I’m on a bit of a campaign to spread the news of how hard it is to have a kid. None of this sugar-coated B.S. when people ask me how it’s going and I coo: “Ah, it’s a miracle!” Nope. I tell them it’s unbelievably, incredibly, mind-blowingly HARD! Why? Because NO-ONE TOLD ME! So I figured I’d tell anyone who wants to listen.

I was on this trip when The Mother Figure’s best friend asked me how things were going. When I told her just how tough I thought mommyhood was, she said the following – wait for it.

“Well, the thing is – you’re not that young anymore.”

WTF? She’s calling me old? I was practically speechless.

“Er…really?” I said.

But what I was thinking was, “You’re not young AT ALL, Grandma!” In fact her grandkids are basically my age. Okay, fine they’re pushing twenty but that’s not that far off 32. Which is apparently half dead. Bloody hell!

I think she saw my look of horror because she went on to clarify by saying that 32 was old to be having one’s first child.

“I mean, I was finished having my babies by the time I was 26,” she said.

I was like, “Maybe, but that was in days when women were named Fanny and no-one found it funny. This is the 21st century and 32 is the new 22 for Christ sake!”

Okay, that’s not what I said but that’s what I was thinking.

I’d thought my post pregnancy troubles all had to do with my expanded waist-line. But now I was fat AND old and I just can’t seem to shake the last 3.5kg of baby boep. And the only reason we’re talking about 3.5kg of lovely lard is thanks to an earth shattering bout of gastro that shed 3kg in something like three days. The gastro was so bad, I thought I was dying so I didn’t even care about the kilos when I was hunched over the toilet bowl – and I do have to be half dying not to care about kilos. The Best Friend, however, didn’t quite see the serious side of the situation.

Best Friend over phone: “Hey. How’re you doing?”

Me: “I’ve just had the worst gastro of my life. I thought I might be dying.”

Best Friend: “Shame… More importantly, though, did you lose weight?”

Me: “I’m horrified. I’ve just told you I was practically dying and you want to know if I lost weight? Okay, if you must know, I lost three kilos.”

Best Friend: “So unfair.”

Me: “I know.”

The issue with the remaining 3.5kg (oh, and the additional aspirational 5-10kg I’ve been trying to lose since I was 14, but one step at a time here…) is that my new home away from home is Tasha’s. The Princess is not the best day sleeper but as soon as I wheel her out of the complex gate in her pram, she’s out for the count. And as soon as I wheel her back towards the front door she wakes up – no matter if we’ve been out for 10 minutes or two hours. It’s like she smells home and she’s wide awake. So what we do is we walk to Tasha’s so she can pass out on the way. We’re there in all of five minutes but we need to pass the time while we’re there so The Princess can carry on sleeping. And so…mommy has a decaff cappuccino (the joys of breastfeeding) and then on some days, a large slice of baked cheesecake jumps out at mommy and demands to be eaten. And all the while The Princess sleeps like a dream…I guess the beauty of a sleeping baby is almost worth all the calories that come along with baked cheesecake.

Anyhoo, enough calorie counting. It’s 10pm which means it’s bedtime for the likes of us “old” mommies.