Writer Helen Walsh bravely shares her experiences as a first-time mum in this essay (warning: it's on the longish side) in the UK's Guardian newspaper. Among other things, Walsh says she sometimes felt suicidal in the difficult weeks after giving birth to her son, and that the support of doctors and other women didn't fully ease the pain.

"There seems to be a collective code of silence governing those first few months of motherhood," she writes. "Maybe it is born of a time-cherished will to preserve the magical aura of new birth for all expectant mothers. Or maybe it's simply too horrid to acknowledge - the idea that we might not fall head over heels in love with our newborn is plain unthinkable. As a mother, I now know why those women abandon their babies in church yards and hospital toilets."

A few points about this provocative piece:

1. I think it's the culture that perpetuates the notion of a "magical aura" surrounding pregnancy and birth moreso than other women. Before I had my son, my ideas about delivering a child and caring for him were based largely on what I had observed on sitcoms. I envisioned a labor during which my husband would run around like a dithering idiot, yelling at doctors and, at some point, fainting. I figured I would scream at everyone like a deranged dragon, grunt a few times, then push out a kid and burst into tears of joy that would continue for, approximately, 18 years. And, naturally, I thought all of this would occur during May Sweeps.

Once I actually got pregnant and began having serious conversations with my veteran mom friends, though, reality sunk in pretty quickly. The first thing nearly all of them said to me was: "The first few months are really hard." If anything was beaten into my head before I became a mom, it was that. "Prepapre yourself," I was told. "Life's about to suck royally." Of course, it's impossible to fully prepare yourself regardless of any advance warnings you may receive. So Walsh's shock at how her emotions went wibbly-wobbly is more than understandable. But I don't think the strain, self-sacrifice and, let's face it, sometimes torturous parts of being a mom are completely a secret.

2. Similarly, I also am not so sure that the "code of silence" Walsh mentions is as much of an issue as it once was. Granted, many women are very reluctant to discuss their feelings of failure at being a mother. And perhaps in British culture, that's even more true than it is in America. But with so many mommy groups, messageboards, blogs and Web sites like Babble out there, that silence strikes me as less deafening than ever before. But, as Walsh suggests, could we be more empathetic toward women who struggle with motherhood? Absolutely.

3. I have to admit, there was one portion of this essay that made me laugh. In the penultimate paragraph, Walsh talks about the day she finally started to come out of her funk and fall in love with her son. She writes: "I remember waking the next morning refreshed, mentally replenished. The Smiths were on the radio, birds were bickering outside." The Smiths were on the radio? And that made her feel less suicidal? No wonder Walsh knew she was on the road to recovery. The depressing lyrics of Mr. Steven Patrick Morrissey have been known to crush the spirits of people who didn't even have infants to breastfeed.

File Photo