THE BAD MOTHER
Esther Walker

Copyright

The Friday Project

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by The Friday Project 2015

Copyright © Esther Walker

Esther Walker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780007524747

Version: 2014-12-11

Dedication

For Mamgu

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Intro

Sleep

Eat

Play

Routine

Sick

HELP

Sun

Us

Two

Poo

Motherfucker

Three?

Light

Temper

You

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Intro

Of course I’m not a bad mother. Neither are you. I’d go so far as to say that there is no such thing as a bad mother. Sure, there is lazy, neglectful, idiotic and wrong parenting, but that doesn’t make you a bad mother. If you psychologically torture, beat or starve your children, that makes you a criminal – being a bad mother doesn’t really come into it.

But it has become fashionable recently to put a hand to your forehead and declare, ‘Oh God, I am such a bad mother.’

I never say this. I do not think I am a ‘bad’ mother, or really a ‘good’ mother. I try not to think about it in those quantifiable terms because it would probably send me crazy. I am a mother to my children and that is that. Sometimes I exercise good parenting and sometimes I exercise poor parenting, in the same way that sometimes my house is clean and sometimes it is a horrible dump, sometimes I do a really good piece of work and sometimes I file a load of old shit and hope my editor doesn’t notice.

You need to know more about me.

When I was eight, my little sister was born. There were no sisters in between me and her. There were two sisters above me, then nothing for a long time, and then a baby.

My mother was forty-nine. I didn’t have any sense at the time of what that meant, beyond the fact that everyone made a huge deal out of it, but knowing what I know now, it seems a perfectly insane and demented thing to do – to have a baby when you are nearly fifty.

We were fed and clothed and looked after in our house, but it was unstructured. There was no such thing as ‘bath time’. Once in a while, if we felt like it, we had a bath. We went to bed at some point, dressed in one of an assortment of shared nighties. My mother cut our hair with the kitchen scissors. Cats wandered about. We poked around in the large, tangled garden outside, swung on the old metal swing, played with the dressing-up box, watched telly, read Enid Blyton books. We went to school but there were no extra-curricular activities – except for next-eldest sister, who had piano lessons because she was terrific at the piano. (I was given piano lessons but was allowed to give up after I very nearly flunked my Grade 2.)

So when my sister was born I was eight, next-eldest sister was twelve and eldest sister was fifteen. It was, even I realised at the time, extremely hard and tiring for my mother. She was stressed, exhausted, irritable. And we – especially I – were not particularly helpful with the baby. It is just not true that eight-year-olds make terrific surrogate parents. They might do for a few minutes but then they wander off, bored, in search of their own lives, leaving the baby to lick matches, fall down stairs. I quickly saw that if I was not helping – and I did not want to help – I was a hindrance. I volunteered to take myself to and from school. Certainly by the time I was eleven I made my own packed lunches. By thirteen or fourteen I did most of my own laundry.

My baby sister was not especially difficult but my mother had never heard of Gina Ford: say ‘routine’ to her and she will start thinking about gymnastics. The baby slept whenever, in my parents’ bed or on the sofa or in a pram. She often wouldn’t go to sleep at night – not crying but squeaking and squawking, singing and chatting and keeping my parents awake. This persisted throughout her childhood.

After my elder sisters had left home and I was getting up early to get to my new school across town, I would almost always wake up and find the rest of the house still slumbering, exhausted after my sister’s night-time activity. I would unlock the kitchen to find it cold and dark. I sometimes ate biscuits for breakfast. I remember, clearly, once eating a chocolate eclair on my way to the tube station at 8am.

It is all water under the bridge now. I recognise that the experience made me self-reliant, resourceful and independent, which are all things about myself that I like. And I only started thinking about that time in my life when I had children of my own, it’s not like I’ve been brooding about it for 26 years. But, at the time, I couldn’t possibly have been more resentful, more angry, more martyrish about the whole thing. What other teenagers, I wondered, had never had their homework checked? What other teenagers washed their own clothes, made their own doctor’s appointments? What other child had reached the age of sixteen without even once having been read a bedtime story?

So I never grew up thinking that babies were cute and magical. As far as I was concerned they were little terrorists. A baby was like a grenade going off in a house. They were wild, thrashy, unreasonable things that, if left unchecked, would bring you to your knees with their insane and impish demands. Unless you contained their madness with rules and structure, they would bend any household around themselves, rather than fitting in with the status quo.

At twenty-seven I met my husband who declared himself, at thirty-eight, to be more than ready to have children. I steeled myself. This was it. This was my chance to get even with babyhood. I didn’t want to not have children, but I wasn’t going to sit around and let a baby ruin my life.

