My Child and Other Mistakes: The hilarious and heart-warming motherhood memoir from the comedy star

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For anyone who is pregnant, or trying to weigh up whether or not they ever want to be pregnant, this is a really helpful insight into what you might experience and - importantly - that all of the negative experiences and emotions that you may go through are NORMAL and OK! For those like me who have recently experienced preganancy and newborn life, it is a great book to reflect on what you have experienced so far - and to realise that those times where you think, or thought, you were doing a bad job, you were just / are just a human being and doing the absolute best that you can. As a cis white woman married to a cis white man who were fortunate to conceive naturally, my account of parenthood is undoubtedly limited by my many privileges.”

My Child and Other Mistakes: The hilarious and - WHSmith

We write off people’s experiences of having children, because it’s so commonplace. It absolutely happens thousands of times a day, and yet for each family, it is seismic. And that’s basically why I wanted to write the book, because I think it’s a story that does get sidelined. You go, ‘Oh Susan’s had a baby, let’s send her a basket of muffins’, but for her, the tectonic plates that her life is based on, have completely shifted. And so that is basically what the book is. It’s what I like to think of as the extraordinary ordinary story of the experience of becoming a parent.” In my old life, BC (Before Child), my aim was to move to America and become the next big thing, like a younger, female Hugh Grant with better teeth. I would live a jet-set lifestyle and become best friends with Kristen Wiig and end up replacing James Cordon as host of The Late Late Show. The world was my oyster. What Taylor does in her coming of age memoir is show you the reality of this in a funny way. She doesn’t sugarcoat the harder times or the times that make her look just a little unhinged. It all adds to the wonderful colour of this story. Her thoughts on motherhood are especially honest and she lays bare how hard it is but also how rewarding she has found it. I enjoyed this book (on audiobook, narrated by Ellie herself) but it didn’t blow me away. Parts were relatable and parts were funny but on the whole I found it a bit wannabe worthy. But, as always, for all of us it was ‘just a phase’. Ratbag acclimatised, and so did I. Partly because time passed and partly because, essentially, we were out of options. I had to work, I wanted to work and for that to happen she needed to be somewhere I wasn’t.

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And her voice was so clear throughout the book, never getting lost to ‘I am writing a book I must sound formal and knowledgeable’. It was authentic. Before I had my daughter, I was told by some local parents that if I wanted to secure a spot at one of the neighbourhood’s good nurseries and not one of the places that was essentially a primary-colour painted gulag, I should really have started putting my name on waiting lists shortly before I sat my GCSEs. Trying to make up for lost time, I began to look at places for my unborn child when I was seven months pregnant. I should probably caveat this review by saying that I just didn’t find this book that funny. Sorry. There’s no doubt that there’s a wide audience for Taylor’s style of comedy, I’m just probably not it. So why read the book? Well, because I am mother to a 5 month old and am currently at the stage of craving anything that makes me feel ‘seen’.

My Child and Other Mistakes: How to ruin your life in the

When further talking about having a baby, Ellie said, “It’s the most commonplace, unexciting lifechoice to make. It’s not exactly punk, is it, to have a baby? And yet, for you, and the family that the baby comes into, it changes, it really does. All the cliches are true, annoyingly, but it really does change everything, and I’m so glad that I’ve got to write this all down, and I really hope it’ll make new parents feel like someone else has been through it before.” In this very funny book she writes candidly about her own personal experience exploring the decision to have a baby when she doesn't even like them, the importance of cheese during pregnancy, why she took hair straighteners to the labour ward, plus the apocalyptic newborn days, childcare, work and the inevitable impact on life and love and most importantly, her breasts.Taylor’s book is naturally predominately lead by her own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth (in this case via C-section) and being a mother, however, she does also pull anecdotes from other mothers and parents that have been part of her life and these add further depth (and occasionally some comedy) to the narrative. I have no idea whether I’ll end my life being a mum of one or a mum of two, or perhaps a mum of one and then surprise twins, or maybe a mum of one and owner of new tits. But what I do know, is that the child I have has been worth all the mess, all the noise and all the destruction. When parents make choices for their child and are over-involved in their lives, children learn that they can’t trust themselves and grow up believing that others always know better. Part of being resilient is learning to become independent and to trust in our own abilities – whilst asking for help where appropriate. Women should not feel bad about having time apart from their children and having the audacity to enjoy it. When my child is at nursery, I end the day knowing I have worked hard, and she has done 20 activities she would never get to do at home. I don’t spend our time away from one another in lovelorn misery but rather I end the day with a bubbly Christmas Eve sense of excitement as I go to collect her. Sometimes I think I love her the most when I’m not with her. I have come to realise that I’m a better mother when I don’t have to mother all the time. A raw, refreshingly honest, and hilariously funny read, this book begins prior to Ellie’s pregnancy during a period of her life when she was questioning whether she wanted children. It then travels through via various highlights and lowlights including; the pregnancy itself, childbirth, navigating the early days of life with a new-born, and of course, motherhood.

