Pregnancy: Be freelance and have the kind of “catastrophic” insurance that covers something if you are hospitalised, but not sonograms, medicine or doctor visits. Have no end of small problems for which you have to see the doctor, including thinking you are leaking amniotic fluid in seventh month. (Turns out it’s urine, which is at first a relief and then disturbing in its own way). Spend a week believing you have gestational diabetes, but later it’s discovered that it was the glass of Sprite you drank just before the blood test.Bonding: Ask timidly if you are “allowed to breastfeed.”

Birth class: Attend with ex, who openly resents any homework and bolts before class is over each week to get a drink at neighborhood bar. Wonder if it would be more or less embarrassing to go alone.

Labour: Wake up feeling crampy and dig out yellow Wonderbra you’ve never worn before; don it. Go to hospital five hours later and immediately beg for an epidural. Get an epidural that pools so that your left hip is numb but everything else is in full bloom of pain. Make mental note that you don’t have pain relief, nor will you get credit for having a natural birth. Say to anyone near you, at first abashedly but with increasing volume and abandon, that you “really feel like” you have to “poo”. Although all other clothing has been removed, keep yellow Wonderbra on for entire labour and delivery.

Birth partner: Ex is there but leaves during transition to make phone calls. When he comes back, he takes one look at your vagina and blanches. Ex attempts to comfort you through contractions by trying to pash you; stands on IV.

Delivery: Scream bloodcurdling scream until son finally comes out. Baby is immediately whisked to neonatal intensive care unit. Head to hospital room and become the only person on the floor without a baby. Feel foolish.

Bonding, phase 1: Visit child in NICU but feel like interloper. Ask timidly if you are “allowed to breastfeed.” When son finally comes home (day four), experience feeding child as akin to placing a snapping turtle on your swollen, chapped nipples. Notice son has little pimples and have flashback to terrible high school years when you had ackers.

Bonding, phase 2: Son is now covered in white and red pustules and looks not unlike the Singing Detective. When people come to see him, blurt out, “Can you believe how bad he’s got baby acne?!” so that they know you know it’s there. Feel bad that this is the first thing you say about your child. Try to pump bottles so Baby Daddy can do four a.m. feedings, but “allow” the occasional bottle of formula (okay, use formula every night).

Co-parenting: Swing between smugness that you and baby’s father literally share the work and expense of childrearing, unlike most “real” couples you know, and blind rage that you have to parent with irrational man you broke up with two years ago. Wag finger in ex’s face and whisper sotto voce threats that you won’t follow through with.

Bedtime: As child grows older, have him on late schedule so he’ll sleep in the morning. By the time he is twelve months, his bedtime is ten p.m.; by eighteen months, it’s midnight. Keep this a secret from friends, relatives, and your own parents.

School: Take son to pre-school the day after he turns two. Sneak out of school, sniffling, when he isn’t looking because that’s your strategy when you leave him with babysitters. Walk home talking on mobile to sister about how son is in school and next thing you know you’ll be leaving him at Uni when other line beeps in. Learn that son is hysterically crying, “desperate,” as the teacher terms it, and that you are to pick him up immediately. At the pick-up, start to cry when teacher asks if you even said goodbye to son before leaving.

Psyche: Notice son winds his tresses in his fingers as he is falling asleep, plucking out many strands during each nap, creating small bald spot.

Food: Son appears to consume about a gallon of milk every day, eggs, and very little else. He asks for Tic Tacs and cough drops as a treat, demanding in a loud, rude voice, “Need Tic Tac! Need Tic Tac!” Try to resist giving child Tic Tacs or cough drops, as it seems weird and he’s crunching them and probably going to break one of his tiny teeth. Despite anorexic’s diet, son is extremely tall. Sometimes he will emerge from his bedroom chewing on something and when you inquire what, he’ll say, “hair.”

Psyche, part 2: Notice son gets up from a nap covered in strands of hair. Call pediatrician for advice. Pediatrician says to ignore that son is pulling out hair ritualistically, that son is soothing himself, like thumb-sucking. Ignore hair-pulling for one day and then take to whispering intensely to son not to pull his hair; you’ll give him cough drops if he’ll stop pulling hair. Please stop pulling hair.

Love: At son’s school, three weeks into the term, as you are fluffing his hair to obscure thinning areas, receive wet, mentholated kiss from balding two-year-old. Wince as heart nearly breaks from how lucky you are.

Photo courtesy Nathan Kendall

My slate is full this year and while I'm excited to be on the road — – all those Bliss Spa beauty products and random chats with cab drivers – I dread not only saying goodbye to my four-year old, but saying hello. From my Blackberry at the airport, the phone in my hotel room, Skype on the screen of my MacBook, no matter the medium, I'd rather eat my arm than talk to my kid while I'm out of town.

Seriously.

You know how it is fellow sojourners: you long for your children the moment you see the airport sign on the highway. Suddenly nostalgic for the twang of the 5:45 a.m. alarm and epic daily corralling through teeth-brushing, face-washing, yoghurt- and apple-eating, lunch-making and surreptitious eyelash-curling, you have inexplicably romantic thoughts about waiting for the bus or catching the train with five million other people.

You forget holding your breath when the man next to you sneezes five times in a row, and how often you wonder whether you can get swine flu more than once. Or if you live outside a big city, you forget the pang of guilt you feel (the ozone, the future of the planet!) every time you turn on the air conditioner for the seemingly endless drive to school on nauseatingly curvy roads.

But these moments of waxing rhapsodic are fleeting, are they not? Mere hours later, comfortably ensconced in a room with a massive Heavenly Bed and a willing Room Service delivery person, things change.

There are movies on demand… movies you want to watch! The Wifi is perfect and you can work when you want to, at three a.m. say, without worrying about passing out the next day after morning drop-off. Did I mention you can pick up a phone, tell someone what you want to eat and then they . . . bring it to your door? A door you can answer in just a long shirt and bare feet?

Yes, my friends. Things are good. Until the hideous red LED clock on the dark wood veneer bedside table creeps closer to what you have calculated to be bedtime at home. First you have an hour. Then twenty minutes. Five. Three. One. You pick up the phone with a heavy hand. Your partner answers, you brace yourself, and then you’re off to the races.

"Hello!"

You say this first word cheerfully, with great excitement, because you know the first rule of calling home is sounding as if you have been waiting to talk to your spouse and children since the moment you kissed them goodbye at the airport (when the truth is you haven’t thought of them for hours).