Not again.

I proposed this ebook to my publisher while still pregnant with my second child and thinking, as you do when your first child is walking and talking, that I knew everything. I actually sat down and wrote it when my second child was born and soon realised, with swirling, dizzying horror, that I knew absolutely nothing about any children – least of all mine.

So what follows is just what I discovered from my own children and also talking to other women (because what you do an awful lot of after you have kids is talk to other women). Having children for me hasn’t been a ‘journey’ especially, so this book doesn’t begin with a pregnancy test and end with them going to school.

It begins with the most critical subject, the one that is on every parent’s mind, at all times (sleep), and then tackles other subjects as they occurred to me. At the time of writing my second child is not even eighteen months old, so I am right in the dark vortex of doom, right in the eye of the storm. If you are too, or if you have been, I hope that this book makes you laugh and makes you feel better, or relieved, or smug – or just not so alone.

Sleep

Parents of young children are almost always thinking about sleep. They might be walking around and talking about other things, but what they are thinking about is sleep. Sometimes they are actually having semi-sexual fantasies about sleep. When they are going to do it next, what they will be wearing, exactly how they are going to drift off. I’ll just lie down and put my head there and tuck myself in … like that … and then … and then …

In fact I would go as far as to say that the only hard thing – really hard thing – about having kids is the sleep thing. Even if your kids sleep well, there never seems to be enough sleep in the world for the parent of small children. And if your children sleep badly, well, fuck. You will simply go insane with exhaustion.

You can tell how much sleep matters because as soon as the youngest child in any family is no longer waking up in the night needing instant attention, and/or can also be left safely downstairs alone in the morning with its sibling(s)/telly, you see the shoulders of the parents visibly slacken.

Their faces lighten, they move around more slowly, the edge goes from their voices. Their children might still be annoying little ratbags but there’s nothing that can’t be coped with now because there is more sleep to go around. They are no longer regularly jerked awake in the small hours by inexplicable wailing, they are no longer required to play horsies at 7am, and no longer need to beg their spouse at 3pm on a Sunday to be allowed to go upstairs and ‘just’ shut their eyes for ten minutes.

And so, inevitably, after the congratulatory stuff about your first pregnancy subsides, out comes the shit about sleep. ‘You’ll never really sleep again,’ you get told, on and on. ‘Just get loads of sleep now because when junior’s out …’

I knew, though. I knew better than anyone that babies don’t fucking sleep. Or they sleep at the wrong times, or they’ll only sleep in 45-minute bursts. The threats about sleep fell on smug, prepared ears.

‘I’m getting a night nanny,’ I would say, rudely, to anyone who dared suggest that after having a baby I wouldn’t still be lazing about in bed for ten hours a night. ‘For six weeks. She will teach the baby to sleep. The baby will sleep. So will we.’

My husband didn’t understand the need for a night nanny. He thought we should have the baby in bed with us; he thought it would be cosy.

‘If you have a baby in bed with you,’ I would snap, ‘that’s how it learns to go to sleep. Then it can’t fall asleep on its own. I’m not having a three-year-old in bed with me.’

My husband paled at the cost. I told him that I would happily go without a summer holiday that year if money was the issue. He said that it was more than a summer holiday. I suggested that we sell the car and my engagement ring, which I’ve never liked anyway. I offered to stack shelves. He relented.

What is a night nanny? It is a person, usually a woman, who is expert with newborns. They arrive, usually at about 7pm, and take the baby for twelve hours until 7am the next day. If you are breastfeeding they will bring you the baby (or you go to the baby’s room) for a feed, then take it away, change it, burp it and settle it back in its cot. If you are not breastfeeding at night, they feed it formula milk from a bottle and do all the changing and settling, and you sleep right through.

A night nanny seems extreme to most people. But I didn’t know how else to do it. My mother’s approach to small babies was to breastfeed exclusively, which she found easy, and to have the baby in bed with her. Permanently. Forget the sanctity of the marital bed. As far as she was concerned, her house was a cave and she was some sort of proto-human living in this cave – and in caves the whole family slept tucked up next to each other.

Well, no thanks. I slept in my parents’ bed until I was seven and it has left me with all sorts of bad sleep associations. I couldn’t go on sleepovers when I was little, I didn’t have my own bedroom, which took some explaining to visitors.

