Parenting? Let's be honest ...

I'D volunteered for the cupcake stall at the school fair. "Making or selling?" enquired the mum at the gate. "Selling."

"Thank God," her relief almost cartoon-enormous. Everyone's laughing at the one who's the benchmark of non-domestica. But do you really want to be known for your baking prowess? I'm with Carrie Bradshaw: the oven's used for storage, and five of our kitchen cupboards are crammed with books. God help the kids. "Whatever works" is the philosophy. Parenting is a process of letting go; relinquishing control of that tight little existence you were once so firmly in command of.

Yes, the baby's still breastfed, but there are no qualms about a hearty dose of formula. "He's having his McDonald's!" yells the chap to neighbours when he's out wheeling wee Jago, bottle in mouth. Yes, my kids eat sweets, but the standard was set a generation ago: Milo on white bread sandwiches every day of school life. How on Earth am I still alive? Yes, my kids watch TV and sometimes it's even used for babysitting to, er, finish a column - but I do recall growing up watching The Brady Bunch, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island and Greenacres for hours on end, every afternoon - as did every kid around me. How can we function in this world? Where were the parents? Not hovering like they do now, that's for sure. A mate earned his way through uni by being paid to watch Days of our Lives each day and deliver a detailed summary. The employer? His working mum. How times have changed.

What I'd love is a bit more honesty in the parenting world, because it's bloody hard, for all of us. It can be such a haranguing, judgmental little battlefield. Can't we just value each other? We all have our short cuts, guilty secrets. Mine? That sometimes it's cereal for dinner. Scrambled eggs, too often, because it's easy and doesn't involve flour. That I've been known to eat an entire packet of chocolate biscuits furtively behind a cupboard like a grubby thief, the kids oblivious by the telly. That my life's been so overtaken by everyone's black socks that I've given up ever sorting them; they're in a basket now, to be delved into by everyone but me. That I turn into someone else when tired; a voice snaps out in a tone of anger and ugliness that I'm ashamed of, yet still it roars. Dirty T-shirts? Sometimes flipped inside out. My kids have never had a home-made birthday cake and yes, I've smacked.

How have any of them survived? No help either, apart from a cleaner. There were afternoon nannies in London, but I found it deadens the relationship between you and your kids. Yes, it's more even, but there are less of the vivid lows and crucially, the soaring highs. The Aussie childminders around me - earning bucketloads as the most-coveted nationality in the nannying stakes - would tell me repeatedly they'd never raise their own kids this way. Telling. Because you need to muck in with them, get your hands dirty; don't want that distance between you like a glass wall in a bank. Or do you? Being a parent puts you at the coalface of living in all its wretched exhaustion and competitiveness and depletion and ugliness - but in all its incandescence, too.

So now we're muddling through with my pathetic attempts at cooking. Miss Four, who has just learnt the art of the compliment, said proudly recently: "This is the first meal I've ever liked, mummy!" (Chicken and broccoli curry in satay sauce - as complex as it'll ever get.) Then there's the poor, dear chap. During my flying trip to England last year my sister's mate was roped in to look after the family. And, er, cooked. For weeks afterwards there were late-night laments emanating from the kitchen: "I married the wrong one." They'll start up again when the chap reads this column and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are freshened up for him once again. Non-domestic-type recipes and secret-embarrassment-as-parent stories most welcome. I can't be the only one, surely?

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