"How am I?"

You say this with a little more than a soupcon of aggravation because rule number two dictates you sound as if being away is positively awful, the worse thing EVER. Sounding like you’re having fun could cause jealousy and possibly even long-lasting feelings of betrayal. And so, even though you have largely recovered from the atrocities of air travel, you share only the truly dreadful details.

"Uch, the trip was terrible. Bad food. My seat was in the back of the plane, and the hosties treated me like I had leprosy. They tried to give me a room 10 ks from the bloody lift. When I told the person at the desk, he moved me to a non-smoking room that smelled like an ashtray. You know how it is."

Instead of pity, you’re treated to a recounting of all of the extra work done in your absence. Adhering to rule three, you sympathise and share, from the bottom of your heart, how much you wish you were home to help. Which is more or less true, but the movie you’re watching on-demand has clicked back on after its three-minute pause, and you have to rush to silence it lest your partner thinks you’re luxuriating while he or she scrapes the burnt scrambled eggs out of the pot you left on the stove this morning.

Because you now feel guilty about the movie and yet understandably inspired by your 12 hours of solitude, you throw an offer out, forgetting the last time you did this it landed poorly.

"I’m so sorry, honey. I know it’s hard when I’m away. I’ll be back soon. When I get home, let’s pitch a tent in the backyard and have sex all night under the stars."

Which, as it did the last time you tried it, wins a sarcastic retort. Something like, "Well at the moment, all I can think about is how I’m going to empty the nappy bucket before the natural gases cause an explosion and feed Claire something other than bite-sized Violet Crumble chunks."

You roll your eyes but say nothing (rule number four). And then to get things back on track, you utter the words you’ve been dreading for the last few hours.

"Can I talk to the baby?"

And then it begins, the brutal exchange of barely intelligible grunts, awkward silences, and incoherent trains of thought masquerading as sentences. Ten minutes that sound more or less like this:

You: "Hi honey! How are you? Mummy misses you so much!"

Honey: "What, Mummy?"

You: "I miss you!"

Honey: "What, Mummy?"

You: "I miss you!"

Honey: "Daddy didn’t use the right toothpaste when he brushed my teeth this morning."

You: "Mmmmm.. Well did you tell him it was the wrong toothpaste and show him where the other toothpaste is?"

Honey: Silence.

You: "Honey? Did you tell Daddy to use the other one?"

Honey: "No. I’m hungry Mama. Are you still on the aeroplane? Is there food on the aeroplane?"

You: "No I’m not on the aeroplane anymore. I’m in the hotel."

Honey: Silence.

You: "Honey? Are you there? I’m at the hotel."

Honey: "You’re at the hotel? Where’s that? Is that on the aeroplane? I lost my red bouncy ball today and Daddy couldn’t find it. Are you still on the aeroplane?"

You: "No honey, I’m not on the aeroplane. Remember when we went to Los Angeles and we went to the hotel and the man brought you the chocolate milkshake? Remember the hotel? I’m in a hotel."

Honey: "You’re in the hotel where we got the milkshake? Is that in the plane? Can I have a milkshake now or will the chocolate mess up my poo?"

You feel as if you’d rather slit your wrists than continue this mother-child communication charade, but you must go on as everyone knows maintaining connection is the only way to keep your child from being irrevocably scarred in your absence (rule number five). You fight the urge to scream.

You, calmly: "Okay honey, give the phone back to Daddy."

Honey: "But Mummy? When are you coming home from the aeroplane? Are you coming home tomorrow?"

You: "No, honey. I’m coming home in four days."

Honey: "Is that the day after tomorrow?"

You feel like pulling your fingernails out, but know you must not express one iota of frustration (rule number six).

You: "No, honey, but soon. Now let me speak to Daddy, okay? Mummy misses you. Sleep well. Love you."

Honey: Silence.

You: "Honey? Give the phone back to Daddy."

Honey: "But I don’t want to give the phone back to Daddy."

You: "Give the phone back to Daddy."

Honey: "Mummy, when are you coming home?"

At which point if you’re lucky, your frustrated-but-still-adoring spouse takes the phone and saves you from throwing it on the floor and stomping all over it.

Spouse (again, if you’re lucky): "We miss you babe. I’ll find the toothpaste. I love you. We’ll be here when you call tomorrow."

Tears of gratitude well up in your eyes at this exquisite show of compassion.

"I love you too. Get some rest, okay? Don’t let them wear you out. Kiss."

You hang up and lie flat on your bed, staring at the ceiling. You reach for the remote with your right hand and thank God you’ve got 24 more hours before you have to do it again.

"Sure — just give me two secs."

He huffs back towards the playroom, glancing over his shoulder at me to make sure I am on my way to save him from his younger brother. A typical exchange between mother and son, with one exception: I am completely naked.

He caught me coming out of the shower at the precise moment when the wet towel went up on the hook and I was figuring out what to wear that day. The bedroom door was open and I was rooting through my underwear drawer, still bare when confronted with his urgent problem. Yet neither one of us skipped a beat. I may as well have been standing there in a full-length parka, boots and a hat. It was a non-event for both of us.

Later, I ask my husband, "Do you think it’s creepy that I still let the boys see me without clothes on?"

"It’s not creepy. It’s not like you prance around or anything."

"So, as long as there is no prancing, it’s okay?"

"I think so."

"What about when they’re teenagers?"

"You might want to rethink things then."

But I didn’t want to rethink things. There are certain inalienable rights associated with the family. For me, nudity is one of them.

My feelings are not political. I am not taking any sort of stand on freedom of expression. And I’m certainly not making bold statements about "not being ashamed of my body." At thirty-nine years old, I clearly sport some body parts that are worthy of a little shame. But these are the humans to whom I am the closest in the entire world. If, so to speak, they are the fruit of my loins — why should I have to rush to cover said loins?

A strong case can be made that when your children are toddlers, nudity is not negotiable. When flying solo with my kids, my trips to the bathroom and showers were rarely unaccompanied. Doors were never locked. Unfettered access was a safety issue. But somewhere around age four or five, that argument no longer holds water. It’s at that point that parents choose how they want things to be.

