There have been many moments in my life when women have lowered their voices and told me a truth within a truth. These footnotes of a woman’s life, doled out in half-truths and measured tones, are where I received the most meaningful advice on matters of love, sex, health, and career.

Having heard all of this advice, why did the complications of motherhood, one of the most formative experiences in a woman’s life, come as such a surprise to me? Thinking back on all the advice I’d been given or overheard before I became a mother, I cannot think of a time when my female friends spoke frankly about the upheaval of motherhood, and how it affects everything from gender and jobs to sex and identity. Maybe the advice was just not plain enough, or maybe I was not experienced enough to understand it. And like that woman so many years ago who told me, plainly, that I would understand someday — I didn’t then, but painfully do now.

Which is precisely why, years later, when my oldest friend called me on her 36th birthday to say that she and her partner were considering starting a family, my unexpected reaction was not to congratulate her, but to warn her. To lower my voice and give her some frank talk about motherhood. Not to deter her, but to be sure her eyes were wide open.

I t’s complicated to become a mother. You gain so much, but give up so much in return.

She, like me, had worked hard for her achievements. She’d worked her way up in a male-dominated field, and loved what she did. She also had a loving partner, a house, a life well lived. I wanted so badly to tell her my truth: that it’s complicated to become a mother. That you gain so much, but give up so much in return.

Sitting where I am today, a mother of two young children — listening to my friend on the precipice of that decision — I weigh my truth against the story I was told and expected to share about motherhood. The socially acceptable one. The one that’s marketed in movies, on TV, and on Instagram. The complexity of my truth, the weight of it, stands in stark contrast.

In place of congratulations, I want to give her the fine print on motherhood, and I want to give it to her straight. Not the social media haze of motherhood, but the bleeding nipples and gender inequality. The long days of boredom. The cost. Of course, I want to tell her the lovely bits, too — but it’s complicated. Maybe if I’d known all that before, I wouldn’t feel so hoodwinked now.

They do not write cutesy articles about the heavy weight of motherhood. There are no hashtags about #9monthson9monthsoff for this. This is a weight that’s rarely acknowledged, one that women aren’t encouraged to talk about at all.

Claire Cain Miller recently wrote in the New York Times that women were “increasingly caught off guard by the time and effort it takes to raise children.” She writes about how parenting is almost solely the responsibility of women — and it costs them their careers. Before I had children, I heard a lot about the hardship of giving birth, the challenges of breastfeeding and how I would never sleep again. But no one said to me — do you know that the cost might be your writing career? No one admitted motherhood might upend my sense of self, my partnerships, and knock askew even the most straightforward of career paths.