chord of a certain song on the radio will make me cry,

‘Do you mind either way?’ The woman behind the till has scanned my box of Colgate and bottle of nit shampoo, but her hand pauses over the pregnancy test. My eyes flick quickly up to hers. I have four children already; asking me if I mind, as I buy a test that will seal my fate, feels way too intimate. What if I had been a different person, in diffe

am separated from another woman, my friend, because I cannot talk about this part of motherhood: the wanting and then the getting and the resenting and the missing, the longing.