I thought I could be a ‘cool mum’ – just strap my baby to me and keep living life as usual. I was so wrong | Tara Kenny

When I was six months pregnant, against all odds, I hosted a house party. An intense plus-one, herself a mother, cornered me to deliver an ominous, drunken warning: “You can’t be cool and be a mum.” This struck me as something that someone who had never been cool, with or without children, would say.

Don’t blame your innocent spawn for your lack of rizz, I thought ruefully. Plus, I knew it wasn’t true, because I had grown up idolising my primary school friends’ chic and powerful mothers. They had covetable wardrobes, rock dog exes and misspent youths in far-flung locales such as Prague and Berlin. While we played in the courtyards of their St Kilda apartments, enjoying a luxuriously long leash, they smoked cigarettes and gossiped, unburdened by anxieties about their capacity to measure up to arbitrary standards of coolness.

Millennials are procreating later in life, or not at all. For many heterosexual women, having kids was once just something you did; a quotidian rite of passage akin to regrettably tweezing off your eyebrows in puberty or becoming a vegetarian in first year university. Today, it’s more likely to be a conscious, carefully weighed choice. Alongside concerns about precarious finances, waylaid career ambitions and the generally abhorrent state of the species, the millennial woman – who has enjoyed a protracted adolescence and been conditioned to view her identity as a carefully calibrated personal brand – might return to a more nebulous but equally vexing question. Will I still be cool with a kid?

Coolness is an elusive and subjective quality, but, much like pornography, you know it when you see it. When I found myself expecting a child, I wasn’t exactly sure what being a “cool mum” meant, but assumed it involved ceding as little of my childless identity and lifestyle as possible. This idealised matriarch certainly bore little resemblance to my darkest daydreams of a parallel self shackled to miscellaneous baby paraphernalia, at the mercy of base bodily functions and rigid nap schedules, and communicating purely in “goo-goo-gaa-gaas”.

Haunting apparitions aside, I was confident that I would be just like the stylish, breezy mothers I remembered from girlhood, gallivanting around town with the 2024 equivalent of a rock star baby daddy (a digital artist) and a new, adorable human accessory. I’d just strap the baby to me and keep living life as usual. “Babies are so adaptable,” insisted my similarly clueless friends. “Just take the baby with you and do what you always did!” I repeated like a mantra, forgetting that my primary hobbies were gossiping in saunas, watching horror movies and scabbing puffs of acquaintances’ vapes at the bar.

That’s why, six weeks into my son’s life, I heroically agreed to take street scene photos and vox pops at the opening night of Rising festival. It was a fun gig that would double as the baby’s soft launch into the elite Melbourne art world. He would be the perfect, disarming foil for approaching strangers. Once inside, drunk off the fumes of life beyond my apartment, I snapped and posted a photo of my newborn with a smoke machine in the background, before swiftly deleting it, concerned that my followers would assume we were at an actual rave. I struggled to maintain eye contact and witty repartee while deciphering the baby’s coos above the thumping bass of the speakers. On the way home I frantically Googled “newborn ears and music” and stayed up all night fretting that I had done irreparable damage.

Undeterred, I took my new plus-one to a birthday party at a wild west-themed bar in the former Franco Cozzo store in Footscray. We watched from the sidelines as carefree revellers rode a mechanical bull, knowing full well that as a duo, we lacked the core strength and neck control that such an activity demands. A guest whose frequent bathroom visits signalled either pharmaceutical indulgences or gastrointestinal woes asked if she could hold the baby. Through gritted teeth, I reluctantly obliged, hovering nervously by her side. As the crowd grew progressively louder and more depraved, my tot and I traded rising panic back and forth symbiotically, until I sought shelter in a hidden back room and waited for the witching hour to descend. Bereft at the kitsch saloon bar, it became clear that my subconscious desire to embody the cool mum was taking a psychic and spiritual toll.

While it’s technically possible to do whatever you want with a baby in tow, it was a rude shock to discover that previously pleasurable activities were often joyless and depleting as a new mother. But I forged on, convinced that to limit spontaneous socialising in “adult” environments would sound the death knell for my pre-child identity and any last gasps of edge and relevance.

And yet, there’s nothing less cool than maintaining a tiring performance of ease and whimsy for fear of becoming a boring loser. By letting go of what I previously understood to be the markers of a thriving, grown-up life, I’ve discovered wholesome, unexpected sources of fun and new, equally arbitrary ways to be cool. Rhyme time is my cocktail hour. Fitzroy Gardens is my catwalk. My nappy bag is chicer than a Fendi Baguette. All my best friends are babies. And you will rarely catch me out past 7pm, lest I turn into a pumpkin.

Luckily, I was born cool and no baby can take that away from me.

• Tara Kenny is an arts and culture writer based in Naarm/Melbourne