I chose not to cover up — and am sticking with that decision — because paranoia regarding nudity in my own home feels repressive. Yet, it remains an incredible quandary for me and the countless other parents who have young children of the opposite sex. My husband can walk around the house totally starkers for the rest of his life without question or judgment because his parts match our children’s. My sister, the mother of two daughters, can do the same. Yet, as a mother of brothers, my nakedness might be questioned. It feels unfair.

Fathers of daughters have it far worse. The stigma of who is and who isn’t a sexual predator falls heavier on men. I find myself thinking often of The Good Mother, the Sue Miller novel turned movie with Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson, in which a mother’s custody is threatened when her young daughter sees her boyfriend naked, and asks to touch his penis. The boyfriend, with actually the best intentions, agrees and all hell breaks loose. Clearly, in this scenario a line was crossed. But who draws the line?

Nudity in the family falls under the same guidelines as how long to breastfeed, how much TV gets watched or whether sugar cereal is available for breakfast. It varies by family and, I imagine, lines up very closely to what the parents experienced as children. I remember seeing both my parents naked when I was a child — never out of context and never in an inappropriate way. I don’t feel the least bit scarred by this. Conversely, married friends of ours who were both raised in conservative households never saw their parents naked. Consequently, they are never unclothed in front of their own children. I suspect they stay covered up in front of the family pets, too.

Expert opinions on this particular topic may be out there, but finding them online is another story. I went to Google "nudity, children" and then thought twice before hitting "I’m Feeling Lucky." I don’t need the social services showing up in my kitchen. But my concern speaks directly to how stigmatized we have become.

Truth be told, I am not immune to the moral barometer. To wit, showers with Mummy were at one point a special treat for my little guys. There was nothing inappropriate about this activity whatsoever, in my opinion. I washed their hair, made bubbles, and helped rinse. They didn’t wash me. But one day, I noticed that they were tall enough that eye level for them was crotch level on me. And the shower stall does not leave a great deal of room for personal space. That was the day the Mummy showers stopped.

While I still hold my ground on my right to be naked around my kids, I do think there are certain parameters by which to abide:

1) I will not force my nudity on my children. Except for the rare occasion when I need to retrieve some critical article of clothing from the downstairs laundry room and decide to make a dash for it al fresco, my nakedness will remain in the bedroom and bathroom, where I have a right not to be paranoid about it. If they stumble upon me in a state of undress, so be it. If they don’t want to get an eyeful — they will learn to knock.

2) I will never be naked in front of their friends. I do not aspire to be a Mrs Robinson-type figure. When guests are in the house, I will stay covered.

3) If I am going to put myself out there like that, I am going to have to be willing to answer their questions when asked. So far, there haven’t been that many queries, but I probably should practise saying the word "vagina" a lot more.

4) No touching, tickling, hugging, kissing, back scratching or wrestling naked. Now, while these are activities that we do engage in regularly when everyone is dressed, doing any of these things while clothes are off feels highly inappropriate. So it probably is.

5) Lastly and most important, I will trust my gut. We ask our own children to do that when it comes to protecting themselves. When something doesn’t feel right — it almost certainly isn’t. My choice to let my kids see me naked is always reversible. I can just simply start covering up. (For the record, I don’t think the same can be said if your children have never seen you nude and you suddenly decide to expand their horizons.)

I would never judge another parent who is uncomfortable with nudity. I would ask her to do the same with me. With all the horrible things we hear happening to children, it is no wonder we have become a society of overly paranoid parents. It is one thing not to trust others with your children. It is another thing not to trust yourself. The fact that my son doesn’t bat an eye at my unclad body suggests that I am raising an uninhibited child who has the highest level of comfort with his mother. And, in my opinion, there isn’t anything creepy about that.

Article photo courtesy Amanda Holden

If I give in, I won’t have to either. I slip my hand out of the warmth of our comforter and slide it across flannel, feeling for the spot where the remote landed when it ricocheted from my nose. I point it in the general direction of the TV on our dresser and press "power." "There you go, honey," I mumble, but it’s muffled, my head already burrowing back into my pillow.

My daughter goes from sixty to zero. Mummy’s stint as a human trampoline is over. Jillian is already curled in a foetal position, her head on Daddy’s pillow, her eyes fixed on Cookie Monster as he once again devours the letter of the day.

"Cookie Monster’s funny," she says through a fit of giggles. Apparently, that joke never gets old. But I have.

Two years ago, I called my husband at work, horrified. My friend had dropped her three-year-old off for the day, and he’d spent the morning demanding the Disney Channel. "Can you believe it?" I asked Jonathan, full of righteous indignation. "I had books I picked up at the library yesterday. Boy books! Books just for him! And all he wants to do is watch TV. What are they teaching him?"

"It’s okay, honey," he said. "Just let him watch a little TV. He’s fine. I watched TV, and I’m fine, right?"

"Yeah, fine," I muttered to our then-infant daughter as I got off the phone. "Daddy’s fine, but his world revolves around SportsCenter. And God forbid the cable goes out . . . oh, noooooooo."

I was darn sure my baby wasn’t going to go down that road. I wasn’t going to use TV as babysitter. I wasn’t going to park my kid in front of the idiot box. I wasn’t going to be a cliche. And my position had some extra credibility, because I, ahem, didn’t have television until I was seventeen. Yes, that’s right, folks, step right up and see the ’80s child who never even had the chance to figure out just what Willis was talking about.

When I was pregnant, I sported that fact like a badge of honour. The fact that I’d spent most of high school begging my parents for a cable hook-up so I could get in on all the talk about Ross and Rachel was quickly forgotten.

"I love to read," I’d tell people, rubbing my belly. "And this one will too. I’m going to limit how much TV little Squirmy watches. We’re going to read books every night before bed, and every morning. You know, I didn’t have TV, and I could sort my parents’ mail when I was two and a half."

Jillian’s two and a half now. She can’t sort our mail.

She can tell you Curious George airs after Sesame Street. Then we switch the channel. What she watches next depends, really, on when I rouse myself from my cocoon and head downstairs for my morning caffeine injection. If it’s time for Pinky Dinky Doo, the TV in the living room is tuned to Noggin while I putter in the kitchen. If The Upside Down Show is still on, I’m open to negotiations.

"Cars or The Little Mermaid?" I ask.

"How ’bout . . . um, this one?" Jillian counters, grabbing Blue’s Clues Shapes and Colours off her shelf at the bottom of our DVD collection.

I don’t even blink. Whipping the disc out of the box, I do a quick switch in the DVD player, and she settles on the couch with a yoghurt drink and plate of toast.

