My daughter was in night nappies when she started going to school and I WON’T apologise for it – no one should criticise working mums for being too busy to potty-train

There was a turning point when my oldest child, Flo, was about six months old, when the whole charade of being able to balance a freelance writing career with childcare came crashing down around me.

I was interviewing a self-important celebrity on the phone from home and since I had been told it would only be a short conversation, I had put Flo in the bouncer so she could bob up and down and grin happily at me while I was working. .

Twenty minutes later I was still on the phone and she started grumbling. I walked into the next room, desperately trying to extricate myself from the conversation. Flo started bawling and I moved further away from her. I hated myself for putting my work first, but felt completely stuck.

Thirty minutes later she screamed blue murder and I was now standing outside in the garden with the French doors firmly closed. I kept trying to end the conversation, but there was no way around it.

My palms felt sweaty, my heart was racing and all I wanted was to get back to my baby. By the time I did, she had fallen asleep, upright but dangling from the doorframe, her face wet with tears.

Of all the weeks we’ve had this particular guilt trip on our doorstep – just after a brutally rainy spell, with the specter of Christmas lurking, said Shona (pictured)

How many other working mothers have found themselves in a similarly miserable scenario, wracked with remorse because they were forced to prioritize work over childcare?

I can imagine their anger, as well as mine this week, that MP Miriam Cates is now blaming us – an army of exhausted mothers doing their best – for the increasing number of children going to school in diapers.

Of all the weeks we still have this guilt on our doorstep – just after a brutally rainy summer holiday, with the specter of Christmas lurking. And to add more fuel to the fire, she seemed to direct her ire at working mothers, as if fathers don’t play a role in the parenting equation.

Cates was speaking at the Alliance For Responsible Citizenship conference when she made the comment, saying: ‘Think of the rising number of young children going to school in Britain who are still wearing nappies… toilet training can take weeks of dedication to this task. This becomes increasingly impossible when our gross domestic product-obsessed economic system demands that even mothers of small children leave their children in daycare to return to the workplace.”

My blood boiled. But I have to admit that I agree with some of her comments. Toilet training is difficult. And incredibly annoying. By the time I had my fourth child, Dolly, I was so over this particular parenting challenge that I (now look away, Miriam) almost ran back to work to avoid it.

Fortunately, much of the task then fell to our useless au pair, whose modus operandi seemed to be to let Dolly run around the garden all day without anything on from the waist down, and make her pee all over the rhododendrons.

Because my youngest daughter is a late August baby, she started school just a week after she turned four and I’m ashamed to say she was still in overnight diapers at the time. Was this my fault for focusing on work and not spending my days encouraging her to sit on a potty? Guilty as charged, I’m afraid. But that was my choice.

Looking back, it’s completely clear to me that once I realized I needed childcare to work effectively (no more babies bouncing in the corner of my office!), I also realized I had to deal with some of the more boring parts of parenthood. could outsource.

But neither the au pairs nor the daycare centers did the job as well as I could have done if I had nothing better to do. Which of course I did. And this is probably also the reason that all my children were still incontinent at night well into their fourth childhood. However, I think I am in the minority as I voluntarily delegated the tasks. Meanwhile, most other working moms I knew fought fiercely to be as present in every stage of their little ones’ development as they could.

Not me, of course. But I believe that has something to do with having four teeth, weaning and potty training.

I remember my French mother-in-law expressing thinly veiled horror when she discovered how far behind they were. Apparently Gallic babies are placed on a potty as soon as they come out of the birth canal. She kept telling me to refuse the children’s fluids from lunchtime and put them in trousers all the way!

Of course, this helpful advice was pointedly directed at me, even though my husband Keith was between jobs at the time and seemingly spent most of his days on a golf course. Would it have occurred to him to pick up the potty training baton? Don’t be ridiculous.

My husband Keith was between jobs and seemingly spent most of his days on a golf course. Would it have occurred to him to pick up the potty training baton? Don’t be ridiculous (archive photo)

I am completely convinced that as two working parents with demanding careers in our children’s early years, we would be separated now if we had not received outside help.

As career mothers know all too painfully, we women can work if we want, but what will we pay for it at the end of a long day when the lunch boxes still need to be emptied and the washing machine needs to be filled.

For many of us, school is a blessed relief because it allows us – by law and general acceptance – to continue our work with much less effort and expense. There are no complicated childcare arrangements to organize and no feelings of guilt.

If I had been a hands-on mom from the start and spent my days doing nothing more stressful than making things with Play-Doh, I might have felt differently.

Sure, I’ve taken all four of my kids to school with a spare pair of pants in their backpacks and felt a pang of guilt that none of them were truly prepared for this next big step in their lives.

Particularly Dolly, who, on the way to school, desperately sucked her pacifier like a death row inmate getting his last cigarettes.

When we arrived, I tried to pull it out of her mouth as she begged, “One last suck, Mommy,” before dejectedly leaving it in her car seat.

And yes, Miriam, I cried all the way home. Because that is part of motherhood. None of it is easy.

It’s all one big, complicated, guilt-inducing mess that we’re all doing our best to get through without ending up in an insane asylum.

My many shortcomings as a mother hurt me then, and still do 24 years later as my offspring fly the nest, still not fully prepared for the world that awaits them.

But I’ll tell you something for nothing. Besides the drunken nights, none of them wet their pants today. That’s some kind of success, isn’t it?