Editor’s letter

God could not be everywhere, Kipling said, and therefore he made mothers. Like much of Kipling’s output, you’d wonder would he get away with it these days, the patriarchy fetishising just one part of womanhood like this, and possibly shaming women who are not mothers.

Indeed, you’d wonder how long more we’ll do Mother’s Day. Someone’s bound to take offence at some point.

So today we talked to some mothers, who all have different stories. Storm Keating was happy not to have kids because she wanted Ronan Keating, and she had made her peace with it. But then things changed. Even though Storm could afford a full-time nanny, she chooses not to. She wants Cooper to have the kind of earthy upbringing she had.

Faye Dinsmore finds motherhood hard, but the fact that she and her husband, Paddy Cosgrave, and their baby, Cloud, live communally with other people makes it easier.

Yomiko Chen thought she would never go back to work after she had Lili-Sue, that she would become a different person, but she didn’t change too much. She went back to work.

Every mother has her own complicated story and her own choices to make. Maybe a truly 21st-Century Mother’s Day would be about no one judging anyone else’s choices.