The tale of the nativity changes after you’ve had a baby. No longer is this the seasonal story of a prophecy-made-man on a hillside in Galilee. It is not the visitations of angels or shining stars or even the virgin birth that strikes you as miraculous. Rather, what amazes you now is how, in the name of all that’s holy, Mary did it. This is a story of a young woman wading through insane government admin while hobbling more than 70 miles to her in-laws’, in the final stages of her first pregnancy, before facing an accommodation crisis and the prospect of childbirth without a health service.

I gave birth five weeks ago. When I was pregnant, just sitting on the 253 bus would almost inevitably result in me having to lurch off before my stop, vomit in a bin and, shortly afterwards, want to lie down and quietly die in the Euston branch of Accessorize. The very idea of rumbling through the night on the bony haunches of a recalcitrant donkey, when your pelvis already aches from the tectonic shift it’s making to let a baby through, and the instinct to nest, settle and pat your baby’s bedding washes through your veins unquenched, makes me weep.

Pity poor Mary. According to the Bible, Jesus’s corporeal life ends with the blood and suffering of the passion – a cross, the nailed hands, the public shame – but this is, in fact, a suffering book-ended by his birth. To be dragged through the streets exhausted and in pain, turned away from shelter by sneering and unsympathetic landlords, to go through the colossal, thumping, urgent surges of birth alone and surrounded by the flies and excrement of livestock, to watch your blood spread through the hay at your feet and to lose your body in a moment of pure pain – that to me is suffering and sacrifice as much as any crucifixion.

Of course, for poor old Mary it doesn’t end there. No sooner has she undergone the ordeal of childbirth for the first time, unaided and uninformed, than a load of shepherds turn up at her door, uninvited, wanting to know the gossip. I went into something a little like an out-of-body experience when my own mother somehow snuck her way into the birth centre and turned up in my room, entirely without warning, and started talking to me about potato salad and vaginal tearing. What it would be like to suddenly have a load of sheep-smelling, soil-fingered men with crooked sticks turning up in a cloud of lanolin and excitement when you’re still naked and dazed hardly bears thinking about.

Then the gifts start. People’s urge to give you things after you’ve had a baby is wonderful, of course, and saved me countless trips to Mothercare. But there are always a few that miss the mark. And just when you’ve been thrown into a chaos of washing, swaddling blankets, milk-soaked sheets and your own continued bleeding, you then have to navigate around a bizarre collection of items brought to you by well-meaning people who have never had, and will never have, children themselves.

Oh sure, the gold is great, but I can just imagine the look Mary might have given as she realised she was now going to have to carry a lump of myrrh over the hills as she fled to Egypt on the back of that bloody donkey, as well as everything else.

After I gave birth I didn’t want wise men at my threshold – I wanted midwives, mothers and aunties bearing lasagnes and knitted hats. I wanted wise women: women who had known how it felt in my body, had felt that weight of birth and were proud of me.

And, of course, there’s the admin to get through. My first attempt at filling in the CH2 child benefit claimant form was so entirely unsuccessful that I not only gave up just one page in, but also burned my lunch and managed to get urine in my hair in the process.

What must it be like to queue up for a census in the town you left years ago (precisely so you wouldn’t have to bump into the dickheads from school while waiting in queues any more) just so you can pay taxes to a Roman emperor, without much hope of a welfare state in return?

Of course, as the Tories rip through social care, take the health service to breaking point, leave our transport system to rot and use austerity to drive those on low incomes into poverty and desperation, the story of the nativity takes on a new tang of fear. Faith, love and charity can go a long way and must be encouraged at Christmas, but we must also fight to keep the very institutions, services and structures that allow the vulnerable to survive and bring equality to all.

There are young women right now travelling across borders, pregnant and scared, preparing to give birth in camps and in sheds, without support or medical care, who are vilified by innkeepers and landlords and all those other heartless gits in pubs who moan about migration and scroungers and the undeserving poor. There are Marys everywhere, always have been. And it is our duty to look after them – because the future is in their loins.

• Nell Frizzell is a freelance journalist

• This article was amended on 28 December 2017 because an earlier version referred to the immaculate conception, when the virgin birth was meant. This has been corrected.