A woman of no importance?

We all know that being a mum can have a permanent effect on your life, from your shape and size to your social life, relationships and career.

As Mother's Day approaches we asked mothers to write about feelings and experiences of becoming a parent. We spoke to Kate Konopicky, author of A Woman of no Importance, about what having a child did to her world as she knew it.

• I didn't wear a skirt for a year
• A mums' ghetto
• Guilt and the supermum
• My dream indulgence
• Snotty Chiswick toddler groups
• Mother, wife and landlady
• There's a lot of laughter in this house

At first, I didn't have a problem with being a mum. I was besotted with my baby and quite happy to be with her all the time. I've never had a problem with my identity either - career woman was never part of it! The problem only came later when I got bored and broke.

At one point early on, I definitely felt that my time was over and I was handing the baton of "important person" over to my daughter. It was her turn now and it was my job to make sure she had every chance in life. It sounds daft now but I really felt that strongly when she was a baby. I didn't bother much about my appearance and probably didn't wear make-up or a skirt for about a year. Shortly after my 40th birthday I wore a pair of earrings that my sister had made me for my birthday - and lost one. It seemed to sum it all up: what's the point of trying to make myself look nice? The anger was totally disproportionate to the loss so I probably did resent the rotten self-image more than I realised at the time! Now, of course I am perfectly smart and well-groomed at all times. And if you believe that you'll believe anything.

Having a small baby does send you into a sort of mums' ghetto, I think. It's such a devastatingly life-changing state that you do have to leave some people behind, unfortunately. It's too wearing have to explain things all the time. They want you to get a babysitter and go out, do all the same things that they want to do. They can even be a little resentful that you have got something else to think about now. I like the fact that people with children understand a bit better what life is like, but don't always want to be lumped together with the 'mums' - it's a constant mental struggle, trying to be all things to all men (or, more usually, women).

The divide does get smaller with time, however, and I no longer feel I have to be surrounded by other bloody mums all the time! My problem now is getting flung together with my daughter's friends' parents, and seeing a lot of them just because of proximity, and never actually seeing my own friends. It's very true that you don't necessarily want to be bosom buddies with people just because they have children the same age as yours.

The guilt I felt as a mother was largely engendered by my incompetence! Am I doing this right? Is she hungry, cold, hot, ill, unhappy? Why can't I pacify her? What am I doing wrong? I also felt guilty about disturbing my husband when I got up for night feeds, because he was working all hours to make some money. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Somebody remarked to me the other day: "Women aren't allowed to be self-indulgent," and I think that's still true. You just have to get on with it. All those magazine articles make me laugh when they tell you to "make some time for yourself". Yeah, right, then how's the washing going to get done? If you're not doing everything like a sort of supermum you feel selfish and if you think you're being selfish you feel guilty, because mothers are supposed to be totally selfless. We can't win.

My favourite day of the week is Thursday - my day off. Naturally I spend the whole day working or doing all the housework, so by 3pm when I go to pick my daughter up from school I'm usually exhausted and wishing I had just a couple more hours to get everything done. But it's still my favourite day because I get a clear six hours alone. That's my self-indulgence. What I would really, really like is about £2,000 and a day in Peter Jones, but that's never going to happen. (Why Peter Jones? Because I work for John Lewis and I get a discount - I still want my indulgences on the cheap.)

You do need people to talk to, however, but organising social occasions wasn't my strong point when I had a small baby. You need a group of like-minded women to chat to, but you also need somebody else to organise it - preferably without any children present! There's also the danger of talking about nothing but babies - everybody's in the same boat, but everybody wants to talk about their own problems. That's probably why I wrote the book - if you're writing it all down nobody can interrupt you to talk about themselves!

I took my daughter to a couple of mother and toddler groups because I thought she wasn't mixing with enough children. I hated it, and she wasn't too impressed, either. The children were too noisy and pushy and the mothers weren't much better. I didn't find it at all welcoming, I felt as if I was being sized up. Perhaps it was because it was in a rather snotty part of Chiswick! I did meet one very sympathetic French woman (yes, I know, but life's full of surprises) but I never saw her again after a couple of weeks.

I was a freelancer when I got pregnant, so I didn't have a job to go back to, not that I think I would have wanted to anyway. I thought I could work from home - disaster!

I had no idea how much time a small baby can take up. It was important to me to stay with my daughter but finances were a major problem. I could never earn enough to pay somebody well-qualified enough to look after a small baby, so I did it myself. But we were really broke (and I don't mean I had to cut down on fresh flowers and dry cleaning, I mean changing bits of old foreign currency to do the shopping!).

We ended up taking in short-term bed and breakfast lodgers. So much laundry and washing up! I remember pegging out yet another set of bed linen and thinking: "So I'm not just a housewife and mother, now I'm a bloody landlady as well!". It was very, very tough. But I've no doubt that if I had had a very well-paid job it would have been tough as well, leaving her with someone else.

There is no right and wrong in the "working mum v stay-at-home mum" debate and I wish people would understand that you just have to do what's best (and what's possible) for you. The only real solution is to have such enormous amounts of unearned income that you don't have to make any decisions! I now work three and a half days a week and although I like earning the money and getting out of the house, I would still like more time at home.

Being a mum means everything to me. I still get thoroughly hacked off with it, sometimes, though. The low points are when I get absolutely enraged with my daughter because she won't do as she's told, or she sulks or whines and I think I'm bringing up a juvenile delinquent and this isn't how it was supposed to be. Then I just want to leave it all behind and go and stay in a country cottage by myself, with nobody making any demands on me. The high points are when I see how other kids behave and realise that my girl is an absolute angel by comparison (and beautiful and funny and intelligent, of course).

However, despite the fact that I can get extremely irritable and bad-tempered, there is a lot of laughter in this house, which is terrific. What's also terrific is being loved unconditionally - I hope that lasts. When I asked my daughter if I was a good or a bad mum she said I was good. Right answer, but I don't know how much of it had to do with her seeing how much other kids get yelled at! What's a bad mum? Don't know. Maybe someone who has forgotten what it was like to be a child.

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