THREE TEENS AND A BABY DIARY OF A GAP MUM LIZ FRASER

This week: It was never this much of a struggle to juggle the work-life balance before...

‘Liz, I’m sorry. They need you in the studio…”

I’m on my knees on the floor of a lavatory in a London TV studio, changing my baby. My maternity bra is still undone, I’ve got stains on my shirt, and as soon as I look up to tell the now stressed producer that I’m doing this as fast as I can, my newborn wees all over the mat, the floor, and her clothes, which I now need to change.

And I’m supposed to be live on national TV talking about parenthood.

I’ve done this “workingmum-trying-to-juggle-itall” lark before, with varied degrees of failure and wardrobe shame.

I’m freelance this time though, so I’ve had no maternity leave, we have no family nearby to help, I have no childcare except her dad, but he works full time, so during the day I have to bring her to work if I’m to earn anything at all and keep even half of an exhausted foot in the employment door.

I’m sure that being older is a huge factor in how bad I feel. Age makes us more tired, and tiredness is the enemy of a sound mind.

But as the work-life balance goes, this is about as ridiculous as it gets, and six weeks in I’m getting ready to hand my baby over to someone I’ve never met, albeit for only a few minutes. I have a moment where I wonder what am I doing?!

I remember promising myself, now older and (I thought) wiser, I wouldn’t do things this way. I told myself that I would take my time, rest when baby rests, savour the precious newborn days and not worry about rushing straight back to work, housework, and looking after my older children.

But those dreamy notions seem to have been thrown out with the first stinking nappy.

I don’t know if it was the relentless colic, which started in week two and brought screaming day and night, reaching a level of sleep-deprivation my body can’t handle, or the pressures of deadlines, but in a blinding lightbulb flash of epic naive idiocy, I realised that I can’t manage it all.

Whatever it was that caused it – and it was probably all of these things and more in a potent melting pot of maternal overload – it happened.

There was no defining moment of collapse, just a gradual realisation that I was less and less… smiley. I was emotionally weaker, and less able to deal with things going wrong. And looking after a new baby, things tend to go wrong about 5,696 times in the first two hours of the day.

It would take just one missing sock or one phone charger left upstairs when I’d just got downstairs and I’d be in a rivers of tears.

Every day became a case of existing, not living, in a confused, silent, detached little bubble, containing only me and my baby. Worse, I was aware of all this. Aware of how weak I was. How much it was affecting my relationship with my partner, my baby, and my children. But not being able to change it.

I knew things had reached a crisis point when I was holding our beautiful daughter and looking into her enormous blue eyes with my tears cascading onto her chubby cheeks.

I don’t know if babies can sense emotions, but she really seemed as if she was saying: “Hey Mummy. Please don’t be sad. It’s going to be OK.”

Something sent a message to whatever grain of rationality was left in my exhausted brain, telling me that I had do something about this. Now, or never.

“Liz, we have to go now.” The producer looks as desperate as I feel.

I did the job and went home, where I decided that something had to change. Now. For us all.

‘I knew things had reached crisis point when I was holding our daughter, and looking into her eyes, with my tears cascading onto her chubby cheeks’