I haven't slept properly in three months. Here's what finally changed.

I'd read the books. I'd ordered the pads. I had a whole shelf of organic-cotton disposables and a backup pack of reusable ones because I was determined to be the kind of mother who didn't generate landfill. None of it mattered. By week three I was waking up four times a night, twice for the baby and twice because my own shirt was soaked through.

I'd stand in the bathroom at 3 am, peeling a wet T-shirt off, and I'd look at myself in the mirror and not really recognise the woman looking back.

The pads, by the way, were the worst part. I know I'm not supposed to say that — they're supposed to be the helpful thing. But every single morning I'd wake up and there'd be one half-rolled up somewhere in the bed and the other one stuck to my skin in a way I'm not going to describe in more detail. They'd show through my shirts. They'd peel off whenever I moved.

They smelled — not because I was unclean, but because milk smells, and there was milk on everything.

I started cancelling things. A coffee with my sister. A walk with my mum. A dinner I'd been looking forward to for three months. I told everyone I was just tired. I was tired. But I was also scared of leaking through my shirt at the table and having someone see.

I didn't have a moment. What I had was an Instagram ad. I scrolled past it twice. The third time I clicked, partly because I was up at 2:30 am feeding the baby, partly because the headline said “one less thing” and I genuinely couldn't think of anything I wanted more in the world than one less thing.

The brand was Vemorina. I'd never heard of them. Belgian, apparently. They sell exactly one product — a nursing bra with an absorbent layer built into the cup. I read the website. I read it twice. Then I read the founder story and learned that the person who'd designed this thing was a couple — a guy called Jurgen and his partner Alejandra — and Jurgen had apparently spent months reading Reddit threads because a close friend of theirs had told them about the wet nights and the muslins and the hiding-from-friends part, and his own mother had quietly confirmed she'd done the same forty years earlier.

I cried a little bit, which I am blaming on the hormones, but I think probably wasn't only the hormones.

I ordered two. They arrived two days later — the brand ships from Belgium in 48 hours, which I appreciated because I genuinely did not want to wait a week to find out if this was going to change anything. I put one on that evening. I went to bed in it. I slept. The baby woke up at 2 am, and I fed her, and I went back to sleep. I woke up at 6 and my shirt was dry.

It is not a miracle product. I want to be honest about this because I'm tired of essays that pretend everything is perfect now. On a really heavy let-down day, I sometimes swap the bra mid-afternoon. The brand actually tells you to. They say it absorbs about 30 ml per cup — they tested it themselves — and that for unusually heavy days you might need to switch out.

I appreciated that they said so. The pads brands never said anything that honest.

But the thing I want to tell you is what stopped. I stopped checking my shirt. I stopped doing laundry every single morning. I stopped sleeping on a towel. I went to my sister's birthday dinner two weeks ago — my first proper night out — and I forgot, for about three hours, that I was a breastfeeding person at all.

I just ate. I drank one glass of wine. I laughed. When I got home I realised I'd genuinely not thought about my chest once during dinner.