My mother probably tells people that aged seven I simply moved into my own bedroom and slept there and that was that. This is not quite true. I moved in to share a bedroom with my sisters, which was just about bearable, but when I actually moved into a room by myself the transition was hellish. I couldn’t get to sleep. I was lonely and terrified. I still fall asleep more easily and sleep better if there is someone else there with me. This is fine if you are a child sharing a room with your sisters or if you are married, but if you are a single adult it is really quite problematic.

No child of mine was going to live like that. It was going to sleep alone in its own bed, from the start, and that was that. But I knew myself. I knew that at the faintest moment of exhaustion I would have the baby in bed with me like a shot and my dreams of an ordered house would be over.

So I hired a magnificent woman, originally from St Lucia, who came six nights a week for six weeks and trained Kitty to sleep through the night, in her own bed.

And she did. After carrying on with a feed at 11pm for a few weeks, Kitty slept through the night, going to bed at 7pm and waking up at 7am the next day when she was ten weeks old. And that was as much as I could ever have dreamed or hoped for.

A lot of people think this is wrong and that when a baby wakes up in the night it wants to see its mummy, that you fail to bond with your child, that this is neglectful and bad. I don’t find this. I found the whole thing magical. The clean and ordered bath time, the slumbersome bottle taken in a cosy, dim nursery. The certainty of it all! The night nanny left me with an A4 sheet with Kitty’s new routine carefully written out. A bottle of this much at that time, naptime then and then, bath time then and goodnight! Cheerio, see you in the morning!

So it came as a nasty surprise that even though Kitty slept, I was still tired all the time. When 7am rolled around, even though I had just had the previous twelve hours to do whatever I wanted with, I still felt tired and crushed when it was time to get up. During the day as we crept towards her naptimes I would feel my eyelids drooping, my shoulders sagging. I was sleeping at night but I was still in a fug of exhaustion all day. And, worse, I felt unentitled to it because Kitty slept so well at night and I had long given up breastfeeding as an impossible, unreasonable, terrible task.

Why was I so tired? Why, why? I ought to be rushing about, achieving things! I ought to be on top of absolutely everything, banging out novels, cooking enticing meals, looking terrific. But I found that I was only just marginally more together than other mothers I knew who were doing the whole thing alone. I was an absolute failure.

My husband would do bath time, but I would hang around in the nursery to keep him company. I remember that I would often fall asleep on the single bed near Kitty’s cot as he bathed her at 6pm. But what had I done that day? Not much. Kitty and I would have been out, come back, drunk some bottles, batted a few toys about. Kitty hadn’t even been weaned at that point, so there was no pureeing or cooking to do. I had had two hours all to myself in the middle of the day while Kitty slumbered in her cot in her own room. What on earth was so tiring?

I noticed eventually, when Kitty was about eighteen months old, that this constant droopiness had lifted. During Kitty’s lunchtime nap I no longer rushed through a few tasks in order to lie on the sofa and stare numbly at the ceiling. I made calls and chatted, packed up things to go to charity, worked, poked determinedly at neglected corners of the house.

Then I got pregnant with my second child, Sam, and a new era of tiredness hit me like a truck. Having not been especially exhausted while pregnant with Kitty, I was staggered at how tired I was all the time. Every lunchtime I would be wiped out for two hours, like chalk on a board. An alarm would raise me at 3pm to get Kitty up and I would lurch up the stairs to the nursery, still mostly asleep, nauseated to my bones. I would wake her up and let her play in the room (i.e. smash the place up) for another half an hour while I lay on that same single bed, drifting in and out of consciousness.

Sam was born in May, two years and three months after Kitty, and despite seeming to be a perfectly good sleeper and getting the same night nanny treatment that Kitty had had, at four months old he started waking up at 5am. Then that stopped for a bit and then he started waking up at all times of the night. Sometimes two or three times a night, always at different times. I had no idea what he wanted.

Having had no experience of this with Kitty I was completely adrift. And I suddenly realised what being really tired actually meant.

I hadn’t been tired with Kitty at all! I had been slightly fatigued! I was concentrating hard because everything was so new, and learning is exhausting, and I had been bored out of my mind because it was all just pretty boring, which makes you feel like you’re tired. But I wasn’t actually tired.

After Sam was born and spent months and months mucking around at night, driving me to distraction, winter came along and not only was he awake at least once in the night, Kitty was also getting ill and waking up, and then I got ill and all of a sudden I was open-mouthed and demented, one-eyed and bonkers with fatigue.

It struck me how dangerous it all is. When I consider how many people have children who do not sleep well and how many of those people have to go to work in the morning it really is a miracle that the entire world doesn’t just grind to a halt in a pile-up of errors because everyone is so flipping wired out on coffee, fags and sugar because their bloody kids have kept them awake since 4.30am.

