Parenting is harder than birth, and we don’t say that enough

There is something about the way we build up birth that makes it feel like the ultimate event, the summit, the defining test. We prepare for it for months. We analyse it. We debate it endlessly. We plan for it in ways that feel strategic and serious. We talk about birth trauma, birth empowerment, birth stories. We hold it up as this transformative threshold moment that changes everything.

And it does change everything.

But what I have found, both personally and through the families I work with, is that the real stretch often begins afterwards.

I work in birth. I believe in its power and its physiology and the way it can alter someone’s sense of themselves. I’ve seen it be euphoric. I’ve seen it be traumatic. I’ve seen it be deeply redemptive. Birth matters. It deserves the attention it gets.

But parenting, at least for me, has been harder.

Not in the dramatic, cinematic sense. Birth can be intense in a way that feels almost mythic. Parenting is harder in a quieter, more repetitive way. It is the kind of hard that accumulates. It asks for patience every day, not just courage for a few hours. It asks you to regulate yourself while someone else is completely unregulated. It asks you to function on broken sleep while still being the emotional container in the room.

After my first baby, whose birth ended in an emergency caesarean after a cascade of interventions, I remember thinking that I had already climbed the mountain. I had survived the surgery, the recovery, the system. I assumed the hard part was behind me. When my second was born in a fully physiological birth, despite being in hospital and requiring constant advocacy, I felt something close to euphoria. I felt powerful and deeply inside myself. I had worked for that birth and it felt aligned in a way my first had not.

And still, the years that followed both of those births have stretched me more than either labour did.

Parenting is not contained. Birth begins and ends. Even when it is traumatic, it is an event with edges. Parenting does not have edges. It seeps into your sleep, your body, your work, your relationship, your sense of who you are. It is relentless in a way that birth simply isn’t. There is no clear transition point where someone says, you did it, now rest.

We spend so much time preparing people for labour and delivery, and comparatively little time preparing them for the long middle of raising small humans. We debate birth plans and intervention rates and place of birth, which are important conversations, but we rarely speak with the same seriousness about the nervous system toll of parenting, or the identity shift that doesn’t resolve neatly after six weeks.

I think part of the reason we don’t say this out loud is because it feels like a betrayal of the narrative. Birth is supposed to be the hardest thing you ever do. Motherhood is supposed to feel instinctive, or at least natural once you find your rhythm. When it doesn’t, people assume something is wrong with them, rather than questioning the story itself.

For me, the hardest part hasn’t been the physical act of birthing. It has been the daily requirement to show up while tired, overstimulated, and still becoming someone new. It has been the way my nervous system feels permanently on call. It has been the realisation that there is no applause for endurance when it stretches across years instead of hours.

None of this diminishes birth. It just shifts the frame. Birth is a threshold, but parenting is the terrain you live on afterwards, and terrain requires a different kind of stamina.

I sometimes wonder what would change if we prepared people less for the peak moment and more for the ongoing reality. If we told them that the real work isn’t confined to labour, and that it’s okay if the long stretch feels harder than the event itself. If we made space for mothers to say they found birth empowering but parenting destabilising, without that being read as ingratitude.

Maybe fewer women would sit quietly wondering why they feel more undone at year three than they did in transition.

I don’t have a neat conclusion for this. I just know that in my own life, and in the lives of many of the women I support, the sustained work of parenting has asked for more adaptation, more humility, and more resilience than birth ever did.

And I think we should say that out loud more often.