Once or twice other women I met at coffee mornings or music classes, women who had older children as well as babies, recognised that I felt I wasn’t doing a very good job of motherhood and kindly told me it would get easier. It did, in some ways. But in other ways – ways I had never anticipated – it got harder.

When Daisy was a year old I found a childminder and started to do a bit of proofreading a few days a week from home, and the guilty freedom I felt as I walked home after leaving her was offset by the sudden new challenge of having deadlines to meet, as well as the depressing reality of how little was left of my earnings after I’d paid for her care. It was also matched by guilt of another kind – guilt that I could barely begin to acknowledge, even to myself.

All parents are dreamers. Romantics. Fantasists. The flipside of the fear we feel for our children is hope. Who hasn’t looked at their little one and wanted great things for them? Mark and I were no different. As months went by and Daisy became more settled, there were intervals of calm when we gazed at her in her cot and imagined lives for her – all kinds of lives. She could become a doctor, a ballerina, an explorer… a scientist, a poet, an entrepreneur. So many possibilities, all wide open. Or so it seemed.

Ingrid was the first person to suggest that for Daisy, those opportunities might not be open at all.

It started with a disastrous evening of babysitting, when Daisy cried solidly for hours and she had to call us and ask us to come home. Then I caught her looking suspiciously at me when I fed Daisy with a spoon rather than her feeding herself. There were questions about potty training, sleeping, whether Daisy was talking yet. Insinuations, or so I felt.

I complained to Mark about it. I wanted him to come down on our side, to say she was being ridiculous, but he didn’t. Instead he had words with her and afterwards he was sombre-faced and refused to tell me what she’d said.

Suddenly, having my mother-in-law nearby stopped meaning free babysitting and started to mean trouble. I no longer left Daisy alone with her, and we began to see her less and less. I’d have been happy to stop seeing her entirely, but I knew Mark wouldn’t be able to bring himself to cut off contact, no matter how insensitive she was, so resigned myself to occasional frosty visits.

‘We just need to give Daisy time,’ I said to Mark more than once. ‘She’ll catch up.’

But time, as it turned out, was not on our side.

Never underestimate the power of denial, as someone else once said. But some kinds of denial can’t last forever. And on the day of the pre-school Christmas show, when Daisy was three years old, our time was finally up.