Pregnancy is a perfectly normal experience which is also just about the weirdest thing that can happen to you. What other life experience involves your eyeballs changing shape? Not to mention the part where a live human being is inside you. Inside you.

(I remember lying in the bath watching my skin ripple with hiccups that weren’t my hiccups. Something in my body had hiccups but it wasn’t me. It was as though my liver had suddenly started whistling showtunes.)

And then there’s the effect on the rest of you. Not just your body but practically everything that identifies you as you gets shaken out and restructured, like Lego, to whatever best suits your little parasite.

Children. They make you weird.

Now, you must understand that I have loved David Bowie since the age of fifteen, with a love purer and more intense than anyone else has ever felt. No, seriously, we are soulmates. This soulmatiness began in 1990 when I first saw the film Labyrinth. If you haven’t seen it, Bowie plays a shaggy-haired, tight-trousered Goblin King called Jareth who steals the baby brother (Toby) of a teenage girl (Sarah) with the help of his many goblin minions, and thereby forces her to go on a Dorothy-like quest to retrieve him*.

Obviously, for me, Labyrinth was essentially a film about David Bowie and his amazingness, with some plot and stuff. And so it remained every time I saw it. Until 2003, when I had a baby.

Of course I knew that being a parent was going to change me, but I didn’t fully understand that so many of the little corners and pointy bits of my personality were going to get redesigned, rubbed out, and ruthlessly realigned. When I watched Labyrinth after becoming a mother, I suddenly discovered one of the aspects of the new me.

It had become an entirely different film. When I saw the scene in which Bowie performs Dance Magic to the baby he has acquired while his goblins play around him, every bone in my body screamed at me: “OH MY GOD, THAT MAN HAS KIDNAPPED A CHILD! WHY IS HE LETTING GOBLINS BE IN CHARGE OF A BABY? THEY’RE THROWING HIM TO EACH OTHER! PUT HIM DOWN! GIVE HIM BACK!”

What had once been a straightforward tribute to Bowie’s godlike talent and trousers had now become a terrifying story about a child who is taken away from his parents and held hostage by creatures with no trained childcare skills led by a king who tossed children around like tennis balls. I could barely watch, even though I knew perfectly well that Toby would be fine (and in fact appeared to be enjoying himself hugely whenever he was on screen). It took years before the balance shifted again, and it’s still only gone halfway back (and I haven’t yet tried watching it since having my second child).

And that was only the most striking example. I became unable to watch or read any narrative that featured children in peril – no matter how slight or unrealistic the peril, no matter how much I loved the film or book, and no matter that nothing bad had actually happened to my own child. On the worst days, I couldn’t cope with fictional children of any kind, even if they spent all their time merrily skipping through fields of rainbow-shaped kittens. The world in my head tilted, and everything slid to one side, and I lost all sense of perspective for a while, and it’s never come back completely and probably never will. (I may never be able to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved again. I love that book.)

And of course that kind of thing goes on all the time, with everyone. There are far more trivial examples. You might take against a fictional character because they like tuna and it makes you feel sick, or because they look a bit like the doctor who was dismissive of your ankle rash. Or, of course, you might be unable to judge the merit of a book or film because it features a dying father or a traitorous girlfriend and that’s just too close to home.

Basically, and I apologise if this sounds obvious but it’s taken me years to realise: a writer/creator doesn’t have a lot of control over how their audience reacts to their work. There’s too much context going on. They can do their best to inspire amusement, terror, anger, awe, but their painstakingly crafted prose or script might easily be derailed by a sudden realisation of where a lost Oystercard is, or a moment of inattention during which a vital sentence is missed, or a phone call, or an itch, or your audience being slightly the wrong age, sexuality or background to appreciate what they’re trying to get across.

I guess all you can do – if you’re trying to be a writer/creator – is try to look at your work from an audience perspective as much as possible, try to make it as compelling as possible, and hope. And make sure nothing bad happens to children.

*I originally wrote ‘Alice-like quest’ and then it occurred to me that Alice isn’t actually on a quest, just wandering aimlessly through a random dreamscape. I prefer quest stories.