Outsized polyester contraptions – car seats, feeding chairs, chaise longues – clutter our small apartment. The crumpled shreds of an entire New Yorker issue are scattered all over my bed (whatever happened to rose petals?). A gang of chaos-loving plush toys is taking over my orderly living room. The closet doors keep at bay piles of baby clothes, towels, blankies, nappies. Not long ago, my sitting and writing in the midst of this disarray would have been unthinkable.

Even before I became I mother, I used to battle anxiety by putting things in order. The greater the pressure at work, the closer the looming deadlines, the messier my writing, the cleaner my windows, the neater my bookshelves, the shinier my sink. But I was completely unprepared for the need for cleanliness and order that took hold of me after Rada was born.

Experienced mothers offered all sorts of disparate advice, but they agreed on one thing: the unanimous maxim was "the baby sleeps, you sleep". Sleep deprivation is one of the major problems of new moms and a leading culprit for post-partum depression and a drop in breast milk supply. Yet whenever Rada slept, I folded and refolded her clothes, organised them by size and season, mopped the floor, scrubbed the pots, did my laundry. I could hardy fall asleep knowing that something needed to be cleaned or organised and, in my mind, there was always something in need to be "put in order."

And I was not alone. The more I spoke to other new moms around me, the more I realised that there was an entire tribe of dark-circle-eyed, pyjama-wearing women out there who scrubbed and folded compulsively.

Specialists recognise the phenomenon of post-partum OCD, which affects roughly two to three per cent of new mothers (about the same percentage as OCD patients in the general population), but they insist that women who develop the disorder in the post-partum period tend to focus their obsessive thoughts around the baby. Obsessive cleaning then would be in some way related to the baby’s perceived well-being. But none of my mom-friends sterilised the environment so that bacteria did not harm her child.

My guess is that our compulsive orderliness was a way to regain control at a time we felt we had lost all of it. Our newborns had become the masters of our bodies and our minds and we needed to carve out a space where we felt back in charge, conveniently when the master was sleeping. Whether the dissipation of that need and the accompanying symptoms is a sign of resignation or the re-establishment of some pre-natal hormonal balance, I don’t know. But I’m thankful to feel my compulsive need for order taper off, because the older Rada grows, the more obvious it becomes that I should just forget aboutit. And, there is nothing like an afternoon nap, even in a bed of shredded paper.