I THOUGHT this nagging feeling that, whatever I do, I’m a bad mother, was just me.

But American novelist Ayelet Waldman has just published a book of essays called ‘Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace’.

She became an international focus for the bad mother debate — and was booed on Oprah — after writing an essay about sex and motherhood in the New York Times.

And now she jokes that to earn the title ‘good mother’ she would need to perform an emergency tracheotomy with one hand and calmly change a baby’s diaper with the other. I think the problem’s worse than that. A woman performing life-saving surgery while changing a nappy is more likely to be condemned for bad hygiene than praised for being supermum!

She says that for dads, it’s the opposite problem. They only have to hold a child to win praise. Her hubby, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, was queueing for a cup of coffee with their crying baby on his hip one day when he was tapped on the shoulder and told he was a good father.

In a similar way I was at Meadfoot Beach café on Sunday morning and watched a dad exchange a few brief words with his daughter and it warmed my heart: the way he cupped the back of her head in his hand and called her ‘chicken’ really charmed me.

This isn’t a sideways dig. I’m not saying that men in general are feckless idiots. I’m actually surrounded by some really spectacularly good dads.

Even my ex, while he may not live with our kids, still gives them huge amounts of time and attention and love, and they love him to bits.

My own dad was a great father — not in today’s hands-on parenting style, admittedly, but when we were little he was always kind and gentle and, the thing that seemed most important of all at the time, funny. You know how they say there’s no such thing as a new joke? Well for me there’s no such thing as a joke that my dad didn’t tell me as a child. I’ve heard ‘em all.

And my new partner is a wonderful dad to his two 20-something daughters, still continuously involved in every step of their lives as they move into the working world.

So why is it that we (I mean women mostly) are so happy to acknowledge good dads, yet have set the bar so impossibly high for ourselves.

Back to Waldman. She says: “I think that we are in such in state about motherhood. It’s so, so sad that we find ourselves condemning each other rather than letting everyone just get on and live their lives. The best way I can describe it is as this almost toxic self-loathing, this desire for self-flagellation about whether or not you are a good mother. I used to think it was just an American problem, but judging by the emails I get and talking to other people, it seems to be spreading across the globe.”

She got into the bad mothers debate after writing frankly about her ‘torrid’ sex life with Chabon.

Maybe other women thought she was boasting a bit (he’s not only hot property in the publishing sense, but pretty hot in the looks department too).

One of the ways we working mums survive all the juggling is by convincing ourselves that nobody’s supposed to have it all. And here’s this woman with brains (ex-Harvard law school, former federal defender, successful novelist), a career which allows her to work from home, four young children, a hubby with a Pulitzer… it’s somehow just not right that she manages a steamy love life too.

It all sounds blissfully perfect. But judge not. In her new book, ‘Bad Mother’, Waldman is just as unflinchingly honest about her own bi-polar disorder, the couple’s heartbreaking decision to choose abortion when they discovered their unborn child had genetic abnormalities and about her 11-year-old son’s ADHD.

The article that really got her into trouble contained the claim: “I do love (my children) but I am not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband,” adding: “If I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, I would still have him, my husband.”

It was like an incendiary device. People demanded her children be taken away from her. She had hate mail. She was attacked on the popular daytime TV show The View, booed at on Oprah and called everything from ‘a freak’ to a ’self-obsessed bitch’ on websites.

But you see, I personally can’t see anything wrong with what she wrote.

The love we have for our children is supposed to be a different sort of love to the love we have for our partners, surely? She’s not saying that the death of a child wouldn’t be too bad. She’s clearly saying that if one died, God forbid, she’d have the support of a loving husband to carry on.

It’s just more of that ‘a mother’s place is in the wrong’, ‘toxic mum’ syndrome.

She’d have faced just as much approbation if she’d written the opposite — that she was ‘in love’ with her children. Now that would be kind of freaky.

Part of the problem is that the English language only has the one word for all different types of love. When the Scandinavians talk about romantic love in English, they have to say ‘falling-in-love, love’.

I identify with Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother conflict. As a mother you protect your family. As a writer you have to tell the truth. You can’t do both.

So the easiest way is to write about your own flaws and your own fallibility and accept the Bad Mother label.