By the time she wanders down the hall to my office thirty minutes later, I’ve made three phone calls and answered a host of emails. I’ve checked in with my editor and scheduled two interviews — one face-to-face, one on the phone, set for fifteen minutes from now.

So I couldn’t be happier to see she’s brought another movie with her. This time, it’s Thomas’ Trusty Friends, and she wants to watch it in the office. Not a problem — that’s why there’s a DVD/VCR combo sitting beside my printer and a TV on top of the shelving unit filled with colouring books and puzzles. It’s looking like this might be one of those days when Jillian watches something like six hours of television.

Somewhere, the me of two years ago is holding her head in her hands. After all, all the media reports will tell you kids shouldn’t be watching television at all, let alone all day.

Television commercials — isn’t that ironic — are aired daily with suggestions of outdoor activities to get your kids away from the tube. Mummy magazines are full of numbers from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) — zero hours of television recommended for children under two and all that. The AAP says, "Research has shown that children who consistently spend more than four hours per day watching TV are more likely to be overweight." Their experts say, "Kids who view violent events, such as a kidnapping or murder, are also more likely to believe that the world is scary and that something bad will happen to them." And let’s not forget, the AAP says, "Research also indicates that TV consistently reinforces gender-role and racial stereotypes."

So, let me get this straight: I’m raising a fat racist who’s afraid of everything, a girl who’s going to fall all over herself to let men be the boss.

Tell that to the little girl playing in her toy kitchen in the next room. Her pants are falling off her skinny hips. Tonight she’s going to beg, as she does every other night for repeated readings of her favourite bedtime story, Georgie and the Noisy Ghost.

When I finally get her to bed, she’ll tell me she loves me. And when I say it back, she’ll smile. "’Cause I’m the most beautiful, most smartest girl in the world. I’m smarter than Daddy and everybody."

Oh dear, what am I going to do about her self-esteem?

The truth is, I’m not crazy about all the TV watching in my house — whether it’s Jillian or my husband in front of the screen. But I sacrifice to the TV gods in exchange for a work-from-home job, one that lets me spend more time with my daughter but requires me to offer her a smaller piece of my attention during the day.

It’s not a daycare provider parking her in front of the screen; it’s her mother, the same lady who curls up on the couch for a solid hour in the afternoon, reading Make Way for Ducklings and Goodnight Moon. It’s the same woman who spends bath time giving voices to the rubber duckies and spelling with foam letters on the wall. It’s her mother, who will kiss her goodnight and tell her she’s the smartest and most beautiful girl in the world, and that yes, she can watch Elmo in Grouchland in the morning.

While the bedrooms of the neighbour’s children just across the way are dark, save for a night light in the toddler’s room, my three-year-old is wide awake. She isn’t up past her bedtime. She doesn’t have one.

She has those important rituals of bedtime, sure. She is bathed by me or my husband almost every night, her delicate skin covered first in lotion and then a set of fleecy pajamas. We’ll generally settle in her bed to read stories, but sometimes in ours. She gets at least two books read every night — one per parent. On that, there is no negotiating.

What’s fluid is the time.

Our daughter goes to bed when we do. And so in the hours after my husband comes home from the office and I finish up my work-at-home writing, we spend our time together. We eat dinner together — even if it’s on the living room couch, with a dog staring hopefully at a butterfly-shaped plate set precariously on the edge of the coffee table.

We build pirate ships, and, yes, sometimes we watch TV while she reads herself Clifford the Big Red Dog books, upside down because they’re sillier that way, curled up against my side.

With two working parents, our days are hectic. Even on the days that I work at home, the house is loud — the radio blaring in one room, my daughter outfitting the dog with a set of bunny ears in the other. But we are, by nature, a boisterous and busy family. When night falls, the idea of hustling my daughter off to bed so I can be alone with my husband is a foreign concept to me — and to him.

And yet, many of my friends tell me how lucky they are. Their kids go to bed by seven p.m., and they have couple time after. They do the dishes with no children underfoot. Throw in a load of laundry. Watch their own, much trashier, TV.

Sounds nice — I guess. Except I also hear the wistfulness from other working parents — women and men — who would like more time to spend with their kids. If there’s a common theme among working parents it’s this — they yearn for extra hours to be tacked on to the day. Work is a necessary evil, but they don’t want it to come at the expense of being a good parent.

Or maybe it’s at the expense of watching their kids grow up? Because there’s nothing like seeing a child every day — seeing them in action, not cuddled in a bed for a quick good night kiss — to make you feel like you matter as much to them as they do to you.

That’s why there’s no bedtime in our household, why the seven o’clock hour does not turn our child into a screaming, writhing pumpkin who just wants another ten minutes to play with her toys or sit between Mummy and Daddy on the couch. We tried it a few times — the march upstairs to the bedroom, the tuck in, the request for water, the tuck in, the pleas to go potty again, the tuck in. Each night it would go on for an hour or two, her too keyed up for bed, us more exhausted by the minute.

Pretty quickly, we realised it wasn’t just a rule we didn’t like enforcing but one we saw no point in enforcing. If she was awake, why argue her into bed? Why spend our few hours together as a family every night manning our battle stations?

Commenting recently in the New York Times on the fact that President Barack and Michelle Obama enforce a strict eight p.m. bedtime for daughters Sasha and Malia, Dr. Judith Owens, who directs the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children’s Hospital, says parents unfortunately misjudge the appropriate bedtime because they think their kids need less sleep than they do. Owens says just 2.5 percent of the population needs significantly less sleep than average, but 95 percent of the population wrongly thinks it’s in that 2.5 percent category.

But Dr. Perri Klass, who wrote the New York Times piece, points out that the sleep experts suggest “testing your routine by checking whether the child wakes spontaneously, alert and cheerful and ready for the day.”

Mine does.

In fact, she still rises earlier in the morning than I do — because she generally still falls asleep before either her father or me, him because he stays up to check out the sports scores, me because after a bedtime story, I pick up the latest novel off of my bedside table and spend at least an hour decompressing with some escapist trash.

But while the friends who brag that their children are off to bed by seven p.m. are the same mothers and fathers who make repeated requests to institute a mid-day nap just for parents, I am rarely wakened by an overeager toddler at five a.m. or even six a.m. She generally makes her appearance in our room just before the alarm goes off at seven — sometimes later, while we’re still pulling out clothes for the day. On weekends, when there is no work alarm, she may sleep as late as eight, a blissful lay-in for the whole family on a Saturday morning. By the time she’s ready to crawl out of bed, so are we.

