Rachael McCall: My new-mother misery made me think of suicide

Whether the first months of parenting can cause as much grief as bereavement is an invidious and unhelpful comparison. But it can certainly be the source of more profound misery than you could possibly appreciate before it happens. The first two years of my son’s life were the worst I have known.

The first year was mostly about recovering physically from a terrible ventouse birth. I felt as though I had been in a site-specific car crash. We had to live with my parents for months after I was discharged. They took care of me while my husband took care of the baby. My mother would wash me in the bath as my husband bathed the baby in the sink. If I could have laughed, I would have.

The second year was about recovering from the mental consequences – postnatal depression, anxiety, OCD – of that and dealing with the fact that I had not fallen in love with my child. I cannot convey to you the horror of feeling that you have brought someone into the world whom you cannot love. That you have made a huge, irredeemable mistake that will cause a lifetime of suffering to you and to a child – who deserves to be loved with all of every heart around him, beginning with his mother’s, limitlessly, world without end. I used to cast around endlessly in my mind for a solution, for a way out of the trap I had created for us all. But there was none except to run away or kill myself, and neither seemed like sufficient punishment.

It is grief. And it does have much in common with bereavement. First you are numb. Then you deny, you argue (with yourself), you bargain, you feel guilty. The immutability of the situation is almost unbearable. But eventually, you come back to yourself. And slowly you start to heal. But the world looks different for ever.

And once I healed enough – literally and metaphorically – things came right. I love my son now, with all my heart. Limitlessly. Reconstructed world without end.

• Rachael McCall is a pseudonym

Maxton Walker: I feared the worse as an older dad

Six months ago I announced to my friends that, at 45, I was about to become a dad for the first time. “There’s a reason people are biologically programmed to have kids in their 20s,” one acquaintance told me. “This is going to kill you.” Another 500 (or so it felt) merely gave an arch laugh and told me to stock up on my sleep while I could.

It all got to me. The low point came a couple of months before the due date when participating in Life Study, a huge nationwide survey into how parents’ socioeconomic backgrounds affect their children’s lives. As well as agreeing to offer access to every aspect of my life – health, finances, education – I had to fill in a questionnaire clearly designed to winkle out my state of mind before the birth: “Are you worried that, after the birth, you won’t have any time to yourself any more?” was one of the questions. To my own surprise, I answered: “Very.” That suddenly crystallised the concern – that my life was pretty much over – which had been lurking just beneath my consciousness for months, quietly fuelled by all those unhelpful remarks.

A month ago, our daughter Aster was born and, of course, as babies do, turned our house upside down. Were my worries realised? No. Not even a tiny bit. It’s absolutely fantastic. OK, so it turns out, to my partner’s horror, that I can sleep through anything, even a screaming baby two feet from my head. One of the main pleasures for me, odd though it may sound to anybody who had a baby at a younger age, is finding a ready-made role for myself. I have no problem whatsoever with changing nappies. (Thanks, everyone, who brought that up.) I relish the responsibility; the process of finding out where this new part of my life begins and ends.

A month into fatherhood, I simply cannot imagine life any other way. My only regret (and I fear it may become quite a big one) is that I left it all so late, and Aster will almost certainly be my only child.

Homa Khaleeli: There’s no sleep, but parental delight I never imagined

It’s been two years now since I had a baby – and two years since I’ve slept properly. At times I feel like a witch has taken over my body: my voice is scratchy, my moods are black. After 8pm I feel as though someone is sitting on me. When you are sleep-deprived everything feels like a struggle: relationships and friendships strain; work suffers; even putting your shoes on is too much trouble. My husband and I try to survive by doing lie-in shifts at weekends. One of us gets to stay in bed until 8am; the other one gets the 10am slot.

Some say that having a baby is the greatest joy you will ever know because it kills all other joys. That seems fair. Suddenly there is no time for reading, films, or a proper adult conversation. This year we took an ambitious trip to Iran, and at breathtakingly beautiful monuments we spent all our time running up and down ramps. So I can’t say I am surprised that some people are less happy after they have children. Or that parents-to-be complain that everyone is quick to tell them about the bad points of having children, but no one mentions the true wonder of it.

But that’s because if we started we might never stop. I could describe to you, in detail that would make The Goldfinch seem like a novella, how utterly enchanting my daughter is. How when she runs up and hugs me I feel absolute, untainted happiness. How when I give her a certain look out of the corner of my eye, she falls on the floor laughing – and I feel like an undiscovered comedy genius. How when she smiles at me first thing in the morning, I forget I am tired. Seriously. I. Forget. I. Am. Tired.