Really we know we’re neither good or bad, just the same as everybody else at the moment — trying to work out new ways to be parents, getting the work-life-children-sex-money balance right.

Hopefully our children will learn from watching us, and not judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves, and get their own parenting right.

I LIKE to brag about the fact that I’m a bit of a slut — in the good, old-fashioned, slovenly housewife way, not the sleeping around kind, obviously.

But actually, that’s a lie (not about sleeping around) because I like a bit of housework now and again, when I’m in the mood and have the time.

It’s a kind of therapy… like gardening or writing this column.

The reason I brag about being a slummy mummy, in the same way that I’m always joking about being a bad mother, is that I have to make choices — just like every other working woman — and the one thing I happily choose to drop is the illusion of being perfect.

Housework or sanity. Sanity or housework. Hmmm…. let me think for a minute. It’s a toughy. Because there are moments when, frankly, insanity and a bit of time-out, locked up somewhere soft and quiet, in a drugged-out haze, does sound like a bit of an option.

So the house comes at the bottom of my list of priorities, most of the time.

However, last week the new man in my life offered to help me do something I haven’t attempted in all my years as a single mum… decorating.

He turned up bright and early, with dust sheets and massive power tools. And as soon as we started I remembered why I’ve avoided it for years.

The plan was that we had four days with no work and we were going to decorate the hall and porch… that’s three floors, two landings, eight doors, windows, bannisters, the lot.

I must first tell you that just before I moved to this house, four years ago, I heard a female comedienne telling a concerned friend that she couldn’t have children.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the friend said. “How sad. Why is that?”

“Because I have white carpets,” was the reply.

Well, I too have white carpets. In the hall. But I also have three children. Can you think of anything more stupid?

The sensible thing would have been to get rid of the children. But my ex and I fought over who should have them, and I lost.

Over the four years the white hall (walls, ceiling, paintwork, carpet, everything — it’s like a padded white cell nightmare) has become gradually greyer, muddier and badly chipped.

You know how some sad people preserve tiny baby shoes or footprints in plaster or bronze? Well I don’t need to. I had my children’s imprints permanently displayed over every surface in the hall.

Or I did. Until last week.

For some reason which I now can’t quite fathom, we decided that the easiest option was to re-paint it all white. I think I got into the paint section at the DIY superstore and had a panic attack.

But I did what I always do when I am having a panic attack. I remain outwardly icily calm. It seems to fool people most of the time.

I did not like to admit to the new man in my life that, actually, choosing paint is something that I really need at least five or six months notice on. So I acted as if I thought white would be fine.

The next bit was easy. Big long rollers, smooth surface. Twelve hours later, lots of cups of tea, a takeaway dinner, a sick child totally ignored on the sofa, and all the walls and ceilings were brilliant white. It looked great.

The problems started on day two. As I didn’t want to admit that choosing a new colour was too difficult for my small brain, I decided that I wanted the woodwork to be white.

But not brilliant white. I liked the subtly off-white colour of the existing woodwork.

I went back to the paint shop on my own to get 10 litres of white satinwood.

I couldn’t find any, so I asked the assistant.

Now it’s hard to imagine the absurdity of the following conversation unless you’re standing in a giant warehouse surrounded by tins of paint from floor to ceiling (remember the bit at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Where they hide the ark of the covenant in a storage hangar full of boxes that goes on into infinity. Like that).

Basically, I’m surrounded by millions and zillions of litres of paint. And I ask the assistant for white paint. And she says: “We don’t do white paint.” I get the giggles. She scowls.

They have brilliant white, she says. But not white. Not in satinwood. Not in a big tin. She says I’d have to go to their bigger store in Exeter for that. Or up the road to a paint specialist.

I go up the road to the paint specialist. He says Crown only do brilliant white satinwood. But Dulux do just white. (It may have been the other way around, but whatever). It costs me a fortune, but I think ‘Hurrah for the paint specialist. Nice to see a man who knows what he’s doing’. I go home.

We paint the woodwork. It takes three days. It’s actually not white. It’s brilliant white. I feel conned.

But never mind. Now the problem is that because middle of the house is so bright white, everything else looks dirty… especially that white carpet.

I had planned to finish decorating and get it cleaned. Except that, as well as the muddy footprints and tea stains, it now has splodges of non-removable, white paint all over it. Help!