To me, those extra morning hours in bed are nice. But they’re only the icing on the cake. Because some of the best parts of me — my undying love of the Rolling Stones, my penchant for fudge cookies — come from late nights long after my mother and brother were sleeping, when I sat in my insomniac dad’s home office. In between drafting invoices for his contracting business, we listened to classic rock and shared shortbread loaded with fudge.

I had no bedtime, but my father knew just where his child was at ten p.m. Even better — he knew who she was.

I first learned of this policy about a month before my due date, when my husband and I took a tour of the facility. The nurse showed us one of the post-delivery rooms, letting us marvel at just how un-hospital-like it seemed. And then, as we left the room, she gestured briskly at the hospital’s nursery: "But you and your babies hopefully won’t be seeing much of that. Our expectation is that babies will be sleeping beside their mums. The nursery is only used for babies experiencing medical complications."

At the time, this sounded great. After waiting nine-plus months to meet the baby of my dreams, why would I possibly want to ship him off to a sterile, fluorescent-lit nursery where I wouldn’t be able to stare into his eyes or caress his little hands or cuddle him against my chest? Provided the guy was in good health, why would I not want him beside me every moment of those first few days? In other words, our hospital’s rooming-in policy seemed like little more than common sense… until, that is, I gave birth.

I know that labour isn’t easy for anyone, and having talked to plenty of other mums about their experiences, I feel pretty lucky — no serious complications, no c-section, no back-labour, no tearing or vacuum extractions or other horror scenarios. I went into labour a little after midnight and thirty-two hours later: presto.

At the time of my first contraction, I was in good health and good spirits but not exactly well rested after three months of trying to sleep with what my midwife referred to as itty-bitty bladder syndrome. My first night of contractions was manageable, but sleepless (was I really going to doze off knowing I was having my baby?). The second night was relatively painless thanks to my epidural, but still sleepless, as I experienced the not-uncommon side effect of shaking and shivering through most of the night. So by the time I gave birth, I’d gone forty-eight hours without a wink.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: enter husband/ partner/ impregnator. And indeed, my husband was a superhero during those first post-birth days and weeks. The problem we faced was that, despite all those much-craved burgers and bowls of guacamole I consumed throughout my third trimester, our little guy was born absolutely famished and really psyched about this whole breastfeeding thing — as in, wanting to do it constantly.

And in addition to being famished, he was quite the moody newborn. Apparently, his thirty-two-hour entry into the world hadn’t tuckered him out one bit. Begin sleepless night numbers three and four.

Around my sixtieth waking hour, the flowery wallpaper and homey-style furniture of my birthing centre suite began to blur into the interior of a garish funhouse. At some point during our last night in our nursery-less hospital, a nurse who I remember only as having the face of an angel took pity on me, scooped up the baby and walked him around the halls, somehow keeping him quiet, while I slept. Maybe she rubbed whiskey on his gums. I didn’t know and frankly, I didn’t care. I collapsed into a coma-like state for a couple of blessed hours before the sun rose and it was time for our happy family to get ready to go home.

Promoted by the midwife/ doula/ home-birth-movement community, as well as the World Health Organization, the practice of newborns rooming-in has been widely embraced. It’s a pretty straightforward philosophy: newborns should be within arms-reach of their mothers whenever possible. They argue that separation between mother and child during these first few days can disrupt bonding, impede nursing, and force hospitals to take extensive security and identification precautions for infants who are shuttled back and forth between nursery and post-delivery rooms.

As a result, most hospitals now offer parents the choice of having their baby room with them or go to the nursery. And such a choice makes sense; many of the mums I know spoke glowingly about their rooming-in experiences — especially mums who had relatively short labours or sleepy babies who gave them the chance to recover from the not insignificant strains of childbirth. But other women — women who had marathon labours like mine, or difficult labours, women who bore fussy or hungry or colicky babies and then attempted to care for them through the night — found the experience torturous, or in many cases, simply impossible, and were grateful to be able to send the baby to the nursery for a night or two before going home.

Often, I find myself recalling with bitter amusement the tour guide’s explanation for our hospital’s policy: "We believe that new mothers actually sleep better with their babies close by."

Yes, this must be why enemy interrogators frequently use tape recordings of screaming infants as a form of low-grade torture, because the sound is just so soporific.

Could a more likely explanation be that rooming-in allows hospitals to cut down on staffing and other costs associated with running a nursery? It’s hard for me to accept that it’s really “better” for a woman who has been laboring for days, who perhaps hasn’t slept well in weeks, to be kept awake for an additional two nights and sent home with her new infant in a state of debilitating exhaustion.

The seriousness of this situation descended on me a couple of days after arriving home, when I felt a sore throat and muscle aches coming on, which I thought might be a flu. I completely broke down. I can’t do this, I thought. I haven’t slept in five nights. If I get sick, even a little, I won’t be able to take care of this baby. I phoned my mother, who’d been planning on flying in to visit a few days later. She answered the phone and I greeted her by repeating the same word again and again: Help, help, help.

I’m all for bonding. I’m all for women having the option of keeping their new babies beside them. Options are great. But so is rest and recovery. So is not being made to feel like a failed mother if you need to let someone else — say, a well-trained nurse — help care for your newborn while you regain the strength that labour saps.

That’s why, should I do it all again, I will deliver at a hospital where rooming-in is an option and not an expectation — where, should the need arise, I can stare into my new baby’s big beautiful eyes and caress his little hands all night long, in my dreams.

“I’m only giving him a taste,” she explained, cheeks flushed. “I almost never give him sugar.”

Across the table, the mother of the birthday boy was feeding him the slimmest sliver of carrot cake.

“It is his birthday,” she apologised. “This is practically his first sugar. We haven’t even given him meat yet.”

Standing in the kitchen doorway where I was letting Leo demolish an entire adult-sized piece of cake, I — as per usual when then conversation turns to baby diets — kept my mouth shut.

