Becoming a mother had also forced me to face an inconvenient truth: that my time on earth was limited, and my time with my baby, and then with my children, had an end point.

‘Whenever you feel guilty that you haven’t cleaned the house: Sexton beetles raise their kids in a decomposing mouse.’

The problem is having to strive for an ideal within societal conditions that make meeting it impossible.

Today, it is becoming harder to have children, with many women trying to conceive later in their lives, once they’ve established their careers. This means some women may have children in quick succession, which adds to the intensity of early years child-rearing. At the same time, mortgages and rental costs have risen far more than wages, as has the

Men today do about as much care work as women did fifty years ago.

Mothers spend twice as much time looking after their children every day compared with the 1960s, while also working more.

If a community values its children it must cherish their parents.’

They should stop telling you congratulations and start saying, are you OK? And what do you need?

Melanie Klein believed ambivalence to be a sign of healthy development in her studies of children. The child, who would once see a ‘good breast’ that nurtures and gratifies it and a ‘bad breast’ that is frustratingly absent when desired, heals the split into one integrated person and comes to see that the mother contains both ‘good’ and ‘bad’.4