In typical Adele fashion, I recently wasted a day stressed sick over something I have so little power to change: the way my daughter naps.

Good grief, when something as trivial as daytime snoozing hijacks your emotional wellbeing it shows just how much rubbish needs to get beaten out of you by motherhood. It gives you the chance to let go of the small things…or risk losing your mind.

It also pulls your tendency towards pessimism to the surface, uncomfortably demanding that you deal with it like a woman and stop being such a weakling.

Like many babies, Talitha, too interested in the world around her, has started finding it difficult to switch off in the daytime. The truth is, she’s always been a bit unskilled at napping but since she hit 16 weeks, everything’s stopped working. Even the sling fails more often than it works.

And if anything does work, it only works for 30 precious minutes before we have to fight to get to the second sleep cycle, if we can at all.

As long as something is happening around her, she’s a-buzz, which isn’t itself a problem except she really is tired and gets grumpy whenever I adopt a maybe-you-don’t-need-naps approach.
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Ten years ago I sneaked into a bar with a friend, wearing very different clothes to what my mother had seen me leave home in. With uncertainty I had my first sip of alcohol. It was all a bit of a joke. I don’t even like fizzy drinks and it was rum and Coke.

Later that year or maybe the next, a cousin took me a nightclub and plied me with screwdrivers (vodka and orange juice). She hadn’t meant to. She’d had a lot to drink herself and kept forgetting she’d got me drinks. I bet she’s forgotten this ever happened but I ended up sitting in the middle of the dance floor until one of her friends took me out to the car.

Since then – apart from one or two occasions that I won’t go into because my mum reads the blog and I feel our relationship benefits from something left to the imagination – I’ve been a one or two units kind of gal.

When I moved out, drinking pretty much lost the allure of the forbidden. I still had my weekend glass of wine. My tastes had matured and that would do me just fine.

So you can’t blame me for not expecting to miss drinking. But good grief, I have. Try being pregnant over Christmas. I still slipped a unit here or there and I know the research isn’t clear and some women drink anyway but I’m not much of a risk taker. Sue me.
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At noon on Friday, I will board a train with a dress in my bag and without a baby on my chest. She’ll be snuggled up in a sling worn by her uncle who I’m leaving armed with eco-disposables. I felt it unfair to expect him to fold cloth on top of looking after my oft-confirmed demanding baby.

I will sit on that train to London, reading The Other Boleyn Girl and hoping it’s trashy enough to distract me from what I’m leaving behind.

I made the decision to go to the MAD Blog Awards months ago. You voted my love letter to my daughter into becoming a finalist.

It’s an opportunity to meet face-to-face women I’ve got to know over the past year through their inspiring writing. Some of these are women who’ve shared in my joy on Circus Queen and have been endlessly supportive when I’ve opened up about difficulties.

It’s also a chance to drink more than one glass of wine without wondering how much booze is going into my boobs or questioning the safety of sleep sharing with a tiny person.
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We call him “the water doctor”. My cousins joke that you could break yuh han’ an’ Grandpa would jus’ tell you to drink more water.

He trained in, I think, Ireland, working hard into his, I think, seventies and still going, sometimes paid in fresh produce.

He delivered me into my parents’ bedroom in that little flat we grew up in. The one with leak stains on the ceiling.

Now that I’ve got his great-gran’, I remember the stories of how he saved my infant brother’s life. And I still find myself trusting his medical opinion above all others.
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This baby is just out to break the rules. Most babies are born within a week of their due date. So of course she doesn’t show up until thirteen days after and only having taken next to forever. Tongue-ties grow back only in an estimated one in ten babies. So, obviously that had to happen to her.

But, man, I thought all babies took dummies? Comforters, pacifiers, soothers – let’s not get hung up on what we call them – my baby won’t have one.

It goes like this. I pop what’s supposed to be the magic peacemaker in her mouth, tickling her top lip so she opens first to accept it. She gives a couple of sucks then twists her face (“scwinge up” as we say in Trinidad) as if it’s the most offensive thing anyone’s ever given anyone.

It’s the face I’d make if you told me you were putting chocolate in my mouth and it turned out to be licorice. Though why I’d close my eyes and let you put anything in my mouth is beyond me.
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