Bless. I think. We’re staying with my mother for a few days, and being spoilt rotten with three-course meals and endless cups of tea. But she seems surprised that I know how to use a washing machine, and this morning tried to pour milk for me over my breakfast cereal. Extremely kind, but the cocooning has made me wonder what I’ll be like in a few (gulp) decades time when my tribe have flown the nest. Will I still see them as being prone to falling down stairs? Unable to eat a boiled egg without accompanying soliders, and having the white scaped out onto the plate? And will I ever stop showing off their accomplishments, however minor, to friends, just as my mother does. Only yesterday I overheard glowing reports of me managing to grow strawberries in a tub. In London no less.

It’s not just my mother. Walking down the street with a friend earlier in the week, we were chatting away until she suddenly stopped mid-sentence, pointed to the sky and said, ‘Helicopter’ as a chopper flew by. ‘Fascinating’ I replied, realising she’d forgotten neither of us had children with us. And another friend, a mother to three teens, admits that she still peels the stringy bits of banana off for her eldest, while her youngest (aged 14) has never once used a washing machine.

So once you start, do you stay in parent mode forever? Is a switch flicked that makes it impossible to ever see your children older than a certain age? A sort of parenting-in-aspic approach, akin to deciding in the Eighties that powder blue eyeshadow and stonewashed jeans is your ‘look’, and never experimenting with clothes again. Which I think actually means, am I ever going to be able to let go of my children? I’m trying to equip them for life, by teaching them to cook, and make them mop up their own spills. Only yesterday, I made the five-year-old put his pyjamas under his own pillow. Oh yes, tough love r us. But I suspect that I’ll try and keep them tied to the apron strings as long as I can. Who else could possibly understand the importance of a scraping, as opposed to a spreading, of Marmite on boiled egg soldiers? And not lose patience when it takes 15 minutes of coaxing to get into a swimming pool, when everyone else jumped in instantly?

It might not even be fears about the children growing up and needing me less, but part of a general panic about me getting older. And I don’t want to start obsessing about the merits of Botox et al quite yet.  Anyway, more importantly, did you see that helicopter go phut-phut-phutting past?