Mums the Word: The mother of all taboos

No mother is perfect. Some of us are utterly incompetent, if only we'd admit it. Now a new West End play aims to bring those sordid truths out of the closet. About time, says Joanna Briscoe

There are unspoken truths about motherhood: sordid secrets we don't even tell our closest friends, private corners of shame, and inexpressible yet universal emotions that make us cringe merely by recalling them. But the signs are that the squalid underbelly of motherhood is just beginning to be revealed. Mum's the Word, a series of monologues about being a mother, has just hit London's West End (at the Albery, St Martin's Lane).The reviews may have been decidedly mixed, but to judge by the rapturous reaction of the audience, it certainly touches a nerve. A kind of Vagina Monologues for mothers, it stars six parents: Patsy Palmer, Cathy Tyson, Imogen Stubbs, Jenny Eclair, Carol Decker and Barbara Pollard (one of the co-writers and original Canadian cast), and features jokes, anecdotes and sketches about the maternal experience, from labour to premature birth to lack of sex.

The writing is, to be honest, decidedly lame, yet the audience (featuring many mother-daughter combos) roars as one at lines such as "half my brain washed out with my placenta". Dubious dramatic values aside, this play clearly strikes a massive chord as it tries to expose the reality of life as a mother .

It's part of a wave of truth-telling by a new generation of writers who have arrived at motherhood, balked at its appalling but unspoken indignities, and made it their mission to bring them out into the open. Kate Figes published Life After Birth, a starkly truthful view of motherhood based around interviews with new mothers. Rachel Cusk poured out maternal distress and shock in her searingly honest account of life with a baby, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother. The perceptions in Helen Simpson's astonishing collection of stories, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life make Mum's the Word look like amateur dramatics. And The Bitch in the House, an impressive collection of women's rants, is imminent.

What took us so long? There is much that we're not supposed to admit about motherhood: the outrageous shock of the first few months; the fleeting thoughts of strangling, tossing out of windows, and giving up for adoption, and the almost vomit-inducing levels of boredom, for instance. "You are just bored out of your head a lot of the time," says Mum's the Word co-star Jenny Eclair of the early years. "There is a lot of just sheer hellish trudging about when you just think you really are boring."

If this is confession time, then I have several to make. With a three-year-old and a three-month-old, we're almost talking health and safety issues here. Baths occur every few weeks. This sometimes stretches to every few months. The baby has probably been treated to five baths so far, occasioned only by poo travelling up to her hairline. I still sit there scraping baby-era cradle cap from my older child's rarely washed head, amazed that infant feet can smell like fully-grown horrors as I rub the night's instalment of urine off his legs and back with a wodge of expensive Pampers wipes instead of even considering a bath. Further wipes then double as a face flannel, shoe polish, and washing powder in our pre-nursery morning preparations. As for baths – they hate them, we hate giving them; it's not worth the hassle when all we're waiting for is the moment we can sink into a nightly bath ourselves.

Because it's not done to mention all this, many mothers live in terror of being found out. "I'm always cutting corners," says Charlotte Patrick, a working mother of two daughters. "When you take them in to school or nursery, you feel that something about your child will reveal your terrible lifestyle at home. There's this great sense of relief when someone casually admits to something you've always kept as a deadly secret, like forgetting to feed them or never giving them baths." The novelist Kate Saunders, mother of one son, agrees: "I want to give him a healthy breakfast, but we often stop at Starbucks instead, and I let him have a latte.I think people must be laughing at us when we're walking up to school together with our cups of Starbucks coffee."

Babies, sacred miracles that they are, are surrounded by the fiercest taboos. "There's a point in the night when you think about killing them," says Jane Curtis, mother of two. "When you cannot stand another moment of sleeplessness and crying. You do go a bit psycho and have absolutely mad, crazy thoughts that if anyone knew they would take your child away from you. Then there's the boredom." Few will admit to the sheer teeth-gritting, tear-springing boredom of childcare for the under-ones.

There are truisms that are common currency, yet only scrape the surface of the reality. For example, children shatter your relationship. "Oh yes, we barely spoke to each other for a few years," says Cally Foss, mother of one. "When we did, it was to have yet another argument. We really could hardly stand each other." And then there's sex. With libido hormonally muffled and chronic insomnia exerting a stronger and stronger grip, who in their right minds would be up for it? But rarely do we admit just how bad the problem is. "We haven't had sex for five months," says Jane Curtis, who had her second child last summer. "After the first one, we were lucky if we did it once a month."

Other maternal admissions include pre-teen children still sleeping in parental beds, oversized night-time nappy wearers popping out of their extra-larges because no one could be bothered to toilet-train them, and an inexorable post-partum drift towards the political right. "There's a theory that parenthood makes you right wing," says Charlotte Patrick. "It's sort of true. You change your mind about private schools; you want criminals off the streets, and you suddenly want lots of money."

Finally, there's fear, smugness and madness to be considered. Daily, secret, torturing fear for one's beloved's safety. Smugness because of course one has the best child in the world – and yes, everyone thinks that, but... And then secret bouts of lunacy, when you're about to explode with the pressure of love and tiredness, and all you need is a glimpse of a photograph of your child to set off a hysterical sobbing fit.

But why mustn't we admit all this? Despite this new honesty jag, we still fear judgement. The notion of perfect motherhood still appeals as an ideal. We writhe with secret guilt and inadequacy. "Women are far more susceptible than men to guilt and self-doubt," says Stephanie Calman, who has founded and edits a new website, www.badmothersclub.com, dedicated to mothers prepared to glory in their slackness. "We need to be more like them."

"I think that people do say it, but nobody listens," says Jenny Eclair. "I suppose that in a nutshell women fear that admitting anything negative may impact upon their abilities as mothers," explains Kate Figes, author of Life After Birth and The Terrible Teens. "No woman wants to be seen as a bad mother, and the reality is that we all do our best most of the time. The mothers that judge you are usually the ones that feel most insecure about their inabilities." Kate Saunders agrees: "Other mothers are so judgmental because they know they're crap too." And, says Charlotte Patrick, "I've always felt that I'm being policed by other mothers and that's why it's unspoken."

Hiding from other mothers, I put my filthy child to bed in clean pyjamas, kiss him 50 times, have a cry about some moment of neglect two years ago, rage against exhaustion, and sob a bit more out of overwhelming love. That's motherhood, then.