The moments you don't post on Instagram, and why they matter most

Nobody's experience of becoming a mother looks the same.

With my second baby, the connection was immediate. Instant, overwhelming, completely different to what I expected. But with my first, it arrived more slowly. The love was enormous from the start, fierce and protective in a way I hadn't anticipated. The easy warmth though, the soft confidence of knowing exactly what she needed and how to give it, that took longer to find.

What came first was the weight.

The feeling of being completely responsible for another person before I felt completely sure of myself as her mother. I wanted to protect her from everything, including my own uncertainty.

She had reflux. We didn't know that for four months. Those four months were some of the hardest of my life. She was distressed and uncomfortable, and every time I brought her to the GP I was met with the gentle, maddening reassurance that I was probably just a worried first-time mum. She seemed fine when we were out and about, they said. She seemed settled enough.

It wasn't until we finally got the paediatric appointment that someone put words to what was actually happening. Distraction therapy, the paediatrician called it. Of course she seemed fine when we were out. Being out and about was a distraction from her pain. She wasn't better. She was just somewhere else.

I think about that a lot. How many first-time mothers are sitting in GP offices right now, being reassured out of their own instincts.

In the meantime, the advice I was given was to sit her upright on my lap for an hour after every feed. An hour after every feed, around the clock, with a baby who was in pain and couldn't tell me why, while I wondered whether I was doing everything wrong.

She needed to be held all day long. Every day. I spent a long time feeling like I was failing at something, like I should have been doing the washing, keeping the house, being more productive, recovering faster. It took time to understand that holding her was the work. She was the job. Everything else could wait.

And then, in the middle of all of it, there were the moments.

The ones I didn't photograph. The ones that happened at 5am when the house was quiet and I would lift her out of her swaddle and she would stretch her whole tiny body, arms wide, eyes still closed, and then smile. Not at anything. Just at being alive. Just at the feeling of stretching. I would watch her do that and something in me would go very still.

The feeding and the snuggling. Her weight against me. The smell of her. The specific way she settled when she was comfortable. Those moments existed alongside the hard ones, not instead of them. Both were real. Both were mine.

I went back to work when she was nine months old. The timing felt too soon, and also inevitable, and also like a hundred other feelings I didn't have words for yet.

She is eight now. She amazes me every single day.

Here is what I know, from the other side of those early years: the moments that mattered most were almost never the ones I posted. They were the quiet ones, the hard ones, the ones where I was just there, holding her, doing my imperfect best. Those moments are woven into who she is and who I became as her mother.

This Mother's Day, I am thinking about all the women in the middle of it right now. The ones who are holding babies who won't stop crying and don't know why. The ones who feel the weight before they feel the warmth. The ones who are doing so much more than the photos show.

You are in the moments that will matter most. Even when they don't look like it.

Even when nobody else can see it.

Elysia x