Ellie Taylor and her wonderful crazy life with a toddler
For someone who once said she had the “maternal instinct of a pitta bread” and went viral during 2016’s ‘motherhood challenge’ for a post hugging a bottle of wine, comedian Ellie Taylor’s unabashed joy for her role as a mum is really touching.
“I adore her ridiculously. I tell her I love her 3,000 times a day. I probably suffocate her with love and she’ll end up in therapy because mummy’s so clingy,” says the 38-year-old, characteristically deadpan.
Her daughter is now three and deep in that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ tantrum phase – a stage Taylor describes as “wonderful and sometimes absolutely awful”. But in comparison to the newborn days, she says, “this is so much more my vibe.”
“She’s a proper human and she can interact and respond and you can play. It’s really tapped into my silliness – I love it. Now I get why parents are so desperately proud of their child if they do anything – like, look at the way they breathe!” she laughs. “She’s started calling me ‘Mummy Boss’ which I quite like, and she keeps saying, ‘I like you’ – not love, but maybe I’m growing on her.”
The comedian and TV presenter, who has appeared in shows like 8 Out Of 10 Cats and The Mash Report, is currently hosting Channel 4’s Great Pottery Throw Down. It comes after her hugely successful first book, My Child and Other Mistakes, in the summer of 2021.
Looking back, she says: “It does feel mad to see my reticence [before having a baby], but I suppose the reticence was when the child was an abstract idea. When you’ve actually got a child, and you love the bones of them, it’s completely different.
“But I think I, and people like me, are right to be sceptical [about parenthood] because it’s such a massive, mammoth task, it’s such a huge responsibility.”
