Then there’s my relationship with my own mum. “You look tired,” she’ll say, before offering suggestions to which I’ll respond with my best teenage eye-rolling petulance.

“Have you tried giving her a dummy?”

Yes we did but she spat it out.

“When you were a baby and you wouldn’t sleep, we put honey on your dummy.”

Jesus, really? That’s where it all went wrong then.

“I bought some dummies. Just for when she’s at my house.”

She doesn’t take a dummy, I told you, mum. And please don’t stick your finger in her mouth.

“I spoke to my friend. She’s got lots of advice. She’s very pro-dummy.”

Good for her.

“Isn’t your cousin’s baby lovely? You know she has a dummy.”

MUM STOP BANGING ON ABOUT FUCKING DUMMIES.

Hopefully a few of my parenting choices are rational, but I’m sure there’s an element of deliberately pushing back against my upbringing, of doing things my way. The equivalent of going veggie and plastering my bedroom walls with drum and bass flyers, how you raise a kid is an expression of your worldview, your identity. I have no ideological objection to a dummy but I’m not going to force one on my daughter. As much as possible, I just try to respond to her needs. If she cries at night, I go to her. If she wants to sleep in our bed, I let her. Who knows if my way is any better than anyone else’s.

I love it, this adolescent renaissance. I feel free, creative, young again. The world has regained its sheen. I’ve been given a chance to escape the rat race and start afresh, as though someone’s shown me a trapdoor and said, “Here you go, jump. Who knows where you’ll land...” That’s how I’ve really changed; at 15, I felt invincible, now I don’t. Back then, I cared what people thought of me but I wasn’t afraid of much else. Today, I couldn’t give a nappy sack what people think but I see danger at every turn. What if I drop the baby? What if we’re walking down the street and something falls on her face? What if a bird shits in her eye?

Parenthood is angst-ridden, exhausting, sometimes tediously mundane, but it’s never stagnant. Your child changes constantly, and you change with them. Which is why, a year into motherhood when someone asked me if I still feel like “me”, I wasn’t sure how to answer. Of course I’m not exactly the old me. But I’m on the road to becoming a new me, just like I was back in adolescence. Only, this time I have someone travelling alongside me and they, not me, are the most important person in the world.