A woman tells her son about his early life. About the months and years that he will by now have forgotten. When he was a baby, then a toddler, and when she was going into battle every day. For him first, and only then for herself. It’s a battle fought on many fronts. Against exhaustion, against time, against the loss of selfhood, against an increasingly absent husband, and against a society that values women less than men, and perhaps mothers least of all. And with no guarantee that she, that they, will come out on top. Between a testimony and a confession, between a lesson and a warning to the man her boy will become Soldier Sailor is devastating, uplifting, punishing, galvanising, vertiginous, infuriating, honest, raw, painful, and illuminating…in short, as close a representation of the early days of parenthood that can be committed to words.