No-one, as my sister says, gets away with it. You can have all the help you possibly want, can possibly afford, but unless you have your kids sleeping out of earshot and you’ve got a live-in nanny who your babies call for if they are sick or frightened, when your kids wake up in the night, it’s on you.

It’s one thing if you don’t work or aren’t working much when your children are small, but what if you are up with your kids at night and then have to fucking get up and get on the tube and go to work? It’s a miracle that trains even turn up, that the financial markets don’t collapse in on themselves, that surgeons don’t remove MORE wrong limbs, that banks don’t make more errors in our favour.

So I learned, humbly, what it was to be really tired. I recalled an interview with Stella McCartney (who has four children) a few years ago in which she stated that she had been up a lot the night before because three of her four children were ill and she was exhausted. ‘I’ve got burny eyes,’ she said to the interviewer. That’s it. Burny eyes.

I learned that being actually physically exhausted from no sleep is a completely different feeling from feeling crushed by boredom. When you have barely slept you can actually feel really awake, in the same way that people are said to fling their clothes off and claim to be boiling hot just before they die of hypothermia.

Exhaustion is often accompanied by hyperactivity, jitteriness and hysteria, and a reluctance to nap during the day. When you are being woken up and kept awake at night, you feel a resentment about going to sleep during the day. All you are doing, you start thinking, is fuelling yourself to do this awful, boring thing at night. If you have an hour to yourself during the day, going to sleep seems like such a waste when you could be poking about on the internet or sorting out your diary or tending to a small, terrifying and now critical pile of admin.

You grind through the day, not stopping because if you stop you start to think about just how tired you really are. And it becomes harder to carry on. In my mind’s eye, when I am very tired, I see myself pitched forward at an angle, bowling through my day as if walking against a very stiff wind.

With two children, even though the exhaustion was real, the sleeplessness was real, the pain of it all was real, it was – and occasionally still is – better and more bearable than the crushing ‘knackered for no reason’ with Kitty. Genuine sleep deprivation was not as bad as I had feared – it is bad, don’t get me wrong, but not as bad as I worried it was going to be. You get used to it. And by that I don’t mean you simply bend under it, suffering silently like some kind of put-upon beast of burden, feeling the pain of it but not saying anything because complaining is just futile; what I mean is that, unless it’s really bad, you actually don’t feel it any more.

But there is also, it’s true, very much an element of suffering it and feeling the pain but not saying anything – because after a while you realise that most people are in the same boat, feeling the same pain, but carrying on regardless. They’re all just taking it, taking the hit, wordlessly. Occasionally it can feel like one of those awful dreams where you’re in a crowded room and you notice it’s on fire and you’re screaming ‘Fire! Fire!’ and everyone around you just carries on regardless.

Then slowly you get it. This is life, this is it. This is what being ‘in the club’ means. You’ve been let in on the secret. And the secret is: it’s not always very nice.

Eat

I lie to everyone about breastfeeding. I tell people that I tried, but I didn’t really. I mean, I did try, but not very hard. The first time I fell asleep and nearly keeled over sideways while breastfeeding Kitty at 3am was also the last time. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘is fucking barbaric.’

Plus, my evil plan to get Kitty sleeping as much as possible as quickly as possible was based on the theory that babies need to take on the majority of their calories during the day so that they can sleep at night. If I was breastfeeding the paltry amount that expressing told me I was, then this plan was never going to work. Kitty would simply be too hungry. As it was, by the time she was three or four days old, she started crying after an hour’s breastfeeding and wouldn’t go back to sleep. I saw everything she did through the prism of this eat/sleep ratio, so I instantly concluded that she was hungry, gave her two ounces of formula and she passed out until it was time for her next feed.

On top of this sleeping obsession I just felt so fucking trapped. The physical constraints of pregnancy, being so heavy and confined to the house, had sent me partly bonkers before I even had Kitty, so the thought of having to breastfeed for hours a day, for months, was horrifying, terrifying. It was like getting to the top of a mountain and feeling like you were so exhausted and pushed to the physical brink that you were going to die but at least it was all over, and then being told that behind that cloud, over there – two days’ walk away – is the actual, real top of the mountain.

I just wanted to get out, get away. I wanted to leave Kitty with my husband for an hour or two hours. I wanted him to be able to feed her, too, and not just with a pathetic dribble of breast milk, which she would suck down in eight seconds and then scream for more.

