Motherhood is often described as beautiful and transformative—but rarely as raw, messy, and downright bewildering. In Cry When the Baby Cries, author and illustrator Becky Barnicoat pulls back the curtain on early parenthood, offering an unfiltered look at the chaos, exhaustion, and unexpected humor that come with raising a newborn.
Blending memoir with candid, expressive illustrations, Barnicoat tells the story of her own transition into motherhood—the shock, the bodily upheaval, the sleepless nights, and the quiet, profound moments of love.
In this interview, Barnicoat shares the inspiration behind her book, the moments that shaped her storytelling, and the lessons she wishes she had known as a new mother. With humor and honesty, she reminds parents that they are not alone in feeling overwhelmed, grossed out, or completely out of their depth—and that sometimes, the best way to cope is to laugh through the chaos.
Motherly: Cry When the Baby Cries blends memoir and illustration beautifully. What inspired you to tell your story in this format?
Becky Barnicoat: When I became pregnant, I was working as a cartoonist for BuzzFeed drawing relatable comics about my life. Having a baby instantly gave me a wealth of new material.
Motherhood is this dramatic, sometimes traumatic life event that happens almost entirely behind closed doors. This meant that the whole experience came as a shock to me. I didn’t know what to expect. I was just staggering about in this swollen, bleeding body, holding a crying baby, feeling totally discombobulated.
So I decided to start drawing what had happened to me and share it with other parents, partly in solidarity, but also as a heads-up.
The book captures raw, intimate moments of motherhood. How did you decide which moments to include and which to leave out?
But I also had my children and husband in mind while writing the book. I didn’t want to impinge on their privacy, so they aren’t named. I imagined the kids reading the book when they’re older, and I wanted it to do justice to all the love and joy we share.
I felt comfortable being completely honest about everything that was my experience. I wanted to share everything I felt, what I looked like, the sometimes embarrassing, disturbing things that happened to me during birth, or while breastfeeding.
Really, the thrust of the book is that the kids are great, but society is letting us all down.
What has been the most surprising or cathartic part of putting your motherhood journey into words and illustrations?
Other mothers saying: that happened to me! I went through that too. We become mothers in private, and we don’t really know what other women go through, so there’s a tendency to think that everything that happens to you is unique—freakish even.
The transition to motherhood involves everything that is not acceptable in public: screaming, nudity, bleeding, excreting, your body stretching to enormous proportions, and then shriveling slowly back. It can sometimes feel like your own private body horror, but it’s actually an experience shared with millions of other women. Realizing that definitely lifted my feelings of shame.
If you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice as a new mother, what would it be?
Don’t fixate on expert advice. I desperately tried to force my first baby into a routine. He was having none of it, so my first year as a mother was spent furiously trying to get him to sleep in his cot, while he furiously refused to. It was boring, miserable, and exhausting.
With the second baby, I just did whatever worked in the moment. He fed non-stop, day and night for the first eight weeks. No one had told me a newborn would clusterfeed like that. I co-slept with him, and that meant I slept.
I was lucky that my husband had paternity leave, which then morphed into the pandemic, so he could bring me water and stop our toddler mountaineering up the bookcase. So the other piece of advice would be: accept, no—demand help! We aren’t meant to parent alone.
You describe early parenthood as an “animal time.” How did embracing that raw, instinctual phase change your perspective on motherhood?
This is something I loved about having a baby. I had spent 14 years sitting in an office chair, under strip lights, cut off from the natural world. The office environment felt deeply oppressive and claustrophobic to me. Our bodies are denied there; they must be civilized and neat.
Having a baby felt like the exact opposite of that: a wild, physical experience, totally uncivil, almost obscene, involving the most intimate connection to another human being you can possibly have. It was scary, I felt out of my depth, but at least I was feeling things!
I had been sold a narrative that motherhood is boring and repetitive, but we downplay the same issue in the workplace. Being in an office 9-5 for 45 years is boring and repetitive. We need our lives to be a better balance between work and family.
Your book reassures parents that it’s okay to feel weird, gross, or overwhelmed. Was there a moment in your own journey when you needed that reminder yourself?
Definitely. I was repeatedly shocked by my own body. The sight of my c-section scar, the bloody pee, the swollen aftermath of my no-longer-pregnant stomach. My postpartum body met no aesthetic standard set for women by the media, and it created a lot of insecurity.
One way I tried to overcome that was by loving and appreciating other women’s nonconforming bodies. But humor also helped A LOT. I still remember my friend texting me that her first post-birth shit was like passing a mayonnaise bottle, and I laughed so much my scar hurt.
The idea of babies being “writhing little creatures full of feelings and gas” is both hilarious and deeply relatable. How did humor help you process the chaos of new parenthood?
My kids are now 5 and 7, but every day I still have moments where I just can’t believe how hard it is. When they fight, or hit me, or refuse to do the thing I really need them to do right now. The strength required to be a calm parent in those moments—it’s intense.
