(Disclaimer: this applies only to me. Me, myself and I. But it’s something I’ve wanted to write recently, and it keeps coming back to me, so, er, here it is. Make of it what you will.)

Labels are a tricky thing, aren’t they? I mean, there is the sort you spend half an hour trying to remove, armed only with a scrubby thing and a bowl of hot water, and then there is the sort that you spend a lifetime trying to remove, or, indeed, to acquire, armed only with a reasonable sense of humour and a general awareness of the ludicrous. One of the areas which seems most prone to the acquisition of labels is that old chestnut, being a parent.

When I first had the witchling, I scrabbled about all over the place, reading books, looking online, trying to find The Answer to a bad case of Baby. Looking back, it’s pretty clear to me now that I simply lacked the confidence to do what seemed best to me at the time, to identify myself as the expert when it comes to my daughter. I felt that someone out there must know better, that there must be a definitive way of doing things which would mean better sleep, and less crotchetiness, and an overall Better. I couldn’t really believe that I was the one who knew best what to do, or that I would become that person, despite the growing sense (which I didn’t examine too closely, in case it realised I was looking, and disappeared thus) that, at least some of the time, I was managing to stop the tiny daughter’s plaintive cries with one or another of what felt like piffling solutions. Piffling because I was coming up with them, and piffling because I hadn’t read about them, and they hadn’t necessarily got any basis in accepted parenting theories. (I mean, there can be very few people who advocate specifically hiding one’s baby under one’s own hair in games of hide-and-seek, yet my highly scientific research (with, er, a sample of, er, one) has found it to be very effective.)

I came across the concept of attachment parenting, and duly took lots of it on board. I then spent a good few months beating myself up about the fact that, despite my best attachment parenting-orientated attempts, the tiny daughter didn’t take to co-sleeping in the blissful manner suggested by Dr. Sears, and nor did breastfeeding her mean that night-wakings were the dream-like occurrence which most AP literature describes. (I hasten to add that I stuck with the breastfeeding – I didn’t choose that because of any literature on the subject, but because for us it just felt – and feels, with her now the ripe old age of sixteen months – right.) I read lots of accounts of attached parents, as it were, who determinedly identified themselves as such, and who seemed to manage to function rather better on very little sleep than did I, while on the other hand, I met – face-to-face – other parents who took the opposite approach, preferring nurseries and controlled crying as their way to get through. Different people, different babies, different approaches.

The thing that I find difficult is that these various labels, for me (and I speak only for me here, as ever), can be as limiting as they are empowering. Yes, I felt a sense of relief when I realised that other people felt that they would continue to get up at night for as long as their baby appeared to need them, and yes, I loved the fact that the Sears approach advocates listening to your instincts and doing what comes naturally. But with discovering that community came the guilt I mentioned earlier. Most of the attachment parenting literature articulates very clearly that the concepts should be taken and used only insofar as they fit any family’s needs, so of course that lovely little bundle of guilt which I created was just that – my own creation. But when sleep is a distant memory and the only thing you’ve seen for days is a pile of nappies which needs sorting and the washing-up which you’ve been ignoring since dinosaurs walked the earth, perspective can be a little… lacking, you know? And it’s quite easy to end up feeling like a failure on all fronts – you’re not a fully-fledged attachment parenting guru because you can’t get your baby to sleep in your bed without wholesale warfare breaking out every night, but you’re not in the same world as the parenting experts who advocate strict routines and whatnot because you’re clearly too wet to stick to that kind of thing, having decidedly lentil-weaving sling-wearing tendencies which preclude such things.

It’s a tricky one.

I realised recently that it’s been months since I read any stuff about being a mother.* Somewhere along the line, I seem to have discovered, albeit inadvertently, that yes, actually, I am the expert in this particular field, and I do know my baby better than any expert, and I will work out how best to do things for her, for me, for the lot of us. I still read a lot of blogs about parenting, but the ideas that I read about no longer define the way I approach being the tiny daughter’s mother. For me, it’s about stepping back from the labels, and attempting to ginger myself up sufficiently that I don’t care if I don’t fit the label, and, indeed, I’m not even sure what the label is. The more I analyse, the more miserable I become. Just getting on with it – that is the key for me, in my attempts not to create a monster. I don’t need badges, and I don’t need books, and I don’t need mottoes. In fact, I actively need to avoid them, I think, because to do otherwise just creates themed sticks with which to beat myself from time to time. (Sometimes I branch out and create, oh, I don’t know, one of those whippy things which monks used to use for flagellation purposes. Just for variety, you know.) What I need is a chaotic blend of the tiny daughter, housework, sleep, cooking, walking, fresh air, autumn rain, woodsmoke, love, candles, with the odd bit of knitting and reading thrown in to keep it light. And that’s not nearly snappy enough to be a label. I don’t think I am an attached parent, if such a term can be used in that sense. I’m certainly not a Gina Ford-esque routine queen. I’m just me. And I’m finally beginning to think that’s not such a bad thing.

* The exception to this is Naomi Stadlen’s excellent What Mothers Do, which Turquoise Lisa recommended to me yonks ago, and for which I am deeply in her debt.