Because if I opened it, I’d have to admit that the first food Leo ever tasted was ice cream, straight from the plastic spoon at Molly Moon’s ice cream parlor after a trip to the zoo. Then I’d have to admit that on his first birthday he didn’t get some paper-thin slice but a full-sized piece of banana cake with plenty of frosting, and he downed every last crumb. That not only has he eaten meat of pretty much every persuasion, he’s also delved into pizza, fish sticks, and enough homemade cookies and cake to win me the Martha Stewart award.

As someone who’s tired of getting the evil eye from people who seem to think feeding your child a donut is the equivalent to feeding him crack. I’m just going to come clean and say it.

I wasn’t always the junk food cheerleader. My kid eats junk.

Part of it is practicality — or maybe just laziness. As a working single parent, I learned early on that I can’t keep every last ball in the air, not matter how ostensibly good it is for my child. Already, there have been plenty of nights when the home-cooked well-balanced meal of my intentions morphed into french toast.

But there’s a value system at play here too. I want eating — and life — to be fun for Leo, not something full of rules and shoulds. And let’s face it, junk food is fun. I don’t want to raise a child who’s a Puritan, who can’t kick loose and enjoy life’s pleasures. Maybe I’m waltzing him down the road towards obesity and heavy recreational drug use, but I’m willing to take that chance.

For me, this love affair with junk food is also personal. As a teenager I struggled with food. I had eating disorders and played pretty heavily into the shoulds and won’ts and endless rules. I feel lucky I have a boy, who won’t have to face the same kind of love/hate relationship with his size and shape. But if I came away from all that having learned anything, it’s that denial is a dangerous tool and that too little of anything can be as damaging as too much.

I wasn’t always the junk food cheerleader. While Leo was still breastfeeding, I had visions of being one of those mums who raised her kid the Super Baby Food way. I planned to reform both our eating habits to be full of whole grains and leafy greens and sugar only on birthdays and special occasions. It sounded like the right thing to do.

I got my first inkling this wasn’t going to work out when I took Leo to a party when he was about 3 months old. I watched a father try to steer his two kids away from the chocolate chip cookies and towards a plate of shrimp. Could I pull a lie like that over on my son? That shrimp is a viable choice over a chocolate chip cookie? Surely my kid is going to be smarter than that.

Then there was the friend who told me she never fed her three kids sugar, but that she and her husband pulled the ice cream tub from the freezer every night the second they went to bed. And another friend whose mother raised them on applesauce-sweetened date bars and told them they were cookies. And the mum I met at the park who proudly informed me that she’d baked her daughter a tofu-carob birthday cake for her second birthday and swore up and down this was celebrating. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that building a junk food-free life for Leo would involve a lot of lying — and that’s one dynamic I don’t want unfolding between us.

I can’t say I get any support in the popular press with this one. Every time I turn around there’s another parenting magazine or newspaper headline warning me my child’s going to be an obese and angry underachiever if I offer him any snacks besides apple slices and baby carrots.

Of course, those articles never mention the other side of things. But those of us who grew up around health nut families know the truth. There’s something wrong with kids who don’t ever get a taste of the darker side.

Children who are never exposed to junk flip out when they enter an environment that might potentially contain an M&M. I remember how, the second my mother left us alone in the kitchen, my friend Sarah would leap to the countertop like Cat Woman and begin scouring our cupboards for stale marshmallows and open bags of chocolate chips, anything that might smack of a sugar high. Kids like Sarah never learn the art of moderation. When they go off to university, instead of binge drinking, they’re likely to hole up at McDonalds and inhale five Big Macs at a time.

When it comes down to it, I don’t want to deprive my child of the experience of indulging in wanton pleasure. Sure, technically junk food is not good for him. But do we really have to do every last thing that’s good for our kids? Does that honestly make them better people or just uptight, inflexible, and holier than thou?

For now, I’m trying to model reasonably healthy behaviour on my end and pretty much letting Leo eat what he wants. If he starts angling for ice cream and lollies morning, noon and night, that may have to change. Until then, I cast my vote for raucous over restraint. When it comes down to it, I’d rather be raising a fun, inventive, original, sugar-hyped little boy than a kale-and-brown-rice-eating , mind-your-manners bore.

At first it was cute. When my twin daughters were three, I didn’t flinch at the thought of prancing down the street with one child clad in rainbow tights, a fuchsia tutu, a floppy blue sun hat, and yellow rubber boots. It was the perfect compliment to her sister’s look: orange shorts layered over purple floral pants, multi-coloured striped shirt beneath a shiny cartoon-cat patterned vest, and a red fleece Elmer Fudd-ish hat perched on her head. Like the cherry on top of a very nutty sundae. People on the street would smile, chuckle, and comment as our cute, kaleidoscopic spectacle paraded by. To be honest, I kinda got off on the attention. I was proud of my little girls for picking out those outlandish get-ups all by themselves, so I did nothing to discourage it. I may have even made suggestions from time to time. Hey, you know what would go great with that tiger costume and those ballet slippers? The red Elmer Fudd hat!

But now, my daughters are almost six. They go to a nice little public school in a nice little neighbourhood in our nice little city. And they stick out like a pair of kooky, sparkly, technicolor thumbs. Which has me seriously questioning my decision to give them free rein in their closets, and worrying that their clothing choices reflect badly on me. Now, as I dart down the street with my colorfully clashtastic kids looking like a posse of insane clowns, I worry what other mothers think. I worry that they are judging me, whispering that only an LSD-dropping social maladjust would allow her children to go out in public dressed like that. But I am not an LSD-dropping social maladjust. Haven’t been for quite some time. In fact, I spent the last six years cultivating the attitude that I was a far better parent than those whose murmurs I’m now suddenly paranoid about: those who forbade the public wearing of tutus with rubber boots. Those who confined their kids’ clothes to classic shades of tasteful, sophisticated and dull. Those whose children’s outfits failed to inspire seizures in epileptic bystanders. I didn’t shackle my children with the notion that clothing had to match. I didn’t push my kids to blend in with the sheepish crowd. I was too busy teaching them to be creative and carefree. To be individuals. And I was pretty damn smug about it.