My Child and Other Mistakes: How to ruin your life in the My Child and Other Mistakes: How to ruin your life in the

Expanding on how tough having a newborn was, Ellie said, “I had quite a bleak time with it all. I think, probably now, I had a touch of the old postnatal depression. It’s so hard. You do a lot of baby classes and you learn how much a little six-week old should sleep, and how to swaddle a baby, but you don’t learn that, especially for a woman, it’s a massive mental, psychological, physical adjustment. You become a completely different person. I think trying to get used to that, with all the hormones flying around, and trying to work out how you now exist in this world, when this life has been lifted from you, is massive. My Child and Other Mistakes is the honest lowdown on Motherhood and all its grisly delights, asking the questions no one wants to admit to asking themselves – do I want a child? Do I have a favourite? Do I wish I hadn’t had one and spent the money on a kitchen island instead? The ‘stuff’ sneaks up on you. It begins deceptively slowly – a harmless if garish playmat appears in front of the sofa. “That’s ok,” you think, “It’s just one item.” In fact, it’s a nice hint of ‘child’ in a room that otherwise screams ‘functional living space for two adults who like watching The West Wing’. I felt so honoured to hear such personal, vulnerable details. It was a real privilege to be brought into those feelings.I’m a fan of Ellie Taylor. When I watch her acting or her stand up I genuinely belly laugh at the things that she has to say so I was eager to read her memoir My Child and Other Mistakes because I knew that I would be entertained. Ellie Taylor did not let me down. In My Child and Other Mistakes, Taylor chronicles her ascent into adulthood. I don’t mean the passing of the years that makes us a grown up but the decisions that we make that validate that in modern society such as getting engaged, getting married, having kids. Stand-up comic, broadcaster and actress Ellie Taylor is relatable, clever and interested in how women can have it all. Her honest, hilarious and moving account of the whys and hows of having a baby makes perfect reading for expectant mothers and fathers everywhere, as well as those who've been there, done that, and wonder how on earth they did.

My Child and Other Mistakes: The hilarious and heart-warming My Child and Other Mistakes: The hilarious and heart-warming

The settling-in period was, I would say, pretty heartbreaking for everyone involved. All the parenting my husband and I had done up until that point was about making our daughter feel loved and safe. Nursery felt like the undoing of that. Raw, candid and hilarious, Ellie Taylor’s My Child and Other Mistakes is the funny truth about motherhood and all its grisly delights.

In my new life, TDSY (The Dry Shampoo Years), my main aim this week is to try and get Ratbag to eat a raspberry. Success has shape-shifted from the vast, the international, the stratospheric (with me at the centre of it all), to the small, the fundamental, the domestic – all rotating around a small child who loves pink wafer biscuits more than some members of her family. Chris asked the writer for examples of helpful lessons that she has learnt, which she has now passed on in her book, to which Ellie joked, “In a way, the book is completely unhelpful! You don’t get any useful tips from it! It’s not practical. You’re not going to learn how to safely serve a toddler a grape. There’s nothing like that, but I think what it will do is act like a companion perhaps to you, like a friend talking to you about it. It'll have lots of experiences, which you will go, ‘Oh my gosh, yes that happened, and yes, that’s awful!”