Earlier this week I went out to dinner with one of my best friends (at Essex’s first Marco Pierre White restaurant, in Brentwood, in case you were wondering.)

She is a single mum, to a lovely 16-year-old lad, currently in his first year at college.

And, as is often the case with mums, much of our evening was spent chatting about our boys. How Sonny Jim has taken to telling me we’ll go to pre-school “in a little while. Not now! A little while mummy,” while I’m desperately trying to get his shoes on his feet and out the door. How he needs his socks to be just so. How he continually tells me that “this knee okay, this knee hurtey” after he fell over three weeks ago and grazed it (even though the graze has long since healed.)

Then as the evening (and wine consumption) wore on she told me how she worried that she’d let her lad be too independent. That she feared she should have done this or that, said nothing rather than something, been louder rather than quiet.

And as I listened, reminding her just what a lovely mother she is, (and she really, really is) I was struck again by how the worry of messing it up, of getting it wrong, of not being “good” enough, for our children never goes away.

The sleepless night, the tantrums, the potty training will pass, but it’s just replaced with a whole new batch of challenges, and accompanying concerns.

Even when your baby is fully grown, it’s not like you can just give yourself a pat on the back, switch off the worry button and let them crack on without a second though.

It’s a till-death duty. A non-stop state for life. And while there’s 14 years between my lad and her boy, I reckon we worry just as much as each other.

Though I guess the very fact we worry, means we’re probably doing something right!

Find Katy at www.whatkatydidUK.com