What's so terrible about mothers?

Not every woman in the world wants to be a mother. But like it or not, you can't exist unless you have one. Life as we know it would end without us, as even Camille Paglia, the high priestess of the child-free, admits. 'There is nothing more important than motherhood,' she writes, 'not because it is care-giving, but because it is the primal source of all life and contains its own dark, ambiguous dualities.'

This doesn't stop her commanding women to 'take personal responsibility for the path they have chosen and stop whining for the options they have thereby lost'.

She's not the only one to think so. As much as I hate such easy bigotry, there's always a moment on Mother's Day when I wonder if she has a point. Even as I enjoy my own lie-in and prepare to thank my children effusively for their every offering, I'll be thinking about my own mother and wondering if I've let her down.

As it happens, she's in New York right now. Mother's Day happens later there, so I might just wait till then. But what if I'm wrong? What if it's come and gone and she spent the whole day next to the phone? I could hire a detective and still not know. She's not like my best friend's mother, who will go into a sulk if her flower arrangement has one wilted flower in it. If my mother saw a wilted flower and took it as a sign that her daughter didn't love her, she wouldn't tell a soul. But say if I didn't make some horrible blunder, say I got every last detail perfect - I'd feel just as unworthy, wouldn't I? Mothers are, almost by definition, people you can never thank enough.

I still like hearing the word, though. I like the homemade cards, and I like hearing my daughters whispering nervously on the other side of a closed door as they struggle with the breakfast tray and the flower vase. It doesn't make me feel powerful. It makes me feel loved. And appreciated. And grateful. And rather proud of the children I've helped bring up. But please don't tell anyone. In the present climate, it's inviting the wrath of the gods to say such things in public.

Because something strange happens to the M word when it steps out of the house. Suddenly it gets qualified with words like 'just'. Women who are 'just' mothers are taken to be fools. Unqualified fools. They've had children, people allege, because they couldn't hack it in the 'real' world of work. But working mothers are just as suspect. They treat their children like fashion accessories. They're selfish and cold and not quite human. They're always whinging about how hard it is to balance home and work, and how bad it is that their employers won't help them, when it's clear they could solve the problem tomorrow without any help at all if they gave up 'that European holiday' and used the savings to spend more time at home.

So you're damned if you're a just-a-mother and damned if you're not. You're doubly damned if you're just-a- father. There are still a lot of people out there who don't trust men with children, and many others who aren't quite sure that men who look after children are really men, and quite a few others who think it's fine to cut them out of the picture once a child's parents have separated or divorced. Fathers have even fewer rights.

But the future looks bright. When the new employment laws come into effect next week, fathers will, for the first time in history, be able to claim two weeks' paid paternity leave. But what happens when the paid leave is over? There are, after all, another 6556 more days per child to go.

Mothers fare a great deal better - after next week, if they take up their maximum entitlement of 26 weeks' paid maternity leave, they'll only face 6388 days in which to square the circle. And for the first time ever, parents of adopted children will have the right to unpaid leave, and all parents with children under six or disabled children under eighteen will have the right to ask their employers for flexible working schedules. Employers have to give all requests serious consideration.

But when you think about how many mothers of young children in this UK are in paid employment - the figure is up from 21 per cent in 1983 to 58 per cent in 1997 - and if you look at the figures for men (they have the longest working hours in Europe) you can't help but notice how weak and puny these new provisions are, and how far they fall short of meeting parents' and children's needs.

Well, we did bring it on ourselves, didn't we? No one asked us to have children, and no one told us it was going to be easy. To tell the truth, no one really ever got around to say anything remotely positive. This may just be a reflection of the old British way with children. But in political discourse, at least, it's more virulent than ever. If you are looking to explain why our birth rate is now below replacement level, I suggest you go into this paper's archives and pull together all the things senior members of this Government have said over the past six years about parents, families and children. There are many pronouncements about how important our 'job' is, but the overwhelming emphasis is on how we've failed, and how we must work ever harder and more obediently to make their targets.

But what about our targets? What are the areas in which the Government could do more for parents, and how does it rate next to its European neighbours? The short answer is that their governments all do a lot more than ours . Here, when this Government offers parents a new crumb, there are disturbing echoes of Marie Antoinette. 'I know it's not much,' they remind us peevishly. 'But you ought to be grateful - after all it is cake!'

They don't talk like that in other parts of Europe - especially those parts where they've taken on board the social, economic, political and evolutionary implications of falling birth rates. If people stop having children, it's going to be everyone's problem. If we can't make the Government grasp this obvious point, we don't have much clout, do we? So much for being the primal source of all life.