My Mother Wears Combat Boots

Tag : girls' boots
Only those who are parents can fully understand how birth changeseverything you know about yourself. One thing that can go out ofthe door pretty quickly is any sense of your own identity.

In fact, thinking about it, it all begins when your pregnancy bumpbegins to get too big for your existing wardrobe. Suddenly yourmost fundamental way of expressing yourself - the way you dress- ischallenged. High street stores offer a narrow range of maternityclothing, forcing you into mainstream fashion. And then, after thebirth, you don't necessarily fit back into your previous clothes,and nor do you have time to sort out a new look.

All of which is my preamble to saying that I saw this book, My Mother Wears Combat Boots in the window of our local alternative cafe recently, and Ithought, "yes". But this isn't a book about fashion. Part of theparental loss of identity comes, if you're not careful, in theparenting manuals of our time, many of which preach - intentionallyor otherwise - conformity on all kinds of issues from routines tofeeding.

Routines? Try keeping to a Gina Ford schedule when you're touringwith a punk band, as this books' author, Jessica Mills, does. Oncecertain conventions are rejected as an impossibility, the scene isset to examine everything else that we take for granted. It's aparenting manual that could work in one of two ways for newbieparents: either you'll be confused and threatened by thequestioning of mainstream parenting techniques, or you'll beutterly gratified that there's more than one right way to dothings.

Speaking for myself, I could have done with a friend like Millswhen I found myself in tears after reading in a celebrity mother'sbook that her children were sleeping through the night at six weeksold. Or indeed when wading through any one of the four parentingguru books that were recommended to me by well-meaning folk -before I got wise and swore never to read another book of thatgenre. If only I'd known of this one.

Not that there seems to be anything too wild in My Mother Wears Combat Boots : if you've already trawled the chat-rooms and blogs, clothdiapering, co-sleeping and the rejection of pink and blue for girlsand boys is hardly going to shock you. On the other hand, judgingby the excerpt I read, in which Mills recounts a graphicpoop-eating incident, it's not exactly staid, either. Perhaps oneto keep away from your more conservative friends. You know, theones in court shoes.