No one likes a crybaby … but I have rejection issues. It has taken me this long to connect the dots and realise that all the joking about my not being the boy my parents wanted after six attempts comes from serious undercurrents of … well … rejection. I suppose this is the part where I confess how I used to tell my baby – the one who looked at me with those big hopeful eyes wondering if he had made the right decision – that he had ruined my life by coming to me and that I wish he hadn’t been born.

So, it’s out, it’s shocking and I am a bad person for saying it. But now that I know where it came from, it makes me think about all those other things we do so casually as though they are perfectly normal when really they are just a product of bad programming. There are the horrific ones like beating your child and the less evils like making your child finish every last crumb on his plate. It’s all a matter of perspective because, to the person doing these things, it all seems perfectly normal … because the programming is there.

I can’t offer a cure only a suggestion to be more aware. I worked through not ever smacking my child when I was still pregnant; I’m almost there with the food thing (he is 4, after all, and fully aware whether his stomach is full or not); and I tell him every night now how glad I am that he was born. Because I am you know.