I’m typing this blog one-handed.

The other hand is rocking my baby daughter towards reluctant sleep, after she’s serenaded me all afternoon with a symphonic range of cries, whines and screams in that delightful baby language of hers.

Admittedly, I have child-free times each week whereby my little angel is taken care of and I can focus on agoodwriteup, but I love my work very much, and so I do my best to get extra bits and pieces of writing done whenever my child takes a break from requiring my less glamourous services.

Lately, the whole combination of being a new mum and continuing to work as a freelance copywriter has made me think about language from a new angle.  I don’t mean this in terms of the fact that every professional helpfully reminds me at each appointment that my child “can only really communicate by crying” – a statement that, funnily enough, does not help you at 1am, 4am or 5am, or then again for pretty much the rest of the day once the sun’s up.  No, it’s got me thinking about my own new application of language and the discourses I enter into on a daily basis now that I have a child.

First of all, let me kick off with (or at) the fact that I’ve quickly learned that the phrase “sleeping like a baby”, utilised as a descriptive comparison of peace and tranquillity, is without doubt the biggest load of bollocks in the history of similes and/or infants.  I don’t know who coined this phrase, but I can only assume that they had never in fact raised or even met an 8 week-old baby.  Or that they were deaf.

Secondly, well, I’ve listened to a lot of advice in the last 8 weeks.  Personally, I think all advice is good advice – providing you make an informed decision to either take it or totally disregard it.  Since being in possession of a small child, I’ve come to believe that advice can sometimes be more for the benefit of the giver than the receiver.  With that in mind, in terms of keeping my baby alive and myself sane in the process, I’m tending to just listen to the people who want to help, rather than those who just love a good story or anecdote.  It’s all in the eyes.  If they’re telling you about infant constipation with a glimmer of glee in their eyes as opposed to a knowing look of empathy and mild disgust, then you know which kind of advice giver you’re dealing with.

Next, I’ve found that the leaflets, pamphlets and written instructions you receive upon purchasing baby stuff can on too many occasions be more complicated than the baby itself.  Take the picture accompanying this blog, for example; that leaflet is the instruction sheet for a bottle.  A BOTTLE.  If I didn’t know how to work such a receptacle, then I wouldn’t have had a few glasses of wine one weekend last December and I wouldn’t be writing this blog right now.

What else?  Questions!  I’d estimate that 98% of the questions I ask in a day are now posed online rather than to an actual human person, and having searched frantically each and every day for responses to neurotic Googlings such as “How many times a day should my baby cry/eat/throw up on me?”, “Why does my baby keep going cross-eyed?”, and “My baby’s shit is green – is she dying?”, I really think that I’ve now hit the point where I’ve run out of questions to ask the internet.  I still don’t have any clear answers, out of interest, no matter how I phrase the questions.  She hasn’t died, though.

Finally, or sadly, seeing as my new best friend and confidant is a search engine (unreliable and contradictory though she is), I now use up most of my language allocation talking to myself; either through an internal dialogue of reasoning that I’m a good (or terrible) mother, or via the one-way chatter I engage in with my little one, who despite the many questions I ask, rarely gives me an answer I can do anything with.

It’s been an interesting 8 weeks, but who did I think would be the audience for this blog?

New parents who may resonate with my experiences.

Seasoned parents who may wonder which type of advice-sharer they are.

New clients who may want to throw some work my way out of intrigue – or pity.

Old clients who are interested in what I’m up to when I’m not doing a (hopefully) wonderful job fulfilling their projects and briefs for them.

I also wrote this blog for my little girl, so that when she is old enough to grasp language in order to read and understand it for herself, she will feel proud of what her mum was doing to make a living when she was a baby – and feel a little bit guilty that she had a role to play in sending me half mad along the way.