I became a mum at 40. The baby years felt endless, until suddenly they were gone

There is something slightly cruel about telling a sleep-deprived new mother to “treasure every moment”. It is usually said kindly, but it can feel rather different when you have not slept properly and somebody has just been sick on the clean top you put on six minutes earlier.

I loved being Cyrus’s mum from the beginning, but I can also admit that some days with a baby felt long. There were feeds, nappies, broken nights and the relentless repetition of doing the same small jobs again and again. At 40, I did not arrive at motherhood believing I had endless reserves of energy, and I quickly discovered how much the success or failure of a nap could determine the mood of an entire afternoon.

Yet underneath the tiredness was an awareness I had not expected to feel so strongly. Even while I was living through those seemingly endless days, I knew they were temporary. I could want the evening to arrive faster while knowing that the baby I was carrying upstairs to bed would not remain a baby for very long.

I can’t know whether I would have experienced being a mum differently at 25 or 30 because I never met that version of myself as Cyrus’s mum. Would I have had more energy or worried less or I would have been just as tired at a younger age.

What I do know is that becoming a mother at 40 made time feel less abstract. By then, I already understood how quickly years could disappear. Forty does not feel old when you are living it, despite the strange way women are sometimes discussed once we pass certain birthdays, but it is old enough to have watched whole decades turn into memories.

Then you have a baby and suddenly you can see time moving. Clothes become too small. The Moses basket that once seemed enormous is outgrown. A face changes between photographs and you become so accustomed to looking at your child every day that you barely notice the transformation until an old photograph reminds you.

That is one difference about becoming a mother at 40. I already knew decades could disappear, but I was not prepared to watch the same thing happen in months.

With a baby, progress happens in increments so small that you can easily miss them while concentrating on just getting through the day. A sound becomes a recognisable word, a wobbling attempt to move across the floor becomes crawling and crawling eventually becomes standing. Before long, the child who once needed you to support his head is moving around the room without your help.

That was one of the surprises of motherhood for me. My world became more detailed because things I might once have dismissed as completely ordinary suddenly mattered. A spoon reaching a mouth successfully, a new sound or a tiny hand working out how to pick something up became fascinating because, for Cyrus, these ordinary things were happening for the first time.

Motherhood did not make everyday life less mundane. There was still washing to do, food to make and a big number of tiny items to carry whenever we left the house. What changed was my understanding of how much happens inside those ordinary days.

This is the part I think gets lost when we talk about “cherishing every moment”. You do not cherish every moment, and pretending otherwise creates an impossible version of motherhood that few women actually experience.

Some moments are boring, some are exhausting. There were evenings when I desperately wanted bedtime to arrive and mornings when I would have given almost anything for another hour of sleep. There were afternoons when my ambitions extended no further than drinking a cup of coffee before it went cold.

None of that makes those months less precious though. You can adore your child and still need a break and you can understand that a stage will eventually pass while finding parts of it incredibly difficult to live through. Wanting an exhausting Tuesday to end is not the same as wanting your child’s childhood to hurry up.

It is only with distance that I can see the difference clearly. At the time, I was tired and getting through the day. Now I occasionally look at a photograph from that period and find myself missing something I remember wanting to be over.

I took lots of photographs of Cyrus when he was small. Many are of completely ordinary things: sleeping, eating, sitting in the house or doing something that probably did not seem remotely significant when I reached for my phone.

Years later, it is often the background of those photographs that catches me. I notice the clothes I had forgotten, the baby bottle on the table, the toys, the furniture and the particular clutter of our life at that point. I look at the size of his hands or the way he sat and realise how much my memory has quietly discarded.

That is why I value the imperfect photographs more now. They were not created to present a beautiful version of motherhood to anybody else. They contain washing, toys, tired faces and rooms that look as though people actually live in them. They remind me not only what Cyrus looked like, but what our life felt like.

There is something reassuring about that because memory has a habit of tidying things up. Photographs show the lovely bits alongside the mess, which is probably a much more accurate record of family life.

We tend to think about childhood milestones as beginnings. We celebrate the first smile, first word, first crawl and first step because we recognise them when they happen. They announce themselves as something new.

What I did not appreciate when Cyrus was a baby was that every first also means something else is ending. The first time your child walks towards you marks the end of the period when he could not walk. The first proper words gradually replace the strange sounds you had become so accustomed to hearing.

The difficult thing is that we rarely recognise the last time while it is happening. Nobody tells you that this is the final time your child will fall asleep in a particular way, need a certain bottle or fit into the babygrow you have washed dozens of times. You discover afterwards that something has stopped happening, and by then you cannot quite remember when it stopped.

I can remember plenty of Cyrus’s firsts, but can’t name the dates. I think that is one reason parenthood plays such tricks with our sense of time. We pay attention to the beginnings because we know they are important, while many of the endings slip quietly past us.

“Treasure every moment” sounds lovely until it becomes another standard mothers are expected to meet. We are supposed to be tired but grateful, patient, emotionally present and conscious of the fleeting beauty of childhood while also remembering appointments, nappies, laundry, dinner and the whereabouts of whichever essential object has disappeared that morning.

I do not treasure every moment, and I have stopped believing that good motherhood requires me to. Some days I simply get through. Sometimes a moment passes because I am making dinner, answering somebody or looking for a missing sock. Motherhood does not take place separately from ordinary life. Ordinary life is where most of motherhood happens.

The older Cyrus becomes, the more I think the important thing is not to preserve every second. That would be impossible, and exhausting in its own right. It is simply to notice enough of what is happening while we are in it.

Motherhood after 40 has not made me infinitely patient or given me some special form of midlife wisdom. I still get tired and occasionally want five minutes when nobody needs anything from me. What age has given me is an awareness that time moves regardless of whether I am ready for it.

Cyrus will not remember most of those early days, while I will remember fragments: the weight of him when he was sleepy, the bottles, the tiny clothes, the toys underfoot and the evenings when I desperately wanted him to go to sleep. I will also remember how tired I was, because there is little point rewriting motherhood into something prettier than it was.

Now, years later, I sometimes wish I could revisit one of those completely ordinary evenings. I would not want to return permanently to broken sleep, nappies and cold coffee, but I would like to walk back into the room for a few minutes and see the version of us who lived there.

Perhaps that is what nobody can properly explain before you become a parent. You spend some of the longest days of your life raising somebody through the shortest years of theirs. I do not think we need to treasure every moment, but I do think it is worth noticing the ordinary ones because they are often the moments we miss once they are gone.

Occasional stories, experiments, discoveries and questions from Saffron & Cyrus.