Sarah Turner - The Unmumsy Mum: The Hilarious Highs and Emotional Lows of Motherhood

Dearest Henry and Jude,

My wonderful boys, my Henry Bear and my Judy Pops.

If you are reading this, the chances are you are about to make your way through the rest of the book. Im not sure how I feel about you delving into your mothers deepest thoughts from years gone by, but it was probably inevitable, so here we are.

First things first: I hope you are reading this as teenagers (and not before), because you will notice I occasionally use words I discourage you from using at home. I have always felt that writing down the words in my head, exactly as I think them, adds a certain authenticity to my writing, and it is unfortunate that, sometimes, the first word in my head is cockwomble. Or twat. These are still not appropriate words to call each other at homeyou are never too old for that time-out chair.

Back when I was a teenager I wrote diaries. With a pen and paper. Im aware that makes me sound ancient, and I guess I am ancient in your eyes. I was born in a different millennium to you two. I grew up in the 1990s, with the Spice Girls, Tamagotchis, hair mascara and taping the Top 40 off the radio (remind me to show you what tapes are). Im not going to tell you what was in those diaries because, postschool years, they mainly detailed nightclub flirting with your father (you can stop cringing; I burned them).

I stopped writing diaries soon after I met your dad, and it wasnt until I became a mum that I felt inspired to start jotting down my thoughts once more. Only this time, rather than writing in scented gel pens on carefully selected notepads from WHSmith (which I hid under my pillow), I started writing an online blog; and before I had really considered the implications of letting those thoughts loose on the world, they had already escaped my clutches. The Internet is scary like that.

So I would like to set a few things straight. Right here, right now. Not because I have to, but because I want you to understand why I have written so openly about being your mummy. I need you to understand what was going on in my head at the time, because you two, my little pudding heads, have always been at the very heart of it.

Being a mummy is really hard.

Whatever age you are when you read this, I have no doubt I will still be finding motherhood hard, but those early years were something else. On the darkest of sleep-deprived dayswhen one of you was screaming, I was irritable and the house looked like a war zoneI wanted to read about somebody who was having a dark day, too. Somebody who would reassure me I wasnt going completely mad. Somebody who would tell me there was no need to poke my own eyes out in despair because it would all be okay (but that, in the meantime, it was okay not to be okay). That was what I needed to hear. Instead, most of what I stumbled upon offered practical tips about sleep training or told me I should be treasuring every moment with you. There was always a bloody exclamation mark at the end of everything.