Let me tell you about my friend, Alpha Female. She is a savvy young woman at the top of her profession, who can cook fantastically, speak three languages and drink your average Russian under the table, all while looking like a film star. Jealous? Of course. But, Alpha Female appears to have suddenly met her match in the form of a small, unpredictable creature: her newborn son. Alpha Female’s route to motherhood was pretty much the ideal: with lovely Alpha Male for a few years, married in a tear-jerking ceremony, traveled the world, excelled at work. Then along came baby and Alpha Female backtracked along the evolutionary path and regressed into Pregzilla, devouring each and every pregnancy-related book, website and programme she could get her hands and ears on, with an all-encompassing need to know, to understand what she was going through, was about to go through, to be ready. I was flummoxed by emails and texts pondering the relative merits of strict routines and ‘baby whispering’. I was no help. I thought ‘baby whispering’ involved Robert Redford and a horse’s nostrils. Confused? I still am.

Kids. Whether you’re making them or raising them, it’s a bit of a project, isn’t it? A seriously long-term, oh-God-what-have-I-done sort of a project, admittedly. But the best bit is that you don’t really need any qualifications to take part, just a bit of common sense. A finely calibrated sense of humour helps, too. Instinct, genetics, whatever, something kicks in and we tend to muddle through. We immerse ourselves in the enjoyable consumerism, the paraphernalia of the task at hand. We confidently choose the booties, the buggy, the cot and the colour of the nursery. The Man of the House fiddles with baby monitors and does his best to get excited about the Bugaboo vs Baby Bjorn debate. And then, as we are in full thrust of the novelty of the growing bump, we start wondering if maybe we should take a quick flick through some of the parenting guides on offer, just to have a look, mind, so that we are a teensy bit prepared for life after the big event, The Birth. Any mother will tell you that the nine months of pregnancy are almost entirely devoted to staving off the terror of giving birth. We write birth plans with the vain idea that they will somehow lessen the sheer hideousness of labour and then we turn to distractions for the rest of the pregnancy. If we are clever, we turn to a nice gentle hobby. But some are tempted by The Books and terror of the birth is quickly replaced by the terror of Getting It Wrong, ‘It’ being the next eighteen years or so. You see, having kids is like coursework that never gets handed in but is, instead, continually assessed. Assessed by your peers, by your mother in law, by strangers in the supermarket, let alone by you walking the room with a thoroughly awake baby at 3am, wondering where you went wrong.

And so back to Alpha Female. In her hormonally vulnerable state, she keenly felt the pressure to Get It Right. Baby ‘guru’ Gina Ford instructed her to get baby into a military, love starved routine immediately or face the consequences of having a socially inept three year old, while attachment parenting manuals urged her to give up any semblance of a life and breastfeed until puberty. I scoffed. I gave birth for the first time eight years ago and honestly don’t remember feeling that pressure. Nowadays, it seems de rigeur to cook perfectly (thanks celebrity chefs), keep fit (er, thanks Z-list celebs with your pole dancing workout DVDs) and, most of all, be happy and calm and in control at all times. My scoffing became a strangled squawk as a quick browse of my shelves showed no less than 18 parenting-related books. Oops. Hormones do amazing things to your memory. Rummaging amongst all these books, most of which I hadn’t even read, made me wonder what on earth possessed me to buy clearly conflicting tomes of ‘advice’ and left me shamefaced at the realisation that the only person to actually benefit from most of them was the author, laughing all the way to the bank. Against my better judgment, I read through them and immediately regretted it. Three kids later, my ‘methods’ have dissolved into the bribe-reward school of parenting which, curiously enough, doesn’t seem to have a ‘guidebook’, even though it is the preferred method for most parents I know. Having been made to feel so inadequate by reading so much of how it’s supposed to be done in a perfect world, I have decided to aim at how to be a good parent in the real world. Sometimes fish fingers are the best you can manage and yes, of course goldfish go to heaven, sweetheart. As for Alpha Female? Well, she has come to her senses, ditched the guilt and put two fingers up to other people’s expectations. She goes back to work on Monday.