For me, being a parent is about moments of pleasure coupled with moments of pain. It isn’t subsuming your own identity in theirs. It isn’t about having no sense of the self, but it is about selflessness. The parents I find who are having the most difficult time – the knackered ones whose sanity seems to be held together by a thread — are those who do not accept the fact that they are parents. My friend who puts her career first admitted, one night after too much wine, that she really hadn’t accepted being a mother. “I want my life,” she wailed. “I want to stay up late and party and not have to get up with the kids early in the morning. I want my own life.”