NEW YORK – Here is a summary of a conversation I feel like I had countless times during my pregnancy: You think being pregnant is hard? Just wait until your baby is born and sleep exists only in your dreams. Except you will never have dreams again because you will never sleep again. Anyway, congratulations. Welcome to the Mum Club.

These dire warnings and endless jokes about the unspeakable horrors of parenting have only increased as my daughter enters the “terrible twos”.

While friends, family members and kindly strangers have also shared encouraging words with me, the anxiety-inducing comments seem to vastly exceed the positive ones.

When I was trying to survive the hurricane of infancy, these quips were not only profoundly unhelpful, but effectively depressing.

Yet griping about the quotidian torture of parenthood – the mess! the lack of sleep! the disappearance of freedom! – often feels like the only way new parents can connect, and admitting you might find parenting fulfilling or rewarding increasingly feels like an unspeakable taboo.

Why are people so intent on scaring new and prospective parents? People have become accustomed to talking to one another about the bad stuff, but there is a need to make a better effort to share the good stuff too.

There is some irony – or maybe karma – at work here.

For five years, I was a writer on the Netflix comedy series Workin’ Moms (2017 to 2023), created by and starring Catherine Reitman.

From the start, the goal of the show was to be brutally honest about motherhood, in all its absurdities and indelicacies. It existed in the tradition of shows such as Better Things (2016 to 2022), starring Pamela Adlon, and the hit film Bad Moms (2016).

Workin’ Moms focused on the travails of the working mother, mining humour from the recognisable distress of juggling a career with the chaos of having kids.

Shows like it – and other such “parenting sucks” cultural phenomena that predated it, like the best-selling 2011 parody children’s book Go The F*** To Sleep – arose as an antidote to a culture in which stress over parenting could only ever be spoken of in a whisper.

Now, though, the pendulum has swung all the way in the other direction, as millennial parents are having children later in life and showing no compunction in sharing their displeasure.

When I started writing on the show, I had no children and I was wrestling with ambivalence.

Listening to Catherine and the other mothers in the writers’ room talk so honestly and hilariously about their experiences – with all their searing, uncomfortable, contradictory emotions – helped me exorcise my theoretical fears.

I revelled in their honesty because I wanted to hear the truth, hoping it would help me decide what I wanted to do. And I wanted the show to speak the truth as well.

I became a mother in 2021, weeks before we began writing the show’s final season.

Suddenly, I found myself accosted by other parents who wanted to tell me all the terrible things about motherhood – and how it gets only worse over time.

Once I had my daughter, hearing from other parents about every terrifying detail – and all the horrors to come – did not feel comforting or cathartic. It nearly broke me.

Maybe we millennials just find it too difficult to shed our firmly established adult identities, so we crack jokes about wine o’clock and sleeplessness. We are all trying to sound like cool mums – like we are Ali Wong, Amy Schumer or the latest straight-talking mother on TikTok.

I also think part of the problem is that it is really hard to talk about the good stuff without resorting to sentimental cliches. I admit I often worry about sounding like something of a boring loser when I rhapsodise about my daughter.

I recently posted a photo online of my daughter’s very first piece of art hung up on our fridge. A good friend responded by telling me he is enjoying my “descent into norm-core”.

Generally, I have found that talking about how wonderful my baby is to be a great way to end a conversation. When we talk about parenting hardships, though, other parents lean in, thinking: “Here we go. Giddy up.”

But I know that, as a new parent, what I needed to hear most was that it was going to be okay and that my partner and I had not made a huge mistake.

I need to hear that it might be possible I was actually going to be good at this. Yet those kinds of reassurances were distressingly hard to find.

I have come to understand that having kids can be both awful and wonderful, often at the same time. And while I also want to be a cool mum, I am personally finding that motherhood challenges my inherent sarcastic nature and undercuts my reluctance to be earnest – the very qualities that make me well suited for writing TV comedy.

It also feels like a betrayal of my precious daughter to constantly harp about the inconveniences and painful elements of parenting – and never mention the miraculous gratitude I feel when she enters the room.

She is my sunshine, full stop, as I tell her in song each night. It is dishonest to pretend otherwise.

In my experience, the task of parenting my daughter has become much easier over these last few years, or at least more joyful.

There, I said it – and I will try to make a point of saying it as often as I can, especially to people who are pregnant or seem to be in survival mode in their first year with a newborn.

And I am going to encourage other people to say it too. As much value as there may be in collectively sharing our hardships, there is at least as much to be found in sharing our joy.

When I encounter someone with a child younger than mine, and I sense that the parent is feeling fatigue, vulnerability or fear that feels familiar to me, I’ll share the three magic words my doula used to say when I was pregnant that would make me cry instantly, every time: You’re doing great. NYTIMES

• Karen Kicak is a television writer who wrote for the Netflix comedy series Workin’ Moms.