“There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” That old Cyril Connolly quote has been rattling around women’s psyches for a long time, particularly those with ambitions to write. It was certainly in the back of my mind when I first became a mother. I was a busy journalist at the time and I loved working – would the arrival of a Bugaboo in my hallway stifle my ambitions?

I was delighted to become a mother and have never felt anything but incredibly lucky to have children but I was shocked by how all-consuming motherhood was. Whole days went by without time for a bathroom trip, or even a snack. How could it be possible to be this busy and this bored I wondered, as I put on another load of tiny laundry? I read books over my baby’s head, desperate for intellectual stimulation, as she breastfed for what seemed like hours. Minutes blurred into days and I realised suddenly that I might easily be swallowed whole, never to be seen again, by the unrelenting task list of motherhood.

The following year, I had a second baby, which meant I was absent from work for almost two years. By this point I was really missing that creative aspect of my life and itching to start working again. During yet another night feed, I picked up Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – talk about a little light bedtime reading! – and it struck a chord. “Each suburban wife struggles with it alone,” I read. “As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?”

I needed to get back to work. Motherhood had lit a fire underneath me. The fear of being lost to a world of peanut butter sandwiches and an intimidating ironing pile that replenished itself as quickly as I could deplete was all that was required to make me more motivated than I have ever been in my entire life. I realised if I wanted to work and be a mother as well I was going to have to make it happen. So I did.

I was now acutely aware of just how little disposable time I had and so I became ruthlessly efficient. I started to work again, eking out time in the twilight nothing-minutes of motherhood – the moments between naps (theirs, not mine), the early hours before they woke up, the 40 minutes I could grab from babysitters here and there. I scheduled interviews in the times I hoped my babies would be down for a nap. It was a high-risk and high-stress act but it usually panned out. I set alarms for everything – let’s see how much work you can get done in these 15 minutes before the children get out of school – go! The idea of doing things perfectly was completely shelved. It was about getting things done now, ticking them off the list so I could free up some disposable minutes for my own goals. If I saved half an hour by not ironing sheets, I realised, I could recoup that time to write. Who needs ironed sheets anyway?

The desire to regain a creative aspect to my life was enough to make me bold and brave in a way I never had been before. I became more direct. Emails got straight to the point and so did I. I had always been diffident, fearful of approaching people, but now I didn’t have the luxury of procrastination, or even self-doubt.

On the backburner I had an idea for a book. It was a longtime personal goal of mine to write a novel but somehow I had always just been too busy to do it. Now I saw myself looking down the barrel of 40, and busier than ever – was I ever going to achieve my goal? I decided that the only way to do it, was to just do it. The time was never going to be right. I started using the few precious hours in the mornings when my children were in Montessori to write. Within a few months, I had the draft of what is now my first novel, Breaking Point. I took some of that bold carpe diem bravery that having children had instilled in me and I contacted the biggest literary agent in the country. Within a week she was my agent.

I remember throwing my toddler up in the air with excitement and catching her in my arms, spinning her around in our kitchen. She didn’t know what an agent was. She didn’t know that her mother had been stealing time from her to write a book. I felt like the luckiest person alive in that moment – my baby in my arms and my book in my agent’s hands. In that moment the balance felt right in a way that it rarely does as a working mother. But I also knew in that moment that without the arrival of motherhood and its insatiable appetite for every second of my disposable time, I would never have been so motivated to do the things I have always wanted to do.

Breaking Point by Edel Coffey (Sphere, €13.99) is out now.