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

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Something you don’t think about, when you’re going to NCT, is that suddenly your relationship is totally different. I remember in the newborn days, something I hadn’t anticipated, I felt like I really missed my husband, because you become like ships in the night. You are on shift. One is on, one is trying to sleep. And I was like, ‘You're in the same room, but we barely ever talk,’ and that was really, really hard, that kind of adjustment.” Raw, candid and hilarious, Ellie Taylor’s My Child and Other Mistakes is the funny truth about motherhood and all its grisly delights.

Ellie Taylor On Childcare - Grazia Daily

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. This is a story told from the heart and there are some truly emotive moments in which Ellie Taylor shares her tales of motherhood with all the grisly, painful, and heart-breaking details. That said, she also successfully manages to ensure that the writing feels easy to connect to and is consistently humorous, and therefore, not a difficult read. Even at the worst of my initial nursery anxiety, I have always tried to bat away the temptation to be drawn into the ‘mum guilt’ narrative that I despise. It’s either un-gendered ‘parental guilt’ or it can sod off. It is not for mothers alone to navigate the burden of a work/child balance. If you, like me, ever feel a sneak of self-reproach edge in, I urge you to try and tough-love yourself out of it. Remind your brain, as utilitarian as it sounds, that each of us has a role to play in a family, even our children. For my husband and l, our job is to work and pay bills, and for Ratbag, her job is to go to nursery and bloody well do Baby Shark. I felt so honoured to hear such personal, vulnerable details. It was a real privilege to be brought into those feelings. Resilient children are less afraid of making mistakes and more prepared to take risks – because they can cope with having got it wrong. Explain how we don’t always know the answers or the right way to behave, but we can make the best choices we can – and accept if we get it wrong. This means showing them that mistakes are great ways to learn and are part of what makes us human.Ellie's honesty and humour has helped me a tremendous amount. I read this over a few long nights with my 4 month old and it felt like she was writing my innermost thoughts that I didn't dare to say aloud. Her words have brought me sunshine in some particularly dark nights through hilarious anecdotes that I can already relate to, as well as feeling like being given a huge hug of reassurance. As well as personal stories, both emotional and funny, Ellie supplements these chapters of her life with data and facts about parenthood that were so eye opening. For example the realities of maternity and paternity pay, or the racial disparities across birth fatalities.

My Child and Other Mistakes Ellie Taylor on her new book, My Child and Other Mistakes

Ellie Taylor's book is her reflections on deciding whether to become a mother and what happens when she and her husband finally decide to become parents. In her usual style, Ellie Taylor is funny, honest and insightful in her observations. She also wants to demystify some of the things around pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood and to open up a wider discussion. 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. 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? Bauer Consumer Media Ltd, Company number 01176085; Bauer Radio Limited, Company number: 1394141; Registered office: Media House, Peterborough Business Park, Lynch Wood, Peterborough PE2 6EA and H Bauer Publishing, Company number: LP003328; Registered office: The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PL 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’.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: How to ruin your life in the My Child and Other Mistakes: How to ruin your life in the

Ellie's comedic, best-friend style shines through, covering even serious topics in an approachable way. 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. 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. 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. My stomach is spongy and quivering, like a panna cotta that’s been out of the fridge for too long. My body has decided that it’s best if it keeps hold of some of the four stone I put on when pregnant, presumably for a rainy day.You could even encourage them to make mistakes. Whether that be with homework, or craft projects or creating a new dish for supper – encourage them to take risks. Show them that making mistakes helps us learn – how will they know that sprinkling in a chosen spice creates an unpleasant taste if they don’t try, or that adding red to the paint won’t give them the hue they were after unless they experience it for themselves? I already dream of the day when my daughter only wants to sulk in her room and the siege on my living room is ended. Never again will I need to worry about anyone seeing if my new spherical vase is, in fact, a ‘bouncy ball’. And when that happens, I assume I’ll go up into the loft, fish out the dancing llama, clutch it’s twerking body against my chest and sob as I reminisce about the dreadful magical years when my feet were never safe from an unseen plastic minion. Your weekends 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 by Ellie Taylor | Waterstones

I absolutely love Ellie she’s one of my favourite comedians so was excited to see she had a book out and I got approved for an ARC. It’s a very honest and raw read at times and Ellie covers the whole experience conception, birth, the discrimination mothers face, discrimination non-white mothers face in healthcare treatment and expectations as a mother. Ellie doesn’t hold her punches, but I never expected her to, full of her usual humour and grit, but also such sensitivity and kindness to her audience. Fantastic read, only criticism is I’d have liked a bit more of Ellie other than her motherhood role, but that’s all I can criticise I will and already have been recommending this to everyone I know and it should be a must read for every new mum. This is an absolutely amazing book, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who is pregnant or just given birth. It is so, so funny and I related to it so much. "Minjury" is the best joke I've heard about Pelvic Girdle Pain 🤣 Loved it!! (The book, not Pelvic Girdle Pain!) 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 guess an important preface is that I am an Ellie Taylor fan, and not just a fan but often accidentally the same person. Thinking and speaking in such similar cadence made this such a perfect read, everything made so much sense in my brain because it was explained just as I too would explain it.Children thrive on routine, predictability and boundaries - when they lose these factors in the long-term, and the reasons why can often by unavoidable, it can be a difficult time for parent and child. However, as parents, there are ways to help them not only cope, but prosper during these times. 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. 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.” I think it’s had 20 Emmy nominations. It’s gone wild. It’s so funny. It’s got so much heart, as well. It’s so sweet. That’s all done, the second series starts tomorrow.” Completely honest, real, funny and thought provoking - I found myself laughing and crying (sometimes at the same time) and at some points I seriously felt like I was reading my story.