'I felt I was failing'

From the pages of her book, Jacinda opens up about her early days of motherhood.

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Seventy-two hours after our daughter, Neve, was born, Clarke and I held a press conference to introduce her to the world. We planned the whole thing before I gave birth, and I'd been sure it would be fine. Kate Middleton did it, I'd thought. I can make it work.

Now that I'd just given birth, it did not feel fine.

I had spent most of the waking hours since Neve arrived just staring at her, the way new parents do. For so long, I had waited and worried, and now she was here. I was relieved and elated.

My body, though, was another matter. Even the easiest birth knocks a body in two, and Neve's wasn't entirely straightforward. Close to delivery, her heart rate had dropped precipitously, and she'd emerged with the cord wrapped around her neck.

Her first night, she'd been up for 12 hours straight, which meant I had, too. By now I felt almost delirious from lack of sleep.

I'd also barely got out of my pyjamas since she'd been born. My hair was unwashed, and the best hope was to pull it back in a bun. My postpartum stomach was, shall we say, not minimal. And walking any distance at all made me feel as if my insides were falling out.

Perhaps the most unnerving part of it all, though, were all the posters on the wall of the maternity unit, cautioning me that I might be suddenly flooded with uncontrollable emotions. I didn't feel as if that were about to happen. If anything, I was just very tired. But the images made me feel as though the tears could spring up out of me without warning, big powerful sobs, like some kind of spontaneous backyard sprinkler.

I remembered how Kate Middleton looked on the day she introduced a newborn Prince George to the assembled throng, to the media, to the world. How composed and put together she looked in a powder-blue polka-dot dress. She'd made it look easy. How, exactly, I wondered, as I hobbled down the hallway towards the hospital atrium for my own press conference, had Kate done this?