After a strained silence Maureen says, ‘Tommy, tell your mummy about school. What did you learn at school today?’

School? I don’t remember giving permission to send him to school. I don’t want him bullied, and he’s too small.

He speaks in a low, colourless voice: ‘Learned to spell “Mummy” and “Daddy”.’

Did he say that on purpose, just to get a rise out of me? My hand itches. I rub it hard. This is exactly why I don’t want him being contaminated; he will not grow up comparing himself to other people.

‘That’s great, Mummy, isn’t it?’ Maureen prompts.

Who is this ‘Mummy’ of whom she speaks? I nod, manage a swallowed ‘Yes’ and then: ‘Great boy. Clever boy. Mummy always said you were a bright boy!’ How forced I sound, how like a caricature of a 1950s housewife smiling inanely at the camera while secretly high on Valium and gin, raging at the injustice of the role she has been trapped in.

‘I told them I don’t have a daddy,’ Tommy says. Maureen’s gaze is boring into me. I’m going to have to reach for the right script here.

‘You do have a daddy, Tommy, of course you do,’ I try. ‘Remember I told you that your daddy loved you very much?’

He looks towards the ceiling and beyond, into the celestial sphere, with that dreamy face I know so well, and sticks his thumb in his mouth, then removes it guiltily. I’m so relieved to see his old habit still has a hold over him – he hasn’t been totally eradicated, repackaged. I notice that welt at the joint and I want to reach out to kiss it.

‘My big guarding angel in the sky,’ he says.

‘That’s right,’ I say, reinforcing the lie in front of a professional.

God knows what repercussions will flow from this one, though to be fair if you were to put any mother and son in such an unnatural position every mother out there would fail on some point. I’m only human. I try speaking to myself in a soothing, non-critical voice, be that loving parent I never had growing up. This is what a lot of the guys said in the meetings: it’s the hypercritical voices, the ones full of self-loathing and judgement, that make them liable to fuck it all up in a moment.

‘They asked us to draw a picture of our mummy and daddy,’ he says. At least he’s talking to me, but I can’t help feeling he was planted with these prompts, is testing me in some way. How dare they assume – I mean, surely in this day and age? Test-tube babies, one parent, two fathers, two mothers, all the variations of ‘family’ dance in front of my eyes. I’m catapulted straight back to my own experiences in the classroom, my attempts to make up a mother figure with a halo above her head, the others sniggering or, worse, freezing me out. I will not have him subjected to that level of ridicule.