They're lying, I promise.

Picture the scene. You're 36 weeks pregnant. Prancing around in the newly painted nursery in your blooming marvellous dungarees. Feeling slightly tired, after all you've cunningly convinced everyone your being three times the weight of a baby elephant is all baby, nothing to do with the supposed craving for krispy kremes, in boxes of six. As you walk into your delightfully zen boudoir you spy your perfectly prepared hospital bags under the bay window. You've got three different cds in the bag, one for each stage of labour, complete with Holst's Mars, bringer of war for the crowning, you just haven't realised that suggestion from your mother-in-law was ironic.

On your bedside is one of the many books explaining the routine you just MUST follow to ensure your baby is contented and slots into your life as easily as possible because we all know that there is very little we have to change in our lifestyle to have a baby with the right routine, non?

There is a sudden whoosh and you look at the ceiling expecting the water tank to have fallen, after all it is a period cottage, but no, it's your waters, 4 weeks before the bay is due. This isn't a coincidence, it's a warning, an omen, a sign of things to come. BABIES CANNOT TELL THE TIME. Yet at this early stage many do not take heed, they are still convinced the perfect family is just around the corner.

So you head off to the hospital where the midwife looks like Dave Grohl in the Tenacious D video and gruesomely snatches away your vision of the Perfect Birth, except she doesn't really, it's just reality kicking in. If you're lucky it won't haunt you forever and you won't find yourself talking about it on Internet forums in ten years time.

Either way you are in some form of pain whether you seemingly unnaturally expanded your fanjo to a thousand times its usual diameter or had your abdomen sliced open with a sharp knife. You vaguely remember something about wanting to apply slap before the first pictures but just don't have the energy, know why? You're becoming a mother.

Then almost a minute and a quarter after you've realised you now have to take this baby home you're strapping it into a car seat and are driving along the m40. Home to a place that feels like it does on the return from a holiday, not quite yours, but like you've been there before.

Putting down the car seat you realise you're not quite sure what to do next. If it were a kitten you'd put it in its bed or give it some toys, a puppy you might let out to the yard, but this squawking thing? hmm. Even a Jehovah's Witness has the doorstep as a place of its own but this tiny bundle doesn't fit into your plans, sleep? it's not bedtime, food? again not time for it, play? well, the hand-crafted wooden train set doesn't seem so perfect for Tarquin now he resembles a squished prune, just bigger, but it's ok, you'll muddle through until you finally collapse at 11pm just after the night feed and think you finally know what tired means, but you still don't. Not yet.

About 2am you're awoken by the most alien sounds you've ever heard. Disorientated you stumble out of bed wondering what it is then realise it's your child, your offspring, your heir but it's ONLY 2AM?!?!?!?!?! the book said every 4 hours, oh dilemma! what to do???

You could put it in the garden with the foxes, or shh and pat it for the next hour hoping it will go back to sleep, or even leave it for 15 minutes a time before going in to comfort it until it is allowed its feed, even though at the same time your whole body is screaming at you to feed it.

A fraught 45 minutes later you 'give in' and feed it, only to see it guzzle the milk and promptly fall asleep, on the breast, whoops. Calming down you are ok about it, it was only one variation, next time you'll stick to the rountine. Until baby wakes again, this time two hours later. Baby doesn't seem to want to stick to someone else's routine. Go figure.

Within about two weeks you look like Linda Blair on the set of her most famous movie and your brain is so fried you're sure when your baby first says 'Mamma' your head will spin, you'll projectile vomit guacamole and prematurely discuss oral sex and the after life.

The most torturous pain of all will be the baby groups. NCT being the worst of all. At least Surestart groups will be easy to hide amongst with the general conversation revolving around who drank the most vodka the soonest, if their baby has a tan and the 'lush' tees that asda are selling with motifs such as 'My muvva finks ur fit' on them. But NCT is a whole different dilemma. Someone, generally the mother with the Au Pair and largest disposable income, will have taken it upon herself to mark the gatherings out of ten, including categories for baking and general cleanliness. So even though you can no longer brush your hair without a call to your therapist you spend three days baking cupcakes and fall asleep at the hairdressers.

Then they arrive, in they come, babies in Vertbaudet, mothers looking like a personal friend of Johnny Boden. The conversation turns to sleep and they all try to out-do each other with Sickly-Sweet-Smug-Passive-Aggressive-Over-Competitive-Mother being last to add how her babies (she had twins just to make you feel more insecure) have slept right through since 3 days old.

Your husband later finds you in the shed, drinking neat gin, from a plant pot.

There is just one thing you must know.

THEY'RE LYING.

When your baby says feed me, feed it, when it says it's tired, put it to bed and if you want wine at 3pm, there is a bar opening somewhere in the world right now. So drink it, then lie, lie, lie and pretend your life is as perfect as they say theirs is.

It's all about survival.