I, personally, had no problem giving up breastfeeding. Now that I have some perspective on the matter, I know it was a decision I made for my whole family, not just for me. I wanted Kitty to be full. I wanted all of us to sleep. I wanted to not go mad and kill everyone. Plus, I have enough anecdotal evidence (and also some scientific evidence) to convince me that exclusive breastfeeding is not essential.

I am quite unusual in that I was breastfed, exclusively, for six months. My husband was never given a drop of breast milk. Not one drop. One of us is a poorly motivated, under-achieving, anxiety-riddled physical coward with a range of stomach-related problems, weak veins, a permanent cough, hay fever and chronic heartburn. And it’s not the formula baby. And this was formula manufactured in the Seventies! Formula manufactured now is like platinum space dust in comparison.

Even within my own family – my two elder sisters were only partly breastfed and they are far more physically pulled-together, mentally stronger and better adjusted than I am. They eat well, have beautiful skin, strong teeth, firm handshakes, quick wits and fine friends. Do I want my children to be like Giles and my sisters? Or do I want them to be like me?

I do not, now, believe it’s a conspiracy. I don’t think La Leche League are evil tyrants. I would never, ever tell anyone how to feed their children. I can only tell you what I did and how it worked out for me. I partly breastfed both my children for about six weeks and then switched them to formula. Kitty is now three and a half and she is strong, rarely ill, reasonably bright and mostly obliging. She was a complete fucking nightmare to potty-train, but can that really be down to breastfeeding?

There’s something else, too. I wasn’t just breastfed until I was six months old; I was still breastfeeding until I was about three or four. I vaguely remember it. I don’t know why my mother chose to carry on breastfeeding for so long, but I suspect it had something to do with it being difficult to stop after a certain point. She wasn’t really bothered about continuing to do it, and I didn’t know any different, so it carried on.

This worked out fine for my mother. She was forty-one when she had me, and not especially interested in going out on the town, or for dinner or to the movies. She stayed at home with us, with my dad, night after night. Having to breastfeed me to sleep every night wasn’t an issue.

But I did not want this life for me. I have grown up to be an independent, brisk, un-tactile, un-expressive and in many ways quite cold person. I really don’t like being touched by people I don’t know, not even a handshake. It’s not a germ thing, it’s just a … I don’t know – I just don’t like it. A benevolent hug from even a good-looking, fragrant stranger would be a major low point in my day. Most of the time when I greet people I put up a hand and wave at them firmly, do not approach for a hug or a kiss. I never, ever hug or kiss my sisters or my father in a greeting – only my children, my husband and my mother.

I love my mother unquestioningly, I am devoted to her. I would take a bullet for her, will be a nurse to her day and night when the time comes – happily! I will howl like a maimed animal when she dies; I will shriek and gibber and tear at my hair at her funeral; I will sit on her grave and waste away. But the fact that I was, once upon a time, so desperately attached to someone else, another person, makes me feel a bit queasy. The idea that someone else would be so desperately attached to me – needing me there at all times of day and night, unable to be put to bed by a father or babysitter – made me feel equally ill.

And I had no other model of breastfeeding to regard. As far as I was concerned, if you had your baby in bed with you even once, even for ten minutes, it would be there until it was eight years old, like I was. If you breastfed beyond six months you would be doing it until the kid went to school. A lot of people think that is a nice thing; I just hear doors slamming shut.

My husband did not regard the issue of breastfeeding this way. He believes that life ought to be lived as naturally as possible and he is fanatical about food. If he could grow all his food himself, he would. He eats nothing processed – not crisps, not sliced bread, not cream cheese, nothing – except occasionally for a tin of baked beans. I know that if he were a woman he would have stayed up all night, breastfed round the clock, made this huge enormous deal out of the whole thing. He would have devoted his life to breastfeeding exclusively and been crazed about it. I, the husband in this situation, would have been left to fend for myself, rushing about fetching him things, cooking, clearing up. ‘It’s the only way!’ he would tell people. ‘Those who do not breastfeed exclusively are killing their children! Formula is poison!’

But he was forced to climb down from this position, as I was not going to be that sort of mother and he was not going to be that sort of husband. He saw the benefits, to all of us, of formula feeding. Kitty rarely cried and she slept well. The formula did not make her constipated or ill.

And Giles could get right in there, doing her dream feed at 11pm for weeks, just him and her tucked up in the dimly-lit nursery together. He would breathe in her milky burps and rub his nose against her fat cheeks with no-one else to see, no-one else to interfere, just him and this baby he had longed for.

I was happy, he was happy, Kitty was asleep. I turned away from any breast-versus-formula debate in disgust. ‘It’s a choice,’ everyone whined. ‘It’s your choice.’ No, sometimes it’s not a choice. Don’t speak to me, I would think. Don’t you even dare look at me.

