When children start to leave the nest, we middle-aged women plan our triumphant return to those distant days when our definition of anxiety was whether we could fit eight supper guests round our second hand Habitat table or who would win the Booker prize this year.

But it turns out not to be as easy as you’d think. I badly want to echo Jonathan Ross and return to my previous existence with a raised eyebrow and a poised “So where were we?” but it’s not quite panning out that way.

The years of dispensing Calpol and re-taking temperatures, imagining scenarios with buses and careless lollipop ladies, performing secret risk assessments on playground roundabouts and weighing up the pros and cons of later-life skin cancer versus childhood rickets, take their toll.

For some of us, parenthood has never been carefree. Those adverts showing healthy, bouncing children on their fathers’ shoulders or hanging upside down from a tree don’t resonate with me.

My first thought is not that the advertiser’s brand of life insurance or pro-biotic yoghurt is the easiest route to a relaxed and fulfilling family life. Not at all. My eye falls to the way the bloke doesn’t even seem to have his hands around the lad’s legs, to grab him if he slips off. Or to the ground under the tree, where I spot a rock – a feature of the natural landscape that I have always felt never really socialises well with growing skulls.

So, despite my declarations that I’m now going to start putting myself first – finish Oscar and Lucinda, which I started reading in 1990 until round-the-clock breastfeeding got in the way, or lie in bed with my laptop every morning for an hour when the house is quiet and just surf for rubbish on the net – I’m hitting a mental wall.

What have I forgotten to do? Even worse, what have I forgotten to worry about? I’m sitting in bed right now, propped up with pillows, and as far as I know I don’t have a serious concern in the world (if you discount the economy, climate change, the fading efficacy of antibiotics, and the fact that the written English language is falling about around our ears and in a few years’ time nobody will be able to read this column because it’s more than 140 characters long and the words are spelled out in full – (though many may argue that’s a good or even gr8t thing).

The phone goes. It’s my mum. Independent, fit, healthy and with plenty of friends, she’s someone that I don’t have to worry about. How are you doing? I ask.

It turns out that she got a call herself yesterday, from one of her best friends, Hazel. Hazel had fallen off the sink top, while cleaning the kitchen pelmet. She wasn’t hurt, she didn’t think, but she couldn’t get up off the floor.

So my mum, who has always believed that doctors and ambulances are best left alone to perform excerpts from Casualty or Emergency Ward Ten, rather than be bothered by the likes of us, called a taxi to go and see how Hazel was. Then she went upstairs to change into less casual clothes.

“The taxi arrived and I got in, and told him where to go,” my mum says.

“Then I looked down and realised that I had my yellow top – you know the one – on inside out.”

Oh dear, I say, still wondering about Hazel on the floor.

“So,” my mum continues, “I wriggled out of my coat, took off my top, turned it the right way round and put it back on.”

I have a mental picture of my mum and her ample bosom frightening the daylights out of the driver. Apparently, he said nothing. Well, what could he say?

A wave of calm comes over me as we talk about other things. I think, just think, I may have found someone else to worry about.