What will your kids think of you when you're gone?

As I drove through the park this morning, I caught a few minutes of Saturday Live on Radio 4. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty (a civil liberties campaigning organisation) was sharing her 'inheritance track', the song she would hand on to her child. In her words, this very special question 'goes to that dark place, what will your kids think of you when you're gone, will they think you broadly did a good job or you broadly screwed their lives up?'

I sat up and took notice. She expressed a thought that lurks in the darkest corners of my mind and that whispers in the despair of the awful moments of being a mother. The decisions I make so carefully for my children: religion, education, the toys they play with and the food they eat; the reflex behaviours which erupt from my own insecurites, phobias and plain old bad temper; how will they influence, even damage, my children? Is it enough to do the best I can with the information I have and the personality I am? And what else is possible?

To hear this expressed by a prominent and respected woman in the bright sunshine on national radio made me think, 'Do all mothers feel like this?' This came as a huge relief. Perhaps it seems obvious, maybe we all think it and I guess the truth is that we will never know the answer.