Here’s one of the more bizarre and pressurising fictions of motherhood: the second you give birth, everything in your previous life instantly becomes meaningless. You might have spent 30 years enjoying skiing or novels or, you know, a career, but as soon as you’re someone’s mummy you become singularly devoted to parenthood forever. If you do have any spare time in between tending to the ceaseless needs of your infant you’re supposed to spend it either baking or aggressively researching local schools.

Oddly enough, we don’t expect dads to give up all their hobbies and redirect their energies into sewing bunting or father-baby yoga. Mums shouldn’t have to either. In the first few months after having a baby, I was desperate to retain some sense of personhood amongst all the feeding and nappy-changing and not-sleeping and marvelling at my son’s tiny hands. But a lot of the things I really enjoy – travel, reading things longer than five paragraphs, drinking more than one glass of wine a night – truly are off the table for a while, as they are wildly impractical. During the first three months of my son’s life, playing video games was one of the only things I could realistically do for myself. They are relatively cheap and you don’t have to spend two hours trying to leave the house.

It’s hard to find the time, though, and this is about the only area of parenting where a cursory Google didn’t throw up 50 articles giving me totally conflicting advice on what I should be doing. So I thought I’d fill that gap. You’re welcome.

Pick the right type of game

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Perfect for new mums … Forza Horizon 3. Photograph: Playground Games

Say goodbye to online multiplayer games. Just accept that you are not going to be doing any four-hour Destiny raids at any point in the next year. Anything that requires you to turn up at a certain place, at a certain time, is out (FYI: this also applies to real life appointments).

Any game you play now will need a pause button, and must not overly tax your tired brain. I found games with gentle, predictable rhythms extremely comforting, so I spent a lot of time with the fantasy farming game Stardew Valley in the middle of the night. I also rediscovered the space ship sim Faster Than Light on my iPad, and enjoyed zoning out with Amplitude, a trippy music game that I’d already spent about 100 hours mastering and could therefore play on autopilot. Forza Horizon 3 was perfect: colourful, transporting, brain-optional. Don’t pick games where you have to make an effort to follow a story or remember what you were doing last time you played, as it might be days or weeks between play sessions – and your memory is now shot. (Actually, time itself will lose all meaning, so even if it’s only been a couple of days since you last played, it will feel like weeks.)

Anything even slightly stressful, emotional or difficult might make you cry, so leave the competitive shooters and Dark Souls runs for a while. Now is also not the time to start playing The Last of Us or Heavy Rain because you’ve always meant to but have never found the time. These are games about the pain of losing a child, and you will be discovered blubbing in front of the television. Stick with strategy and puzzles and role-playing and racing and other low-conflict games until the early weeks hormonal exhaustion madness passes.

Make the most of naptime

Tiny babies are always sleeping, and yet paradoxically it feels like they never sleep, because they sleep for like 40 minutes every hour or two and don’t care about concepts like “night”. One of the stupidest pieces of advice I was given when I was pregnant was “sleep when the baby sleeps”, as if you could just lie down, close your eyes and drop off for random spells of time at unpredictable intervals throughout the day and night. THAT DOES NOT COUNT AS SLEEP.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Random 20-to-60-minute naps may not be enough to allow you any actual rest, but it is enough time to play a decent chunk of a video game. Photograph: Keza McDonald

Anyway, the random 20-to-60-minute naps that constitute “sleep” for a tiny baby may not be enough to allow you any actual rest, but it is enough time to play a decent chunk of a video game. You can at least do something enjoyable while your baby snoozes, rather than staring at the walls or repeatedly Googling “when do babies sleep through the night” on your phone. If you’ve got a newborn who prefers sleeping in your arms or on your lap to sleeping in a crib (which, in my experience, is all newborns), you can hold a controller in that position rather than making futile attempts to deposit them in a cot without waking them.

Naptime becomes sacred when the baby gets a little older. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild came out around the time that my baby started sleeping a bit more like a person (ie, for more than half an hour at a time, sometimes in a cot, and mostly at night). Entirely coincidentally, this was also when I started being very enthusiastic about nap schedules. Choose games that, like Breath of the Wild, let you achieve and save little milestones within short bursts of play.

The bouncer fob-off

I feel guilty whenever my baby is awake and I am doing anything other than talking to him or waving brightly-coloured objects in his general direction. Ridiculously, I felt this way even when he was three weeks old and barely conscious. My partner would happily just stick him in the bouncer and bounce him with a foot while staring at his laptop, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this, so I came up with a compromise: I’d play a game while he was in the bouncer and narrate to him what was going on. Final Fantasy XV was brilliant for this. God I hope his first word is not “chocobo”.

Note: the baby got wise to this tactic after about 12 weeks. Take advantage while you still can.

Embrace portable games

Here’s one of the benefits of breastfeeding that they don’t tell you in the endless prenatal lectures about it: learn to do it lying down and you’ve got your hands free for a 3DS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation Vita or smartphone. If you, like me, thought you were too good for phone games, now is the time to leave your pride at the door. There are brilliant games on iPhone and Android, and most of them fit well into the six-minute intervals between putting baby down in a crib and baby waking up screaming. I thought I’d do some “research” on child-friendly phone games and ended up playing Toca Hair Salon 3 for many, many hours.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Played in bursts during baby’s naps and between feeds, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild should last you a year. Photograph: Nintendo

Incidentally, when you’re a parent, a portable games console that you can also play on your TV on the one night a week that your baby goes to sleep before 10pm seems like the best idea in the world. If there’s room in the maternity-leave budget for a Nintendo Switch I highly recommend it. It’s bloody expensive but if you have Breath of the Wild (have I already mentioned it?) you won’t need any other games for basically the whole year.

Don’t feel guilty

Everything in early parenthood seems engineered to induce guilt. According to the advice of your health visitor/mother-in-law/the internet, pretty much everything you do is wrong. I read an article that told me not to use bubble-bath in case the smell confused my breastfed baby. I think I actually shouted “you’re taking away my bath products now?” at my phone when I read it.

If I may descend into cliche for a sentence, the first few months with a new baby are amazing in countless ways, but it’s also a hell of a tough time. You’re dealing with physical recovery, withdrawal symptoms from the pregnancy hormone drug-cocktail, very little sleep and of course the demanding minute-to-minute labour of looking after a tiny person, not to mention adjusting to a whole new life. It is extremely important to find time for yourself, and not everyone’s into pedicures. You’ve had a baby, but you haven’t had a personality transplant. For God’s sake don’t beat yourself up over playing some video games.

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