No other experience has made me turn so frequently in my mind to the Greek myths: I’d like to see Odysseus or Achilles take on bath time and bedtime with two overtired, over-stimulated under-5s. It’s no joke! But when another parent tells you they had the exact same experience, it’s a huge relief and suddenly it’s funny. Laughing together is a lovely alternative to crying.
Many new parents struggle with expectations around routines and milestones. What would you say to someone who feels like they’re “doing it wrong” because their baby doesn’t follow a set schedule?
When my first baby was born, I realised with terror that I didn’t speak his language. I didn’t understand his cries, or his gestures. I was constantly guessing what he wanted and getting it wrong.
Eventually, after two children, I can speak baby. I do believe we are meant to be around babies our whole lives so we can learn their language, but our society cuts us off from them until we have one ourselves.
Parenting is so hard, because it’s a job without proper training. So please, don’t be hard on yourself if you feel like you’re “doing it wrong”. The way we live now is totally unsuited to raising children, and we are all just doing our best to adapt.
Your book normalizes the messy, unfiltered side of parenthood. Were there any parts of your experience that felt too difficult or personal to include?
I’m not sure anything can prepare you for the violence of small children. They bite, they scratch, they kick, they flail. I tried to convey it in the book, but I think you have to experience it to understand.
This is something that the gentle parenting experts seem to gloss over or ignore, but if you go on any parenting forum you will find thousands of parents struggling through it. It’s bloody hard. Hopefully not literally bloody. For such tiny, adorable people, they can really pack a punch.
How did your own experience of pregnancy compare to the curated, “cottagecore” aesthetic often seen on social media? Did you feel pressure to present a certain image during your pregnancy?
The perfect, glowing, “cottagecore” pregnant Instagram ladies aren’t expelling enormous amounts of gas all day long, or writhing with heartburn after every meal. I don’t see them lying on the carpet, weak with anemia. Or tossing and turning all night with savage hip pain.
Actually, you know what? They obviously are doing all of that, but they pretend they’re not, which is even more annoying. Presenting an idealised version of your life on Instagram has the real-world effect of making other people feel bad about themselves. It was formerly known as boasting, and I feel like it used to be frowned upon. Can we make boasting a taboo again?
When you first saw your baby, you mentioned that your thoughts were not profound and that he looked like your dad. Can you describe what was going through your mind in those first moments?
The very first thought I had when I saw my son was: oh my god, I gave birth to my dad. It was a massive shock to see his genes repeated so vividly like that. And it came with all the baggage of realizing I might be about to raise my dad to adulthood. But over the following 12 hours, my baby, swollen from the womb, deflated a lot and began to look more like a baby, which was a relief.
You mentioned searching for feelings of love after the birth. How did your emotions evolve in the days and weeks following the birth of your baby?
I was fascinated by the early feelings, and I didn’t know what love would feel like. It certainly wasn’t a lightning bolt or cupid’s arrow-type sensation. By the second night with my son, I remember looking at his face resting on my boob, and finding it the sweetest little face I’d ever seen.
But I had conversations with good friends, who said they didn’t feel anything that resembled love for many weeks, even months. A sense of protectiveness, and a powerful desire to be with them might be the most accurate way of describing those early emotions.
You mentioned that the lack of sleep began to eat away at you. Can you describe how sleep deprivation affected your mental and physical health during those early days of parenthood?
It ravaged me. All the experts said I mustn’t sleep while feeding my baby. He wanted to feed for 24 hours a day, so when could I sleep? I knew this crazy riddle made no sense, but if an expert says your baby might die if you do something, you don’t do that thing. I tried to stay awake, passed out, jerked awake in a panic, tried to place him down, he cried, I’d feed him again.
This went on for the first year, with slightly longer breaks between feeds. I was wretched with exhaustion, but my mental health did somehow hold out. I had been through three years of failed fertility treatment to have my son, and had been in a long depression. The memory of how dark I had felt then, and how I thought I’d never get to have a baby, made everything more bearable.
Do you have a favorite page or panel in the book that holds special meaning for you?
The page where the baby apple tree blossoms is very personal. This happened in real time while I was writing the book. We had planted a tree in memory of my father-in-law. When winter came, we thought the tree had died. Then in spring, it burst back to life.
My son pointed at the blossoms and said: “Mummy, did you know? All these will be apples!” and I suddenly understood what I was writing about. I had been wrestling with the question of why we have children, when the future of the planet is so uncertain. Was it just an impulsive reproductive desire, like a knee jerk reaction? This moment made me believe it could be a positive choice: an affirmation of life, hope, and renewal.
What do you hope new parents, especially mothers, take away from reading Cry When the Baby Cries?
Be kind to yourself. Let yourself off the hook, and get angry about how our society fails the vulnerable – right the way from babies through to the elderly. We need a new vision for how we live, with caregiving at its heart. And also: tell your stories. Tell everyone what happened to you when you had a baby. Shock them with it! The reality of becoming a mother shouldn’t be a guilty secret.