Whisper it quietly, but whatever has happened to the joy of motherhood? The place where mothers live today, as portrayed in the hugely popular BBC TV series Motherland and Martin Freeman’s hit sitcom Breeders on Sky, is not somewhere I recognise from my own three decades of parenting.
It’s a foreign country to me, populated by selfish, angry, ghastly mothers who whinge and whine and endlessly complain about their lot even though they are mostly middle-class and live in million-pound homes.
I can see that these shows are often funny (the acting is exemplary), and I understand that the characters are exaggerated for comic effect, but the overall picture they paint of motherhood is depressing and bleak.