The business of looking after a child possesses a core of unruliness, a quality of continual crisis, and my version of motherhood lacked, I saw, the aspect of military organisation with which such a core should be approached. I do not use the word ‘military’ lightly: conscription to the world of orthodox parenthood demands all the self-abnegation, the surrender to conformity, the relish for the institutional, that the term implies.
