Eva Bradley: A new world, but no one else noticed

Eva Bradley

LOTS of things can happen in three months; you can learn a language, sail around the world in a fast boat, Mercury can orbit the sun.
Or, you can stay at home and replicate (half) your DNA and learn to be a parent in the most bone-shaking, life-transforming, sleep-depriving and yet totally ordinary experience life could ever possibly dish up.
What amazes me most after reaching the 12-week milestone with a new baby and finally being able to reclaim enough of my brain to think for short periods of time, is how something so unremarkable on a global scale can be so utterly transforming on a personal one.
The early arrival of Edward, while I was shooting family photos at a wedding in mid-August, really was one small step for mankind and one giant leap for Eva Bradley and Co.
I'm not sure if it's the result of experiencing the wonder and horror of childbirth or suddenly tapping into a bottomless well of love that you never knew existed, but the moment our tiny, squirmy son was put into my arms, life as I knew it ended and a crazy new one began.
And yet, outside the four walls of our home and new universe, life for everyone else carried on as it always had. The traffic lights on the corner still flicked from red to green to amber and back again. Steaming coffee was still being poured at my favourite cafe (just one less trim flat white at 8.15am each weekday now) and around the world, war and peace jostled for pole position much as they always have done and probably always will.
And yet ... Edward was here. The world would never be quite the same again. For a little guy, he's already managed to teach me an awful lot, not least that a basketball can indeed pop out of somewhere more suitable for a marble. He's taught me how absurdly pleasing a simple burp can be at 4am when you want to go back to bed, and how scary it can be to walk out of the house for the first time pushing a pram as though the contents contained an atomic bomb.
How was it that I'd seen an uncountable number of women pushing prams over the years and never once wondered about the transformations each of them had gone through and how each apparently nondescript baby was to its mother and father a thing of great wonder?
Time takes the gloss off most new experiences, and hard tasks repeated often enough become ho-hum. I can now manage to get through the day without spending half of it staring into Edward's moses basket in awe, and the contents of a full nappy no longer repel me.
I'm getting enough sleep now that I don't have to ask for help to locate items that are sitting in plain sight. We can leave our son in the hands of his two doting grandmothers without needing to hover over them as though we're the first people on Earth qualified to care for a newborn.
Heck, I even went back to work last weekend and (despite a small amount of mother guilt at the discovery) enjoyed every baby-free moment of it.
The creation of new life strips away one's own life but replaces it with something infinitely better.
It's a cliche that has to be experienced to be believed.
These are my thoughts on motherhood, for what they're worth. And in case you're worried, no, I don't intend to be one of those women who can no longer think or talk about anything else. I've said my bit on birth, so next week it's back to the "me" you used to know ... with a few modifications to allow for occasional controversial rants on parenting methods, just because I can.
# Eva Bradley is an award-winning journalist