Dialogue: No backing out of this full-time job

By ROANNE PARKER

When is a mum not a mum? No, it's not a trick question, the answer is pretty straightforward: never.

Not in our sleep, not when the baby is napping or the children are at school, or uni, or when they are flatting or shacking up with some deadbeat or getting married or having babies of their own. That's the thing, isn't it? It's a true life sentence.

My gorgeous former police officer sister-in-law is caring for her 9-month-old baby and having the odd moment or three of wondering whether she is really ready for this motherhood lark after all.

She said to me that she thought she was all done partying when she became pregnant last year at 31, but now she's having second thoughts.

Well, there's not much to say to that except "too late".

At last count she had 25 friends with babies under a year old, most of them in their early to mid-30s and wealthy enough to be more concerned about Esprit Kids closing down than about getting food on the table. It must help to have everyone you know in the same boat, but au pair or not, it's a big job.

I can remember that muddle of emotions. I wrote to mum when I had my second baby and told her I felt like a young horse being broken in, fighting the saddle.

That might sound a bit dramatic, but while one child felt a bit like playing dollies, two was the real McCoy. The third - well, by then I guess the saddle fitted.

It's still not the done thing to come clean and confess that you find it hard sometimes, especially when so many couples are battling infertility, but there is a pretty normal zone in the experience of motherhood between the rose-tinted image of the blissfully content earth mother and a whimpering muddle of desperation.

We are having our babies later and later. At this rate the poor things will be lucky to get to kindy before mum is mistaken for grandma. The fertility clinics are full of older wanna-be parents whose chromosomes are getting a bit crusty.

I'm just over the average age for first-time motherhood and it is my great pleasure to stymie the statistics and have all of that nonsense finished with.

No more sleepless nights and granny bras, no more half-hearted thoughts of writing to my MP about tax relief for daycare, no more mashing pumpkin.

It's a funny thing being a young mum; over the past 11 years I have felt like a kind of fertile freak-show among fields of fashionably late-fruiting fallopian tubes. It's such a Westie thing to have your babies early. Just call me Shazza.

I used to sit at traffic lights with three babies in the back seat of the people- mover and look across the lanes at the girls my age in their hot little Barinas and feel very much like I was on a whole different planet from them. I certainly didn't have much in the way of conversation to bring to a girlie chat.

But you know, I could run up the hills and down the slides and swing on the swings and even, on the odd occasion, sleep in the cot with my babies.

Still, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I had thought it might be nice to offer the children to cryogenics and then defrost them again after I had a year or two of my 20s.

But we all survived, even flourished, and I am looking forward to being 40 and gorgeous and moving into my little bachelorette pad down at the Viaduct while the fashionably late breeders are still at the kindy gate.

Ha, fat chance. If only children didn't keep you so poor; by the time I have finished paying for their university fees, I will be lucky to afford a flat in Twizel.

To keep it in perspective, though, I doubt I would be any more fiscally sound if I had spent the past decade partying rather than parenting.

Few people sit down and decide, "Right, now I have done everything else on my list, we are ready to have a family". There are always opportunity costs in any decision, and I don't envy my still-childless friends one little speck.

The thing is, whether you have your babies early or late, it's all the same stuff. And the truth is that whenever you do it, none of us can imagine when we are choosing names and shiny new prams that we will be mum for every minute of the rest of our lives.