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Have you ever talked with a young couple who don’t have kids, but plan to?

Often couples in that first flush of confident planning, especially those who are very success driven, will proceed into parenthood full of goals and high aspirations. ‘We will never …’, and ‘our child will …’. There’s a lot of ‘will’ and ‘won’t’ in their vocabulary, because before you have children, life actually sometimes responds to your intentions. You still have the illusion of control – something that real parents have long abandoned!

When talking to parents-to-be, it’s important never to disillusion them (you should never discourage the young!). A common claim of the not-yet-but-soon-to-be-childed is that ‘our baby will fit in with our lifestyle’. ‘If it learns to fit in right from the start, it will be that way all along.’ Experienced parents listen to these plans and do their best to contain their mirth.

I had some friends who were talking this way. They were both nurses and had put off starting a family, then when it came time to make babies, it took a while for it to happen. Finally they had their baby, and I didn’t hear from them for a while.

At the time I belonged to a trauma team, helping emergency service workers after especially stressful incidents. This work sometimes happened very late at night. One night driving home through Hobart at about 2 am, I saw a strange hunchbacked figure, shambling along the waterfront near Salamanca. There was a large lump on its shoulder, and it was clutching it and walking unevenly but resolutely along the deserted street. I have an active imagination, and I immediately thought – ‘It lives beneath the wharf! Creeping out at night to feast on pizza crusts, shunning the human gaze’. But as I drew closer, I recognised my friend! The hump on his shoulder was a baby. He was walking the streets with his baby at 2 am! He saw me and gave me two fingers and a grin – and I pulled over to see if he was okay. He just laughed as he read my thoughts: ‘This baby is fitting in with our lifestyle!’ He was walking the baby to get it to sleep, it was the only thing that worked.

Take it from me, babies do not fit in with your life. Babies take the Kleenex of your life and roll it into a snotty ball! If you do parenthood even half well, it will re-arrange your world. Babies do this in one especially important way (I’m not sure whether to whisper this or shout it, but here goes): You won’t come first in your own life for at least 20 years. If you’ve spent 20 or 30 years being a self-centred so-and-so, you will find parenthood extremely challenging. But it will be good for you. Hopefully parenthood, and your child, will reward you with enough love that you won’t mind this, but it’s important to know what you are in for.

(In our family this was definitely how it was. As mentioned earlier, we planned carefully for homebirths with great midwives and doctors on standby, and both times we had emergency caesareans. But you claw back what you can – I was there both times, trying not to faint, and I held our babies the second they emerged from behind the green sheets. A few hours after my son was born, I faced down a monster nurse who wanted to put a two-foot plastic tube into his stomach for a sample ‘just in case’. Our babies slept with me on the floor of the hospital room so that they were near their mum as she recovered from her operation. So I am not saying give up your ideals, but give up your well-planned perfect life, and learn to be flexible!)

Parenthood is so worth it, and so difficult, at the same time. Say goodbye to self-absorption. You never needed it anyway. It didn’t look good on you.