By WINIFRED ROBINSON

Last updated at 00:11 14 December 2007

So at last the biggest secret of motherhood is out. For every woman who gives birth then sinks back blissfully into the pillows, there are scores like me who sit bolt upright, eyes wide with fear and think: "Oh my God, what have I done?"

Lest you assume that I just didn't bond with my baby, let me say from the outset that I loved my son Tony from the top of his down-covered head to the tip of his tiny little toes.

I loved him before he was born, before he was even conceived.

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I loved the idea of him, and I never lost touch with that love throughout the many miserable years of infertility and the IVF treatment that finally resulted in his birth on August 20, 1999, when I was 41.

By then, as one of the doctors so tactlessly put it, I was "in the last chance saloon when it came to having kids".

But however much he was loved and wanted, my baby's arrival waved no magic wand of satisfaction over my life.

And as a study this week by the Institute for Social and Economic Research in Colchester attests, I am not so much the exception as the rule.

The survey questioned four thousand couples and discovered that children, until the age of five - the point where most start school - make mothers less satisfied with their lives.

I can sympathise with that. Indeed, I sometimes look back on my son's early years as a long dark tunnel from which I emerged blinking when he reached about four.

The irony of my situation wasn't lost on me: that after all those years of trying for a baby and finally achieving my goal, his arrival made me somehow unhappier than I had been before.

Because what no one can convey before your own little bundle arrives is just how hellishly hard it is to be a Mum - by far the most difficult challenge most of us face in life.

So why wasn't maternal love the harbinger of happiness? For me the biggest problem was a surfeit of the stuff. I was so overwhelmed with love for Tony that I was tormented with anxiety.

In my career as a BBC reporter I had the confidence to dodge pieces of flying masonry while covering riots in Northern Ireland.

But finding myself in sole charge of a tiny screaming infant, I panicked, convinced that I just wasn't up to the job of looking after my baby and petrified that he would suffer as a result.

And for the first three months of his life, suffering was what Tony did. He had colic - that mysterious belly ache which afflicts so many infants - and he screamed the place down for quite a lot of the time.

I recall a well-meaning elderly neighbour desperate to watch Coronation Street in peace, knocking on my door with the helpful suggestion that the milk I was feeding Tony could be off.

The professionals whose I advice I sought were about as helpful: the midwives suggested feeding on demand, the doctor a strictly-timed feeding regime.

Those first few months can be bewildering and utterly exhausting, when a baby sleeps for no more than about three hours at a time day and night. Then there is the effect that the arrival of a baby has on a marriage.

My husband and I had six blissful years together before Tony was born, years of intimate dinners and holidays with lots of strolling hand-in-hand down cobbled streets soaking up the culture of some delightful foreign city.

Like many childless women I know, I had made a bit of a baby of my man. I loved looking after my husband, Roger Wilkes, also a journalist, fussing over him even - and of course, when Tony was born, all that abruptly stopped. "I just haven't got time" became my mantra, and so it remained for the next few years.

And if I wasn't the kind of mother I expected to be, Roger wasn't the kind of father I'd imagined either. Like many men he turned out to be hopeless with small babies, although he is wonderful with Tony now he is eight years old.

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"He won't take this feed from me," he used to say crossly, as if an infant might be expected to down a bottle of formula milk like a yard of ale.

When I returned to work Tony was three months old and a colleague asked: "Have you reached the I Hate My Husband Because He's Useless Stage Yet?" Casting my eyes to heaven I confided that I had reached that moment several weeks before.

I can still recall precisely the moment when I stared at my husband with murder in my eyes. I was holding a screaming baby and Roger was holding a raw chicken.

At any moment my parents, travelling by train from Liverpool to visit us in London, would arrive. My husband has many talents, but cooking is not among them and he was looking at the chicken and asking what he should do with it.

A murderous mist suffused my gaze and I swear if I hadn't been holding the baby, I would have strangled him.

Tempers are not improved by sleepless nights, and they don't do much for general good health and wellbeing either. When warned about sleepless nights before Tony was born, I used glibly to reply that I would be fine because I had experienced shift work.

Motherhood in my case, though, brought thrice-nightly waking for ten whole months and regular 4am alarm calls in the three years that followed. And all without the chance to catch up on the sleep you have lost.

Perhaps worse than all this was the fact that as Tony got a little older and I returned to work, there was the sheer loneliness of looking after him.

Roger and I decided to organise our jobs so that we could care for Tony ourselves without outside help. It meant working alternate days.

On the plus side, our baby was never packed off to a nursery. On the downside, in those early years I seemed to be always entertaining Tony on my own. The modern tendency for people to move far from their families for work exacerbates this problem. It certainly did for us.

