Paloma Faith: I love my child – but motherhood is hell

Paloma Faith has described motherhood as “hell”, saying she never realised how lonely life could be as a parent.

Faith welcomed her first child with her partner Leyman Lahcine in December 2016 by emergency caesarean.

She said she felt “resentment” towards Lahcine and revealed that she came close to ‘losing the will to live’.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love my child – but it’s hell,” she told the i newspaper. “It doesn’t matter how much help you have, no one can explain how lonely it feels at night when you’re waking up breast-feeding and you spend hours just wired on your own.

“You lose the will to live, in a way, because your hormones are going mad and your husband is usually snoring next to you. There’s so much resentment.”

Faith, who is bringing up her child as gender neutral, recently returned to the music scene with her album Architect. She said she went back to the studio from maternity leave to make the record because she received an urgent call from her accountant about her income.

She said: “I think it was a combination of wanting to stay relevant, but also generating an income.

“My accountant called me and said, ‘You need to think about earning some money now, because otherwise…’ I had a little panic.”

Faith said she sometimes worries about being the main breadwinner as she feared it may affect their relationship.

She said: “I was worried about how it would affect our relationship, because being the breadwinner and having a man as the main child carer, I thought: ‘What’s it going to do to us?’

“But it’s really refreshing and uplifting and wonderful to see a man taking responsibility for a portion of your family life. I don’t think it was realistic to think that he might ever be able to match me financially, but he’s matched me in another way.”