I sat in the sunshine outside our local bakery the other day, babies sleeping in the pram, when the man on the bench beside me told me he also had twins. They are now three, nearly four he told me, and oh what a joy they bring. The sight of him filled me with optimism; he seemed so relaxed and happy, eating his piece of cake on a spring-filled Sunday morning, no children in tow. Then we started talking about nights, foolishly perhaps on my side. No, they still don’t sleep well, I heard with horror. One wakes up and then the other one and they almost always end up in their parents’ beds. What, I thought indignant, I am sure I was promised all of this sleep deprivation would have faded into a distant memory by then.

That’s the thing when you starting talking to parents of older children. The conversations often provide some initial reassurance and then almost always seed some grain of doubt. My first experience of this was when talking to the mother of twins, eight months older than our two. She told me the first two months had been really difficult, but then they had this miraculous turning point when everything seemed to slot into place. Ten minutes later she remarked that the second afternoon of our acquaintance (when I was still pregnant and her babies were around four months old) was one of the most stressful she had ever lived through. Hmmm, not quite the turning point she had promised then. A few months later, I was walking in the park with another mother of twins, when we bumped into yet another of our type walking in the opposite direction. My immediate companion had just been telling me how she found life got much easier once her babies hit four months. But my hopes were then dashed by the next mother (her big eleven month old boys chewing on bread and sitting jolly in their pram), as she flashed me a sympathetic look and said, “the first nine months are ever so hard.”

The trick of self-preservation must be to stop believing everything you hear. It could be that there is no particularly easy phase with children, but also, in general, only a few fleeting moments when it is desperately hard. Then again, I always feel slightly smug when I look at younger babies, and think to myself – ooh, how nice to be through that phase. So perhaps it is getting easier. And, my optimism usually quickly returns when I tell myself these children are not our children, and ours , of course, will be very different.