FOR some reason I got really, really excited when I read that the Belgian city of Ghent is about to become the first in the world to go vegetarian once a week.

A lovely picture of a man sailing a giant aubergine across Ghent harbour advertises the new campaign.

When did Belgium go from being the world’s most boring country, to the place I’d most like to visit?

As soon as I mentioned the boringness of Belgium in the office I was shouted down by colleagues who started telling me things they love about the place.

One was instantly aroused by the memory of an ex-girlfriend’s handmade lacy knickers from Belgium and another said that this year’s Eurovision song contest entry from the country is an Elvis impersonator.

Another brightened up with the memory of a drunken weekend in Belgium with 100 firemen.

But back to vegetarianism… starting today, Ghents 5,000 Elvis-impersonating civil servants and lace knicker-wearing elected politicians have agreed to eat only vegetarian meals.

Schoolchildren will follow suit with their own ‘veggiedag’ every Thursday from September. It is hoped the move will cut Ghent’s environmental footprint and help tackle obesity.

Now I’m not quite sure why this all excites me so much. As a vegetarian for 25 years it really, really, really doesn’t bother me whether other people eat meat or not.

I mind a bit when they apologise for eating meat in front of me (why would I care — it’s not as if its one of my relatives or pets they’re tucking into?)

I do mind if people put raw meat in my fridge though. I just don’t like the smell. I’m OK about sweeping up the blood and guts which the cat brings into the kitchen most mornings, but he has the good grace not to put it in the fridge.

And it does upset me a bit that people make assumptions and wrongly categorise all vegetarians as radical, animal activist, health freaks.

Obviously I care about global warming and world poverty, but I don’t think it’s my job to convert anybody else.

Maybe it’s purely selfish, because it means that at long last there will be at least one European city I can go to on holiday and not have to survive on wine, cheese and bread for the entire week.

While I was in Spain last year I went into one tapas restaurant where every single thing on the menu had fish and meat in it somewhere. I told the waiter not to worry, I’d just have wine and olives for my dinner. But when he brought out the olives I realised that they were stuffed with anchovies too. He was so embarrassed that he ran down the road to ask for a dish of olives from a friend.

But now Ghent is leading the way. It is one of 370 European Climate Cities, and apparently they may all join in the meat-free day.

The participating cities are going to get cafes and restaurants to provide at least three veggie choices on the menu. I know that might not sound very exciting to the rest of you, but it will be lovely for me to be able to go into a restaurant and be able to do the whole ‘Mmm, let’s see, what shall I choose?’ thing, rather than …’I'll have the veggie option’.

But I don’t think it’s all going to be plain sailing. I looked on Ghent’s website and there are only seven veggie restaurants in the whole city. They’re going to be packed on a Thursday.

And I’m hoping that the city’s school dinner ladies are better at veggie cooking than the ones in this country. All three of my children have tried school dinners at one stage or another — mostly because I get so fed up making packed lunches.

A whole generation of little Belgians could be put off vegetarianism for good unless they teach their school cooks how to make tasty meatless dishes.

While on the subject of Belgium, my son was convinced in his first year at school that Jesus’ mum was called the Belgian Mary (he used to have a bit of a hearing problem).

He was only about five at the time and no matter how much his sisters and I insisted, he was still sure that he was right and that the Madonna was really called the Belgian Mary.

I remember getting into a very long discussion in which I tried to explain what a Belgian was. And then another one where I tried to tell him, without going into too much detail, what a virgin was.

I realised that I had failed when he looked at me and said: “Does that mean you’re a virgin mummy?”

That was about two years ago, and when I asked him about the Belgian Mary this morning it was clear he still doesn’t know what the joke is.

Today he asked me if a virgin is a type of religion.

The problem is that he’s now as confused about religion as he is about sex and, what with me talking about virgins and Jesus’ mum in the same sentence, he has now truly mixed the whole thing up.

The religion thing got confused when he was set a piece of homework where he had to ask friends and neighbours about their jobs, and what religion they are.

Unfortunately that weekend we had an odd assortment of visitors, and none of them could answer in black and white terms — or in any way that made any sense at all to an eight-year-old — about their religious beliefs.

I do feel very, very sorry for the poor child living in our nuthouse.