By the time you read this I will be days away from having a baby taken out of my body – something that, even as I stare down the barrel of child number three, will never stop seeming extremely weird to me. So this is the last you’ll hear from me for a few months. Who will I rant to every week? Will the baby want to hear my thoughts on politics? If his or her first word is “Trump”, we’ll all know whose fault that is.

I’ve been pregnant a bunch of times now: once with twins, now with one baby, plus assorted miscarriages and an abortion along the way. And what I’ve learned from what I think of as my 360-degree experience of pregnancy is that it is a lot like flying economy on a long-haul flight. It is so all-consuming, exhausting and uncomfortable that you can’t actually believe it will ever be over. But then it is; you walk away and never think about it again, because the ultimate destination is a lot more interesting than the journey.

But some people feel differently. Pregnancy is no longer merely something to be endured, but a statement about aspirational femininity. Where once just making it through the day without vomiting in my hair was enough, now I’m supposed to wonder if the oils I’m rubbing on my stomach are organic, and how cute my bump looks in my lingerie selfies. Because pregnancy has entered the Instagram era.

This spring I was – I say this euphemistically – feeling the effects of pregnancy. This means I was – non-euphemistically – constantly nauseous and insane with fatigue. My pallor was more grey than glowing and any healthcare professional who asked how “mama” was doing was greeted with growls neither human nor animal. One day, as I was wondering if I should puke then eat another slice of bread or vice versa, an email arrived. “Deliciously Ella shares all of her pregnancy secrets,” it read. Deliciously Ella, AKA Ella Mills, is the wildly successful so-called “healthy-eating inspirer”, whose nutritional advice includes the theory that “to really thrive” we should cut out dairy, gluten, meat, fish and eggs. I read on, eager to thrive like the pregnant influencer: “Her morning routine includes a 7am yoga practice with breakfast being a berry and spinach smoothie with rice milk, almond butter and hemp seeds,” the email informed me. “Ella is curbing any cravings by enjoying fresh lemon on artichokes and healthy carbohydrates.”

OMG! Just like me! As long as you substitute “artichokes with lemon juice” for “sweets with more sweets”. And does eating an entire loaf of sourdough between breakfast (bread) and lunch (more bread) count as “healthy carbohydrates”?

It’s entirely possible that I felt so gross precisely because I wasn’t doing pregnancy the Deliciously Ella way. But how was I supposed to fit in yoga around my busy morning schedule of being sick? And I can tell you, making myself a glass of green sludge afterwards would not have helped.

Like Mills, model Miranda Kerr has been documenting her photogenic pregnancy on Instagram. All the cliches of pregnancy-by-social-media are ticked off: laughably ascetic meals of toast, tomato and cucumber, exercise videos, “essential” beauty products that she is shilling, gently lit photos of her perfectly compact stomach being held by her adoring husband. Her clothes remain unblemished, even though it is scientifically impossible to eat during pregnancy without spilling at least half on your stomach. My maternity clothes are a homage to Jackson Pollock’s oeuvre, recreated in spaghetti sauce and baked beans, two foods oddly absent from pregnant influencers’ social media accounts.

For a while I developed an indefensible fascination with the yoga teacher Hilaria Baldwin, AKA Mrs Alec Baldwin, whose enthusiasm for photographing herself in her lingerie remains undimmed four children down the line. “My purpose here is to normalie the postpartum figure,” she wrote under one such selfie, and if by normalise she means “suggest someone can have the body of a model hours after giving birth” then she succeeded. There is, it seems, a fine line between a woman inspiring other women in a thrillingly modern way, and a woman promoting her brand by perpetuating extremely conventional standards of beauty.

Part of me admires anyone who can turn pregnancy into yet another product of our consumerist and patriarchal society, endorsing the idea that being 38-weeks pregnant is no reason not to be photogenic and high-achieving. But a much, much bigger part of me believes the kindest thing you can do for women is tell them the unfiltered truth. Nothing reveals the gap between social-media fantasy and reality more strikingly than pregnancy, so Amy Schumer has been an overdue antidote to all of the above. Throughout her pregnancy and since giving birth to her son last month, the US comic has been posting images of what motherhood actually looks like, in all its laughably undignified glory. “Guys what are we doing tonight?” she wrote beneath a photo in which she wears a customised nursing bra while attached to two breast pumps.

I’ll meet you there, Schumer. And I’ll see the rest of you in the autumn.

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