My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us

Only those who are parents can fully understand how birth changes everything you know about yourself. One thing that can go out of the door pretty quickly is any sense of your own identity.

In fact, thinking about it, it all begins when your pregnancy bump begins to get too big for your existing wardrobe. Suddenly your most fundamental way of expressing yourself - the way you dress- is challenged. High street stores offer a narrow range of maternity clothing, forcing you into mainstream fashion. And then, after the birth, 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 I thought, "yes". But this isn't a book about fashion. Part of the parental loss of identity comes, if you're not careful, in the parenting manuals of our time, many of which preach - intentionally or otherwise - conformity on all kinds of issues from routines to feeding.

Routines? Try keeping to a Gina Ford schedule when you're touring with a punk band, as this books' author, Jessica Mills, does. Once certain conventions are rejected as an impossibility, the scene is set to examine everything else that we take for granted. It's a parenting manual that could work in one of two ways for newbie parents: either you'll be confused and threatened by the questioning of mainstream parenting techniques, or you'll be utterly gratified that there's more than one right way to do things.

Speaking for myself, I could have done with a friend like Mills when I found myself in tears after reading in a celebrity mother's book that her children were sleeping through the night at six weeks old. Or indeed when wading through any one of the four parenting guru books that were recommended to me by well-meaning folk - before I got wise and swore never to read another book of that genre. 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, cloth diapering, co-sleeping and the rejection of pink and blue for girls and boys is hardly going to shock you. On the other hand, judging by the excerpt I read, in which Mills recounts a graphic poop-eating incident, it's not exactly staid, either. Perhaps one to keep away from your more conservative friends. You know, the ones in court shoes.