When I was in the late stages of pregnancy, a trend emerged of news stories about women who regretted having children. I devoured these articles with the kind of sickened interest that makes you unable to look away from an accident. Inevitably the women would describe how they desperately wanted a baby, until the moment their child was placed in their arms.

Eight months into parenthood, I’ve come to think that the root of the shock and regret some women feel is the isolation of family units.

We may never see closeup the reality of looking after a small child, and then when we have our own, we in turn become separated from the world. We form half-friendships with strangers in a library or park who are sharing this peculiar interregnum. Our old connections – based around work or built without children – often aren’t equipped to engage with us.

Perhaps, then, popular culture has a role to play in setting more realistic expectations.

Enter new ABC comedy The Letdown. The story centres on Audrey, played by Alison Bell, and her baby daughter, Stevie. The title is a play on the term for the release of milk during breastfeeding, but also on the dark secret of the early months of motherhood.

In much the same way we are reluctant to acknowledge the physical effects of childbirth, popular culture has shied away from admitting to the repetitive, anxious and lonely aspects of early motherhood. Perhaps it’s out of a desire to avoid being trolled by the likes of Mark Latham, but maybe our collective silence hides a fear that if they know the truth, women will simply refuse to do it.

Most popular representations of baby-care involve parents staring lovingly at their sleeping child, all soft chubby limbs and delighted giggles. And while there is plenty of this, there is so much more.

It’s often only after you have had a baby, as you search for ways to understand what has happened to you, that you discover more realistic accounts.

I wept when I read writer Georgia Blain describe early motherhood:

I felt I had made a terrible mistake. I shouldn’t have had a child. I couldn’t do this. I wanted to say it out loud. I wanted to warn everyone. ‘Don’t be fooled,’ I wanted to say. ‘I’m here to tell you that this is not joy, it is not bliss,’ … Each time [my daughter] cried, I panicked. I did not know her, how could I comfort someone who was a stranger?

Only later, she wrote, did she discover the “startling love” parents have for their children.

And no matter how much love you feel, or how much you enjoy looking after your baby, there will always be moments of devastation.

If you haven’t had the unsupportive parent, you’ve probably had the friends who stopped coming by. If you haven’t had the baby who didn’t sleep, you might have had the unwanted caesarean section or the urinary incontinence.

The world created by The Letdown, largely with a light touch, is very real: small, chaotic, sometimes lonely, and very, very sleep-deprived. Inevitably however, as a new parent, the more absurd jokes often feel less comedy, more cinéma vérité.

Hippies, spiritualists and acid-freaks search for the experience of ego death. When looking after a baby, ego death comes upon you, in my experience, with none of the peace and oneness with the world they imagine.

Blain could feel herself slipping away the moment she gave birth: “I was aware that somehow, in the ferocity of what had just passed, I had shattered.” To the baby, there is no self, no you and her. You are an extension of her; her only way of being in the world. You are consumed by a being of utmost selfishness.

Thus, we know very little of The Letdown’s Audrey outside of her role as mother, her relationships with her partner and their parents. Her life revolves around shopping centres, mothers’ group and driving her baby to sleep.

Deciding you are ready to have a child involves a degree of hope and foolhardiness, a willingness to plunge headfirst into choppy waters you know nothing about. We need more honest stories like this to provide a guardrail, a condition report about what we should expect when we hit the water with a sharp splash and start swimming for our lives.

Hopefully, we are seeing the budding of new ways of telling the story of early parenthood. Podcasts, too, like The Longest Shortest Time, or Kinderling’s new Bodyshock are allowing us to talk and think in a more nuanced manner about how the role of “parent” fits within our lives, what we will make of it and it of us.

Some friends of mine dealt with the shock of having a new baby by writing a diary from the baby’s perspective. In The Diary of an Overlord, the baby – The Overlord – relegates her parents to their rightful place: dutiful servants of little significance.

I wondered what The Overlord would make of the character of Jeremy, Audrey’s partner, if he were her parent. Jeremy is an absent figure in the world of Stevie, describing looking after her as “babysitting” and appearing largely bamboozled about how to care for her.

His role is the only disappointing storyline in The Letdown for me.

For too many women in heterosexual partnerships, the birth of their first child represents a moment of dramatic relationship fracture. Previously, both partners cooked, cleaned, planned, made decisions together about things like, oh, I don’t know, having a baby. Both had important jobs in which they were ambitious and successful. Then a child arrives, and the woman is left, literally, holding the baby.

This dynamic is fed by a host of complex social, physical and emotional factors. Breastfeeding immediately places a lot of the care and sleeplessness onto the mother. Women are still expected to take the bulk of the parental leave, which means the father has other demands, spends less time with the child, becomes less expert. When my partner took three months off after our child was born, most people treated him as if he was some kind of hero. Me? I was just so lucky to have the help.

But many men also don’t really expect to do the equal share of caring. They are relieved to have the escape of work, even if they also miss their child.

I craved some explanation of how Audrey could live with this dynamic. One moment Jeremy is making work plans when she’s supposed to have her first night out in three months, the next she’s trying to have sex with him. Maybe it’s just too hard to unpick in a 30 minute comedy, let alone the real world.

But it’s a minor gripe. If we want to prepare new parents for all the ups and downs they are about to experience, we need more stories like The Letdown – and if current trends are anything to go by, we may well be able to get them.

• Amy Corderoy is a freelance medical journalist

• The Letdown is on ABC TV on Wednesdays at 9:34pm and available anytime on iView