Now, from my lofty position of having two children both past the recommended breastfeeding stage and both getting on as well as I could hope, I can say, happily, that I don’t care what you do with your kids. Feed them breast milk, or formula, or a McFlurry! It’s nothing to do with me.

But initially, although I was bullish about switching to formula, I wanted other people to agree with me. I wanted my own choices validated. I gobbled up any piece in the newspaper about women who nearly killed themselves trying to breastfeed exclusively, and then they switched to formula and it was all fine and tra la la and they wished they’d done it sooner.

I huddled with other mothers who used formula and we said relieved things about it.

And quietly and subtly, though you could never accuse me outright of doing it, I made the case for formula to any new mother I met. If they complained to me that they seemed to be breastfeeding for hours and yet the child still cried afterwards and wouldn’t sleep, I would say, ‘Maybe s/he is hungry?’ meaningfully. ‘But s/he breastfeeds for hours!’ the new mother would say. ‘Maybe s/he is still hungry though,’ I would repeat. My final word, if she was too baffled and exhausted to get my point, was always, ‘Formula is not poison, you know. Maybe s/he is having a growth spurt. You could use formula to get him/her through it and then go back to exclusive breastfeeding.’

A friend had to exclusively breastfeed her child for four months in order to prevent passing on some severe genetic allergies. Not a drop of formula must pass its lips. It was very hard for her. The child was big, hungry and screamed after insufficient feeds. She was confined to the house and on a strict feed-pump-feed-pump plan. It was exhausting but she did it. But far from zooming off into the stratosphere with evangelism, she told me, later, that with her second child she would not hesitate to give an additional bottle of formula at night. ‘It was insanity not to,’ she said.

I punched the air. She is my most competitive and over-achieving friend and she agreed with me. I was right! Formula was not poison!

I am a reasonably rational, normal person and yet I found myself doing that awful, unforgivable thing that mothers often do, which is to subtly or not subtly bully other, newer mothers into doing things the same way that they did, so as to assuage fears about their choices. There is safety in numbers, we unconsciously think – if we all do this, it will make it okay.

If I had decided to breastfeed exclusively, and it had been inconvenient for me and difficult and painful and exhausting but I had persevered and done it, I would feel the same way about that. I would have needed to believe that the sacrifices I had made – time, pain, suffering – had been worth something. It can’t all have been pointless! It must have been essential to my child’s wellbeing! I would definitely have tried to suggest quietly to other new mothers that if they didn’t do what I had done, they were doing their child harm.

It’s dreadful, really – and I am extremely relieved that I can leave that instinct far behind me and be a normal person again. If you tell me that you want to exclusively breastfeed your child and it is very hard and tiring, the baby screams all the time – which once upon a time would have been a red rag to a bull – I will now say, ‘Mmm, yes. You are being very brave. You can only do what you think is best! Would you like some tea?’

The good news is that breastfeeding is the worst of it. What you feed your kids when they are on solids is still a thing, but you are no longer mad, wild-eyed, panicked and vulnerable. If your five-month-old gobbles down Ella’s pouches like it’s only got one more day on earth, or you do your own purees, or you do baby-led weaning or whatever, people will push you around far less for your choice.

Having said all that, I feel sad for myself and for Kitty when I think about how clumsily I approached her weaning. I was still so overwrought, confused, tired and strung out by the time Kitty reached weaning age that the thought of fussing about during Kitty’s precious naptimes with an assortment of vegetable purees, which she might or might not eat, made me feel quite ill.

So I fed her rusk mashed up with milk and mixed it with those fruity Ella’s pouches. I often attempted to give her the vegetable pouches too, but she wasn’t that crazy about them. But that is what she ate for weeks and weeks – rusk and milk, Ella’s fruity pouches. Nothing really wrong with that, but food you make yourself is lovely – it’s delicious. But I, personally, couldn’t face making it for her because I was just too crushed by it all.

Lazy! Lazy and selfish! I wish I could spend an hour with that old me, shake my shoulders, maybe give me a smart slap with one or two baby food cookbooks.

I also didn’t know how much Kitty was supposed to eat. I compared her, endlessly, with other children – often with my ravenous nephews, who would suck down plates of pasta like they were soup, crunching through apples and sandwiches and pints of milk like waste disposal units.

I would sit for an hour, coaxing Kitty to eat just one more spoonful of this or that. Please, I would think, please, please just eat this.

