Tonight, the part of Mum will be played by...

Seventeen months ago, I wrote about how I didn't really feel like a Mother - with all that word's associations. Not deep down. A lot has changed, and now I feel as odd and fraudulent if I'm walking somewhere WITHOUT Alice in the pushchair as I did then with it. Her health, safety, development, and bowel movements are constantly in my thoughts and I would do anything to protect her. I am her mum, no question.

But am I a Mother? When I was a child I thought about my mum, and other people's, as if a) that's all they were and b) they had always known exactly how to be it. I mean, SURELY there's a switch that goes on when you give birth, that makes you all-knowing, super-competent, infinitely patient, totally nurturing, and able to to sew on nametapes, make castles out of cereal packets and cook three nutritious meals a day - isn't there? Well, apparently not. I still feel like it's a ridiculous mistake that I have been put in a charge of a baby - a person. Far from bestowing new and perfect knowledge, parenthood has, like space exploration, only revealed even vaster areas of ignorance. Everything is improvised, accidental, piecemeal and experimental, full of compromise and error.

But I have gained ONE vital piece of knowledge in these past seventeen months. Which is that parenthood is that way for EVERYONE, always. I am not alone.

Eleven months and twenty seven days...

... and two house moves, two lots of surgery, and god knows how many sleepless nights later, here we are, approaching Alice's first birthday. This time last year I was being scanned and poked and prodded by various consultants, and now the object of all that scrutiny is a person in her own right. It still terrifies and amazes me that we can cause whole new people to happen. By having sex! Crazy.

Six months minus three days

Today is my first day back at work. And despite the fact that I have intended all along to come back on this date, wanted to do it, and have had six months to prepare for it, it was still torture leaving Alice at home this morning.

So, to cheer myself up I've been thinking of the plus points:

1) I have a fighting chance of getting through the day without my clothes becoming covered in sicked up milk and half digested carrot (unless we have some REALLY ill-mannered students this year).

2) I might get some adult conversation instead of n repetitions of 'Row Row Row Your Boat'.

3) I don't have to think about routes avoiding steps whenever I go anywhere. And I can sit wherever I like on the train.

4) Nobody is likely to yank my hair out (it's not the searing agony that I mind so much as the alarming number of WHITE hairs that now end up being clutched triumphantly in a chubby fist...)

5) An actual lunch break, dictated by logic and preference rather than the whims of an infant.

6) Significantly less ear-splitting crying.

Ten weeks and four days

I must admit, I still don't feel like someone's mum. Walking round the park with Alice, I look at the other women with their buggies and think of them as Mothers, whereas I'm just somebody who happens to be pushing a baby. I'm just acting the part of 'mum', and even then I'm just the understudy, it's not my JOB or anything.

In fact I'm only just starting to emerge from thinking that Alice represents some sort of exam in which I'm being graded on how successfully I can keep her fed, clean and quiet while remembering to sterilise enough bottles, make up enough formula and wash enough nappies to prevent chaos descending. With bonus points if I can manage to have a shower, get dressed and eat three meals a day at vaguely normal intervals. All of which carries the assumption that it's a finite project and when I've completed it, I will be returning Alice to wherever she so miraculously came from. But as the practical tasks become more automatic and less time consuming, it's gradually dawning on me that she's a person, rather than some sort of Tamigotchi-style challenge. She's not going anywhere. And I AM a mother. And suddenly things are much more scary, and much more wonderful.

Mothers, fathers, poets

I think I may have been a trifle optimistic in my diagnosis of the poetry situation. My brain IS still going like the clappers, but this week it seems to be entirely employed in making lists of what to take into hospital with me, what we still need to buy/acquire and how we are going to create the space for it all in a one bedroom flat, and what I want to write in my birth plan. There is very little scope for poetics in a birth plan, it turns out. Nothing that includes the words 'episiotomy', 'squatting' and 'artifically ruptured' can really aspire to be lyrical.

Interesting thoughts from Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born:

Once in a while someone used to ask me, "Don't you ever write poems about your children?" The male poets of my generation did write poems about their children - especially their daughters. For me, poetry was where I lived as no-one's mother, where I existed as myself.

Although it was Rich's choice not to write about her children, this passage did remind me that, while no subject is verboten to the male poet, women who write about certain things (pregnancy, motherhood, domestic life, the female body) are condemned as being too limited, or too predictable, or just too damn GIRLY. If men get sappy about their children it is vaguely novel at worst, wondrous and transcendent at best, but if women do it it's redundant and boring - well of COURSE women love their children, duh. Or maybe you just have to be an exceptional poet to get away with it, whatever your gender.

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the interspersed vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee

I love Frost at Midnight, but wouldn't we read these words slightly differently, more critically even, if Coleridge were a woman?

Or these from Waking with Russell by Don Paterson?

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.

I think I'd love these poems just as much if they were written by women, but then I don't think they could have been. There is, I believe, a reticence among women poets to engage with their children too directly or emotionally in their work, because they fear not being taken seriously. Was that at the back of Adrienne Rich's mind? Did she really want to be 'no-one's mother' in her poetry, or did she just perceive that in the eyes of the poetry establishment, being someone's mother lessened her?

Weeks: 22+1

Writing babies

There are several different types of baby author. Firstly, there's the actual Writer. People like Anne Enright (Making Babies) and Ian Sansom (The Truth About Babies), who wrote their books because that's what they do, they write. Writers will, sooner or later, respond to most things in their lives by writing about them. There's often a slight note of apology in these books, as if it might be a bit self-indulgent and redundant to get all literary about something that happens to millions of people all the time. Which is probably is.

Then there's the celebrity parents (like Jules Oliver) who write their books because what they have to say is marketable. They often make claims for being 'ordinary' parents with the same struggles as the rest of us, but although celeb babies may puke and shit and cry as much as any other, the childcare and housekeeping options available to yummy mummies make them a very different proposition. I have no time for this sort of book at all. If it's self-indulgent for a writer to write about babies, it's even more so for a non-writer to do it.

Finally, there's the Expert (Gina Ford, Penelope Leach, Miriam Stoppard etc). I am currently in the grip of an overwhelming terror when it comes to books by Experts and I can't bring myself to read any of them. I think this terror stems from the fact that pregnant women are vulnerable to believing everything we read, and if I read two conflicting sets of advice I will be completely paralysed, unable to make a decision about how to proceed. So when this baby is born I will probably still be in a state of blissful, if panicky, ignorance.

Weeks: 17+1