How to beat the baby books

I haven’t done much in my life by the book. I dropped out of uni, giddily moved country a few times, and took a meandering route to my career. I tend to follow passions over instructions, which may explain why I found myself unexpectedly pregnant, aged 34, and single.

Suddenly worried that I might not know what I was getting myself into, I resolved to become forewarned and forearmed, and read all the baby books I could find. Praying for some order in the confusion, I really started to believe that I might find it in the parenting section of Waterstones. My interfering mum and her endless advice were kept at arm’s length — I wanted to find the perfect way of parenting. And like so many of us, I believed I was going to find it on the printed page.

There are thought to be about 10,000 parenting books currently in circulation in America, and Britain is hardly lagging behind. The baby publishing industry is now worth more than £1.1 billion in the UK. There are the Attachment Parents, who read Dr Sears and believe in a tribal closeness to your baby, eschewing nurseries, buggies and cots to keep little ones on the boob or strapped on their back for years. And years. (Forget about getting your marital bed back — attachment kids need to sleep with their parents, as they would in the Venezuelan rainforest where researchers first identified the practice.)

At the other end of the spectrum are the Gina Ford devotees, who read her Contented Little Baby Book looking to be reassured by routines, known knowns, and control. They want to know when their babies will go to sleep, and when they will wake up: ideally in a separate cot, in a different room. Possibly even in a different house. I jest! Just.

Somewhere in the middle are the French-style parenting guides, all with titles about how French kids don’t throw food, don’t answer back, and probably don’t say boo to une oie. All of which makes French mothers sound frightfully strict when, in fact, if you read them to the end (yes, I have read all of them to the end), there is a lot of permissiveness, too, and a focus on reducing the parental workload. ‘Don’t get up unless there’s blood,’ they shrug.

And so, having taken my pick of the various approaches, I approached my due date with the most organic ideals (I had read Baby-Led Weaning by Gill Rapley and Tracey Murkett, too, so knew that once my daughter Echo reached six months she’d be straight on to solid fruit and veg, rather than purées). A pram was bought, but I knew it would hardly be used as I’d be an attachment parent, and a fourth trimesterist — oh yes, I’d also read about how you should treat your child’s first months as an extension of pregnancy. Keep them dark, intimate and close — so handy when you’re a single parent and all your friends want to come and have a squeeze! I would live like a tribeswoman, nourishing my daughter with my body. In Hackney. In 2011. While being the principal breadwinner. What could possibly go wrong? Obviously I was going to have a home birth, too, as I had read so widely about the terrible things that drugs and hospitals do to you — and let’s not even start on the evils of formula milk!

Anyone who has actually had a child can guess what happened next: a chemically induced birth, emergency C-section, depleted breastmilk supply, nobody getting any sleep, then bottle feeding, and me getting so bored as a stay-at-home mum that I thought I might chew my own feet off for something to do. Most of all, though, I spent my days wishing I hadn’t read quite so many books.

However, I still urge my friend Courtney, a brilliantly no-nonsense single parent, to write one. A sample chapter heading would be ‘Fancy Dress Parties and Other Such Fuckery’, and her advice, simply: ‘Wrap the child in a bin bag.’ I asked her for more like this but she said that, really, all of her parenting advice boils down to bin bags.

When I look at all the things my daughter was never going to have: dummies, sugar, a telly so frequently tuned to Mr Tumble she now believes him to be her father... oh, I’ve failed her in so many ways. Yet I don’t give a toss, because it isn’t her I’m failing, it’s the old me, with my imaginary vision of how perfect I would become once ‘all this’ happened.

What actually happened is that my mum stepped in, shoved a dummy in the wailing baby’s mouth, set up a bedtime routine that got her to sleep, gave her formula milk when I was losing the will to live, and marched her to the doctor’s surgery when I ‘went a bit tribal’ about not vaccinating her. Because of this, I now have a child who is healthy, joyful, and who we all enjoy endlessly.