Then I read a book called My Child Won’t Eat!, by a Spanish nutritionist called Carlos Gonzalez, and it changed my life.

First of all, it completely re-calibrated my idea of how much, and what, Kitty was eating. The horror stories of children who refused to eat anything for days, lost weight, went yellow or bruised at the slightest touch, made me realise that Kitty’s diet was entirely fine. She ate a bit of this, a bit of that. Some things she wouldn’t countenance, but other things she would surprise me by trying. She was not constipated, or underweight, or constantly exhausted, or a funny colour.

She was thriving and I hadn’t even noticed.

‘Stop making mealtimes a stress!’ said the book. Relax! No child will starve itself. Give your child the opportunity to be hungry at mealtimes by not stuffing them – out of anxiety – full of crackers between meals. You say when meals are and what meals are, but the child says how much. What matters is that fruit and vegetables are always or nearly always offered, not that they are always eaten or finished.

After I read the book I felt like I was flying. I felt released from the crushing burden of failing to feed my child the requisite amounts of spinach and kale. I hugged this information to myself. I was released, set free. I felt as relieved as I did when I stopped trying to breastfeed. I fell to my knees, palms turned in suicidal supplication to the sky, and I gave thanks for this mercy.

With my second child, Sam, born two years and three months after Kitty, I might as well have been a different person. My expectations from my life were so different. I did not – I do not – require several hours to myself to sit on the sofa and stare at the wall in blank horror at what my life has become.

Even if I have been kept awake the night before, there is too much to do. And I don’t mind doing it, now. When I had Kitty I couldn’t believe how often I was expected to cook. Now I am just so grateful that I’ve got all the correct stuff – plenty of chopping boards and knives, really sharp speed-peelers, a hand blender. When there is a quiet moment in the house I do not sit and stare, I put on my apron and start chopping, cooking and blending.

As soon as Sam required weaning I reached for two popular and sensible baby food recipe books and I methodically went through the purees to find ones that he liked. Baby-led weaning was not an option. This boy was starving and I just needed to funnel food into his tummy – milk was not enough. First time around, these books had freaked me out with their fussy little amounts – 40g of this and 120g of that. Now I looked upon them as my saviour. I didn’t have to think! Just do what it says here.

Then I chopped, cooked and blended … chopped, cooked and blended … chopped, cooked and blended. I bought more storage pots and a special pen to write on the pots what was inside. Then I chopped and cooked and blended. Again, again, again. Repeat. Again.

And Sam responded, opening his gob for food. More, more, more! He was like a sideshow at a circus. Watch the enormous monster baby eat! Down went another spoonful, and another, and another! All sorts of different permutations of vegetable, a fish one, a chicken one, a beef one, macaroni cheese made with microscopic little flower-shaped pasta bits …

It’s nothing I did to make him such a dustbin; he’s just a big boy and hungry all the time. But I do sometimes wonder if I did Kitty a disservice by not approaching her weaning in the same way.

No matter. As Sam approached a year and didn’t want to suck down purees any more but was too incompetent to feed himself, there was about a six-week period where things were a bit rocky. What to feed him now – what, what?? And, selfishly, what could I feed him that I could potentially also feed Kitty so that we weren’t doing that ghastly thing where I was making two separate dinners? I ended up doing a thing where I would chew Sam’s food for him and feed him by hand.

He could manage rice and mashed potato, so that’s what we had with everything. And if I was giving Kitty sausage or a burger, or a chicken pie or fish fingers, she sat and ate hers and Sam’s got chewed.

It was a strange feeling, doing this. I never chewed Kitty’s food for her, because I thought that she ought to be eating it herself. No-one ever told me that pre-chewing your child’s food at this particular stage was a possibility. It didn’t seem to chime with my other rather uptight parenting methods – no co-sleeping, no breastfeeding, sitting at the table for meals at prescribed times. But then you do this rather prehistoric hippy thing of chewing your child’s food up.

But in fact it made perfect sense, and it meant that Sam ate pretty much anything you danced in front of his nose. He wanted me to eat it, too, jamming things in my mouth and going ‘Mmaaaahhh’.

I read somewhere, once – I now forget where – an explanation of the reason that babies are more open to new tastes and textures than infants and toddlers.

Babies cannot stray far from home, so they are okay to eat pretty much whatever they come across. Past a year old, two things happen. First, they stop growing quite so fast and so don’t need to eat as much and, second, they are likely to start crawling and walking. They might come across a bush with strange berries on it, or something else dangerous to eat, and so it makes sense to give infants and toddlers a suspicion of things they haven’t seen or eaten before. That’s why those who believe that a wide-ranging diet is essential (not just medically but socially) are fanatical about introducing as many different foods before the hostile toddler years take hold.

