Here’s looking at you, kid

Poet Hollie McNish tells Charlotte Runcie how she overcame the shame of writing about motherhood

Mothering Sunday is tomorrow, and the shops are full of pastel-coloured cards proclaiming, in sugary Hallmark rhymes, affection for mothers. Some have silly jokes about wine. Plenty are addressed to the “best mum in the world”. None comes close to capturing the transformational experience of motherhood.

“Kafka’s Metamorphosis pales in comparison to pregnancy and birth,” says Hollie McNish, the poet and spoken word artist whose searing performances address the realities of being a mother.

“All the love poems I have read and loved, all the female muses I have heard spoken about in verse and song and pop music and Shakespearean tragedies, all paled in comparison to birthing a baby, attached by the umbilical cord, blood still pumping between the two of us,” she says. “Yet I never read about that anywhere.”

McNish has built a hefty following from her live poetry gigs, her viral YouTube videos and now a book, Nobody Told Me, which is a diary in poems and prose about her pregnancy, childbirth, and the first three years in the life of her daughter. Some of the poems are bright with shouting and swearing, others quieter, reflective and tender. Here she is, for example, on morning sickness:

‘ I think for God’s sake/ Jesus drank it’: Hollie McNish’s poem about breastfeeding, ‘ Embarrassed’ has been viewed 1.5 million times on YouTube