I had my mum, dad and no fewer than five sisters desperate for the chance to help me with my baby son.

But they were all in Liverpool, 200 miles away from where we lived in west London. Most afternoons I would take Tony to feed the ducks in Kew Gardens across the road. I missed my husband, I missed my mum, and I longed for adult company.

Earlier this year in another survey, 2,000 new mothers reported the year after childbirth as the loneliest time of their lives, a time when only 90 minutes a day was spent in the company of other adults.

I think this loneliness may explain the other surprise finding in the research that was published this week that mothers are significantly happier with life if they have a job, regardless of the hours involved.

Much as balancing motherhood and work is stressful, at least (as my own mother used to put it) work "gets you out", out into the grown-up world, with the chance to chat to colleagues around the water cooler.

I never even considered staying home to look after Tony full-time because our whopping mortgage made two incomes essential.

At the time I envied the mothers who didn't face the wrench of leaving a small child. But looking back, I'm not so sure that full-time motherhood would have made me happier, probably because as an older mother I was so used to the intellectual stimulation of work and was set in my ways.

And if I am honest, it was perhaps the contrast between the worlds of work and motherhood that made the task of mothering seem so monumental in those early years of Tony's life.

In my job as co-presenter of Radio 4's consumer programme You And Yours, effort pays off and can sometimes bring instant rewards. If I want a particular interview to go well, I do extra research and it usually works.

By contrast, trying hard with young children can just be pointless and frustrating, and I would guess that this must be the experience of a great many mothers who have careers.

For me, closing the door on the chaos that can be kindled by a fractious child and stepping out in my suit to the office was a welcome escape. At work I felt relaxed and in control, but at home, confronted by a toddler who clamped his jaws against all vegetables, I sometimes wanted to weep. I felt so inadequate and frustrated.

And whereas at work my tasks tended to be quickly accomplished, with Tony I discovered that the basic lessons of life, as passed on by mothers to their children, must be endlessly repeated often over years.

I blush to confess it, but I did a great deal of goal-oriented nonsense with Tony when he was a baby. There were trips to the infant music classes, where all the tiny pupils were invited to play primitive instruments and kiss the same toy monkey at the end.

I had expected to foster in Tony an early love of percussion - in the event, all he picked up were a few nasty viruses from the soggy cuddly toy.

Trips to the "Kinder Gym" piled the humiliation on as a teacher put parents and children through a routine called "Skipping along, Singing a Song" in which my boy didn't so much skip as dawdle.

In fact, Tony resolutely refused to respond to my efforts in a whole range of areas, starting with breastfeeding, which I hang my head in shame to admit we never mastered (I ended up giving up within days), through to the pureed vegetables he spat out and the potty he wore on his head rather than use.

The terrible twos went on well into his threes because from the moment he was born he seemed to have his own tastes and opinions on just about everything. And he could be stubborn to the point of cussedness, just like his mum.

But hand on heart, I can honestly say there was never a moment when I wished I wasn't a Mum. No matter how rosy the memories seemed of the days when I came home from work and relaxed with a large glass of wine, I would never have swopped my childless state for the life I now had with my boy.

And if all of this sounds like a lament, I don't mean it to be, because in the long run Tony has brought me infinitely more joy than any work project or any other relationship in my life.

There were the triumphs of his first words, his first steps, the delicious softness of his little body curled up against mine. His initial total dependence on me may have been terrifying, but it is also wonderful-to be needed so intensely, even if it is for a short time.

Which brings me on to the question of why life gradually gets more satisfying for many mothers when their children start school.

There are the obvious advantages, not least among them the 30 hours a week or so of free childcare - a big money saver if you are working, and a chance for some long-deserved 'me-time' if you are at home.

In our case - and for many other parents I know - the start of school signalled the end of the broken nights. School tires children out and even the poorest sleepers tend to settle as a result.

But for me, more importantly, Tony starting school coincided with the realisation that difficult times with young children are just phases in their development that pass. By the time he was four, I had learned to stop trying so hard. I found motherhood infinitely more rewarding as a result.

I remember in those first nightmare days with Tony, a girlfriend rang who'd had a baby a year before. "Why didn't you tell me it was like this?" I asked her.

"Because you feel so foolish saying that," came the reply.

I understood perfectly what she meant: how could I of all people, after all that effort to have a baby, admit that I was struggling to cope?

Admitting that life as the mother of a young child is less than perfect means breaking one of the last taboos - and yet it shouldn't be so hard to say it. As this week's research proves, those of us who didn't relish every moment are the not the exception, but the rule.