Pretty much all small children are picky, fussy eaters – either consistently, stubbornly, or in bursts, but if they have a larger group of foodstuffs from which to choose some familiar things to eat, then you won’t get trapped in that slightly hellish pasta-pesto trap.

Don’t get me wrong – if your kid eats nothing but pasta-pesto for years on end, I doubt anything bad will happen, but it’s flipping boring for all concerned.

Having said that, children will eventually just eat whatever they come across most often. Both my children eat toast with quite bitter marmalade because that’s what we eat, and if you look the other way for a few seconds, Kitty will drain your coffee. Because coffee is what is lying about the house, that’s what she drinks.

Giles used to make Kitty a beef stew when she was old enough to chew. He would cook batches of it on the weekend and freeze it in little pots. He stopped cooking it for her when she was about eighteen months old – I can’t remember why – and she hadn’t had it for a good year or so when I presented it to her again at dinner time. She sat down and ate it without saying, ‘What’s this?’ or poking it about, as she would with most new things. She knew what it was, remembering it somehow with a deep and animalistic part of her brain, and knew it was okay to eat.

Another thing that pretty much all children will do is become crazed sugar addicts. My view on this is that sugar is just a fact and it is part of a varied diet. My husband’s view is that refined sugar – cakes, biscuits, sweeties, chocolate – is completely pointless, and your diet, health, teeth, digestion – everything! – would be better without it.

I find it hard to construct an argument against this. He is right! It’s simply that I love sugar and my husband doesn’t. I just love, love, love a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive. I love a cheeky slice of cake. I love a fridge-cold Kit-Kat. And my challenge is to eat sugar in moderation, which is very hard.

The world is full of sugar – cheap and intoxicating. I have had to learn how to consume it in sensible quantities, by being exposed to it and adjusting my intake. I feel the same way about Kitty. She probably has, daily, a couple of chocolate biscuits of one sort or another – one or two with her lunch and one after her dinner. Occasionally she has an ice-cream for pudding. When she calls for a biscuit she is usually just hungry, so I always offer toast, cheese, apple, raisins, a banana – anything! – as an alternative, which she usually takes.

So on the days when she eats fourteen Kit-Kats in a row, or a piece of cake the size of her head, or an entire bag of Haribo or three Chupa Chups, it doesn’t matter.

When I was pregnant with Sam and living in a sort of twilight hell of nausea and exhaustion, my childcare of Kitty consisted of her watching television and me passing her chocolate biscuits. For six months that’s what we did. Seriously. No-one believes me when I say Kitty watched TV for six months solid, but she did.

For lunch she had pesto pasta and for dinner she had chicken nuggets and chips. We were mired in an appalling diet. As soon as Sam was born and I had my wits about me again, I worked at turning things around. I could get off the sofa, and I could make different things for Kitty’s tea without having to lie down on the kitchen floor every thirty-eight seconds. I had the strength to say no to repeated requests for chocolate. (We also cut down on the telly, though Kitty had ended up watching so much that she’s subsequently become self-regulating. She will often say, ‘I’ve had enough telly now,’ switch it off and go and do something else. I don’t mean to sound smug about this – this result wasn’t achieved without letting her watch a probably damaging amount of TV, but that’s aversion therapy for you … cruel to be kind.)

My point is that you can always bring it back from the brink; it’s easier than it seems. You can get trapped in a white-carb-and-telly tailspin, no matter how bloody posh and cultured you think you are, but if you want to, you can claw your way out, one day at a time.

The trick to turning a bad diet around is to cut down on the junk slowly and replace it with something else. Rather than saying, ‘No, you can’t have a biscuit,’ say, ‘I haven’t got any biscuits, but I’ve got raisins/rice crackers.’ It helps if you get rid of all the junk in your house. It makes it easier not to cave in.

And if you don’t want to, if you’re not bothered that your kids watch telly all the time and eat nothing but chips, then fuck it. They’re your kids. They’ll probably end up Prime Minister.

But there’s one thing that it is very hard to turn around, and that is the problem of eating at other people’s houses.

In my experience, children under five years and often older really, really don’t like doing this, unless it is a house they know very well and have eaten there before. I’ve decided, based on no scientific evidence at all, that children have acute senses of smell and taste and while someone else’s house might smell to us anodyne and harmless, to a small child the smell of someone else’s house is overpowering and bizarre. They might as well be on another planet. (It’s why kids bloody love McDonald's. It’s always the same.)

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