'If you're neurodivergent, motherhood is going to feel so much harder'

"The moment you meet your baby, it's going to be a love like no other", people told Laura Guckian. As the former marketing executive was handed her first child, she waited for the "massive gush of love" everyone had talked about. It didn't arrive. Instead, she felt this deep sense of fear.

"All of the coping mechanisms that I had put in place subconsciously over my life were ripped apart. My need for structure, routine, planning, that was gone, so I actually couldn't function," she tells Saturday Morning.

Laura Guckian: Motherhood's not easy and that's okay!

Saturday Morning

Once Guckian had rebuilt her life, she studied life coaching and later launched the award-winning Momfessions podcast to support mothers and encourage them to talk about "the really hard parts of motherhood".

"It wasn't that I didn't love my baby, or that I regretted having him. What I regretted was how hard it was, and how I felt almost blindsided by it."

"Utter depletion and exhaustion" from trying to do it all and hold it all together without enough support is the state Guckian sees many mothers of her generation in. Many also have a deep sense of failure and a feeling that they "were lied to", she says.

"That societal expectation to do it all and be it all is utter rubbish.

"We need to look at how do we bring the village back? How do we bring that back into the community so that mothers don't feel so alone in this?

"There should be an expectation of, 'Of course [new mothers] are going to find it hard, because why wouldn't they? How can we support them?

"When a mother struggles with her mental health, it doesn't just impact her, it impacts her child, her partner, and it has this ripple effect into the community, into the economy. It is literally the best investment a society can make, and it needs to start happening."

Women who have thrived in their careers seem to deeply struggle with the chaos of new motherhood, Guckian says.

Many others, like her, who suddenly start struggling deeply after having coped all of their lives, don't know that they are neurodivergent.

After her eldest son was diagnosed with autism and ADHD, Guckian had a strong feeling that she was, too.

'I was like, 'Oh my god, I'm autistic, but I can't be, because surely they would have seen that in the hospital…' It's something I don't think I'll ever forgive the hospital for, because I told them obvious things, like I can't look people in the eye, I really struggle with the lack of control in motherhood.

"That was why motherhood felt so hard. If you're neurodivergent, motherhood is going to feel so much harder.

"All of the coping mechanisms that I had put in place subconsciously over my life were ripped apart. My need for structure, routine, planning, that was gone, so I actually couldn't function.

"The sensory overload in motherhood, the crying, the hugging, the touching, all of it is going to be harder. Not being able to name that as autism, I didn't know what was wrong with me."

Now an advocate for maternal care, she hopes is on a mission to get better support for mothers' mental health.

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