See, I’m no clothes horse. I’m more like a clothes donkey. And ever since the thorough heckling I endured for the trendy red crushed velvet corset/coffin-lining/pirate shirt hybrid I wore in grade ten, I’ve avoided taking risks with my wardrobe. My outfit options fall into three categories: black hanging-around-the-house clothes, black going-out-in-public clothes, and crazy-things-I-bought-on-impulse-but-don’t-have-the-guts-to-actually-wear clothes. But I always wanted to be the girl who could pull off the tartan-mini-skirt-over- ripped-jeans look. Maybe with a purple cashmere sweater, a stripey knit scarf, peacock feather earrings, and a blue fedora. So, maybe by letting my kids continue to dress like the rainbow riot squad, I’ve been doing a little vicarious living. And maybe it’s time I stopped. Maybe I should put the tutus and wacky hats back in the dress-up trunk where they belong. Maybe I should sit my girls down and explain the importance of not wearing multi-colored horizontal and vertical stripes with polka-dots and jumbo floral prints. Maybe I should make some room in their closets for shades of tasteful, sophisticated — and yes, even dull — before my unsuspecting daughters and their fashion non-sense become targets of other kids’ cruelty and insecurity. But it might be too late for all that, as is evident by the conversations that ensue when I try to stage my little interventions.

Me: Here sweetheart, why don’t you try this sweater. It’s nice and soft and…

Neen: It’s brown.

Me: Yeah. Isn’t it pretty?

Neen: Brown is not in the rainbow.

Me: That’s okay. You can just try it…

Neen: No I can’t. Rainbows don’t wear brown.

Me: Okay. But it’s not like you have to wear every color of the rainbow all at once, right?

Neen: Yes I do. How can people know I’m a rainbow if I don’t wear all the colors?

Then she rolls her eyes at me like I’m crazy, and asks me where her red hat is. And instead of seizing this teachable moment to impress upon my daughter the value of dressing like a rational little human being, I’m the one who learns a lesson: you just can’t argue with a rainbow. So I try her twin sister. She’s a little less abstract. Less likely to turn this into a debate. Less prone to envisioning herself as an awe-inspiring, sky-spanning natural phenomenon.

Me: Hey, let’s just put these jeans on so we can—

Roo: No.

Me: But it’s time for school, so let’s just take off the tutu and put on some—

Roo: NO!

Me: But hon, tutus are for dress up, so it’s time to take the tutu off—

Roo: THEN I’LL JUST GO TO SCHOOL NUDIE! WITH MY BOOTS ON!

The tutu it is, then.

As it turns out, the “expert” advice was right on the money. Letting my kids pick their own clothes has given them control over their identities, and their choices are expressions of their budding personalities. They are boisterous, wacky, unpredictable, and colorful. The seeds of independence have been planted, and my daughters’ decision-making skills have flourished. They’ve drunk from the cup of freedom, the chalice of choice, and decided that it would make a great hat. Who am I to take that away from them because of my own ego?

Short of pinning them down and dressing them myself every day, or gutting their closets and replacing their wardrobes with nice neutral mix-and-match collections, there’s not much I can do. And I suppose there are worse things than going to school dressed like a rainbow, or a rubber-booted ballerina. Like going to school nudie. But while I’m busy rationalising my defeat, and rehearsing the humiliated smile I’ll need to flash at other mothers to convince them I am not a bad parent, my husband plays the glad game. “Maybe it’s for the best,” he says. “You know, like in nature. How bright colors warn other animals to stay away.” Because nothing screams, “Don’t mess with me! I’m dangerous and/or crazy!” like wearing an electric blue faux fur vest and pink leg warmers. Or maybe, like in nature, the vibrancy of my kids’ clothes and personalities will attract others of their own colorful kind.

Many years ago, before I had my own children, I was having coffee with my aunt when she confessed that she favoured one of her children over the other. Actually, it wasn’t really a confession — there was nothing guilty or secretive about it — it was more a statement of fact. I felt vindicated; here was an adult, a parent, admitting something I had always believed taboo. I confided that I had long suspected that my mother favoured my sister. My aunt, alas, didn’t disagree.

Now that I have kids, I find that favourites do exist, even at an early age. Of course, at this age the preference is more age-based than anything else: at the ripe old age of three, my son Declan is capable of carrying on a conversation and sharing a Frappucino, both activities I enjoy. Ronan, on the other hand, just shy of two, is capable of head-butting his cousins and throwing his food on the floor.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that I love one of my kids more than the other, or that I’m likely to "accidentally" leave one at the petrol station. When Ronan wraps his grubby little arms around my neck, puts his head on my shoulder and sighs, “Mummy,” my heart actually hurts with love. But whether it’s age-based or personality driven, I’m sure that as my kids grow up I’ll like them in different ways.

And research confirms that I’m not alone. A 1997 Cornell University study found that 80 percent of older mums (anonymously) admitted to having a favourite child. The study also found that 60 percent of children could not identify who was their mother’s favoured child. So that’s some small comfort: we may have a favourite child, but we don’t let it show.

A recent thread on a parenting message board begins with the post, “I know, it’s taboo to admit. But do you have a favourite child?” The poster explains, “To me, it’s like any other relationship. I have a large group of friends and I love them all dearly, each in their own way for their own reason. But there are one or two who just click better with me. I can’t even place why. It just feels different.” The poster closes with, “Needless to say, I love ALL of my children,” which struck me as a little defensive.

When I asked other parents if they had a favourite child, many looked at me with a mix of shock and disgust. Some professed to having no partiality at all. Others claimed that preferences were situational. And then there were the really honest ones.

“ABSOLUTELY,” (her emphasis, not mine) wrote one friend in response to my email. “It was my middle son. We thought alike and loved to do things together.” She admitted, “I know he knows that he was the favourite but I doubt the other two knew.”

Another mother writes of her daughter, "I really feel like there is just a different connection there. It’s so strong. It’s just this amazing feeling." The same mother recalls her own mother’s favouritism: "I was never hurt over it. I’ve always understood that my mum loved me but just clicked with my brother."

So why are so many parents loathe to admit what one father calls “an obvious truth”? Because as parents, it’s hard for us to separate love from like. Admitting that your personality is more compatible with one of your kids than the other is by no means a reflection of love. But many people see it that way.

Stacy DeBroff, founder of momcentral.com, calls favouritism "somewhat inevitable." She explains, "As a parent, you find yourself drawn to a child who is most like you — traits that you can identify with and deeply empathisze with as you experience them yourself.” Though I have yet to see my own experiences reflected in my young children, save Declan’s fear of the dark and occasional bed-wetting, I do see this happening with my sister, whose six-year-old daughter is a carbon copy of herself at the same age. As such, she is dramatic and fiercely resentful of all the "little kids" in our communal household (that would be Declan and Ronan and her three younger siblings). Whereas I, a younger sibling myself, might have told her to suck it up (in nicer terms, of course), my sister, who was fiercely resentful of having to share a room with me at the same age, decided to convert a storage room into a bedroom for her oldest daughter. While my sister insists that she doesn’t favour any of her five children, clearly she feels a certain affinity for the daughter whose experiences most closely match her own.

