Career-mum guilt? No, no

How strange it is when the most unexpected of exchanges gives you the most pleasure. A conversation between my youngest child and a friend - let's call her Sarah - did just this.

Before a night out, Sarah was changing into a beautiful party dress at my house while the four-year-old watched the makeover in wonder. While they chatted, my friend asked the child: "So, what does your mother do?"

First, the child who regularly threatens to kill me and yesterday morning called me an idiot, said: "You're prettier than my mother."

And then she went on to say: "She cooks, cleans, and looks after the children. Sometimes she goes to work to do a bit of writing."

In her mind she might have thought she was torturing me - my mother, well she's a rather plain, dull housewife. She got me wrong. I am not sure why she was trying to hurt me. (What had I done wrong? Come home too late?) But what she didn't know was that, instead of hurting me, she made my heart sing.

If you understand the pleasure I felt, you must understand the sense of guilt a working mother feels. Some have trained themselves to not feel it at all - a waste of precious time. Rather spend the time you waste feeling anxious, they advise, on snappily meeting deadlines. Get home earlier.

That's good advice and requires discipline. I am not made to be disciplined about this. I do waste precious time worrying about my children and what they will think of me one day.

When it turns out that they aren't going to be super-clever at school, or when their marriages fail, it will be my fault because I, like billions of other women, have had to work during their childhoods.

They will spend their little inheritances - if there is any left after all the money spent to outsource the parenting I don't do - on therapy. They will need to overcome what Philip Larkin says is my fault. You know his verse: "They f*&k you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do."

It's not a nice image I have of the mother I am.

So when my child says I cook, clean and look after children, I have to hope she's not lying to win favour with my influential friends. I have to hope that the little bit of domestic work and care I do offer is enough to warp her imagination and make her believe this is what I do with my life. And that only sometimes, while she's out at her nursery school, I do a bit of work.