For other parents, it’s the kids most like them who are the hardest to relate to. When we see our own flaws reflected in our children, it can be hard to tolerate. One mother confesses her preference for her daughter, going on to say, "[My son], well, I love him but, my God, does he ever get on my nerves. Apparently he’s just like me, and that’s the problem."

For many harried parents, the favoured child is simply the easiest one. As one friend joked, his favorite was "whichever one is most soundly asleep at the time." In response to the aforementioned bulletin board posting, one mother wrote, “Right now the baby is my favorite, but that’s b/c he can’t talk back to me and doesn’t dump his toys all over the floor. . .YET!!” Another mother confessed, “Heck, sometimes the best any of them can do is ‘least-annoying!’”

In some cases, the kids do the deciding for you. My three-year-old isn’t shy about voicing his preferences; when I ask him how much he loves me, he throws his arms open as wide as they can go; when my husband asks the same, Declan holds his thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. And when two-year-old Ronan wakes up in the morning, it’s always with an ear-splitting “Daddy!”

But I’m sure this won’t always be the case. Just as my favorite will change as my sons grow up and develop their personalities, so too will theirs change as they reject conversations and Frappucinos for chess or football or whatever they choose to do. I expect that one day down the road, they will ask me which one I prefer. And I’ll borrow the line of this smart mother: "I will always love you both totally equally. But from time to time, I like one of you better than the other." And who might that be at any given moment? A good parent never tells.

When our first child was born, we both took some time off to stay at home. For the first few weeks, our infant daughter napped peacefully in the living room cot while the television blasted out the sound of online car races and accidents as her sleep-deprived parents played Burnout 3. As a going-away present from my colleagues, I got a Nintendo DS (handheld gaming platform), which soon became my daughter’s favorite toy, the tactile screen providing a perfect playground for her stylus-thin fingers.

On her second birthday, she switched from handheld to console gaming, watching us play kid-friendly games on the Nintendo Wii. To our concerned friends, I joked that I would always be able to limit my children’s gaming time with the final argument that “It’s Mummy’s turn with the Playstation!”

I added that, as a gamer, I would be more qualified than most parents to supervise my kid’s choices. With my knowledge of the medium, I would be able to guide my daughter down the virtuous path of interactive entertainment without falling into the quicksand of car stealing and zombie killing. I’d be both the most responsible parent in the world, and the coolest mom on the block!

I also thought proficiencies my daughter was acquiring at such a tender age would be a great foundation for her teen years: while other girls become bored wall-flowers whenever their boyfriends organize a LAN party, my daughter would be able to “frag” with the best of them. I wasn’t giving her a bad habit. I was preparing her for a technology-driven world!

We spent hours running around in virtual worlds.When she also started playing by herself, we’d let her play half an hour of videogames per day. We’d let her choose between television and games, but the former seldom won out.

When I became pregnant with our second child, my energy level dwindled, and I found myself giving in more often to her videogame demands. After an hour spent dressing and undressing Polly Pocket dolls, I was more than up for catching a few stars in Super Mario Galaxy.

Our daily half-hour soon bloomed into a full one. And as the months passed and my belly swelled, my will faltered some more and that single hour multiplied. My balloon-like feet high on a pile of cushions, we spent hours running around in virtual worlds, kissing weird Japanese characters or gathering honey for Winnie the Pooh.

Then came Lego Indiana Jones.

That one we played as a family: my husband controlled the main character and our daughter and I shared “Player 2″ duties. At that point, she was approaching her third birthday and becoming quite good at pushing buttons. I moved the character around with the joystick while she pressed the “jump” button. As the levels progressed, she got the hang of the “use” button, which inevitably became the “fight” button. “Cartoon violence,” said the packaging, to describe Lego men dissolving into smaller Lego pieces whenever they got hurt.

“Who are we fighting?” my daughter asked one day as she repeatedly pressed the “A” button. I launched into a “Good versus Evil” explanation that would have made George Lucas proud. She nodded gravely, and then dropped the bomb on my mothering pride: “Mummy,” she pleaded, “I want more bad guys to beat up!” She wasn’t yet three, and had just tasted the joy of virtual attacks. What had I done?

In my defense, I’d mostly turned to video games for a sense of security. Since my daughter’s birth, I had always been the kind of mom that sits on the floor to tell stories with stuffed toys, or run around at the park playing Hide and Seek. From a self-centered young adult, I had grown into a nursery-rhyme singing, Play-Doh molding, selfless mother, always going the extra mile to make my little one happy. I spent my days finding happiness through her eyes. Like a play slave, I invented games until my mind grew blank, and forced enthusiasm for occupations that sometimes bored me to tears.

I could have kept on going. The problem was that, soon, my duties would double… and that scared me to no end. I already felt at the limit of what I could give. Would I keep on going on sheer will, gradually transforming into the motherhood version of a Stepford Wife: perfect in appearances, yet internally screaming every time I saw a plastic doctor kit?

After two years of adapting playtime to my daughter’s preferences, pregnancy made me start having her adapt to mine. Some parents take their kids to see art house movies like Harold and Maude, others take theirs to bars. I had taught mine to play videogames.

I proposed a quest to find a save point before dinner. Back on the couch, my husband answered my daughter’s plea with a roaring “I’m a bad guy!” and they were now fake-wrestling, tickling, and giggling away toward a bad case of hiccups. I could have put an end to the whole thing right there and go back to supposedly “wholesome” games that encourage imagination and physical activity. But did I really want to? I finally let go of the perfect mother I had planned to be, picked up the controller, and proposed a quest to find a save point before dinner.

There would be time later for a return of the “half-hour” rule and for games labeled “early childhood.” Right now, there were Lego Nazis to be dealt with, and the fact that we all could enjoy it naturally and effortlessly felt like salvation.

As we resumed our button mashing, I looked at the blinking light on my controller. It stated that I was the second player out of a possibility of four. Four? I stroked my bulging belly, all fears gone for the first time in months. Our second child could come: there was place in my heart, in my life… and on my X-box.