The public can be incredibly cruel or incredibly kind to exhausted mothers. I've experienced both

Better still, buy her a coffee. These women are among the most catatonically exhausted members of our community and they are, for the most part, doing their very best

The summer holidays are now upon us, and mums are going to bear the brunt of the grumpalumps who find the presence of children annoying (Getty)

This column is largely about motherhood. I’m letting you know upfront to give you the option to roll your eyes and slope off now without reading it, muttering that “you did the equivalent of pushing a watermelon through a tin whistle, as women have since the dawn of time – big wow”.

As far as the wider world sees it, while a man with a papoose is adorable irrespective of whether he has it on the right way up, motherhood is something that throws you open to merciless judgement from all quarters. It can feel like nothing is ever quite right, whether it’s the food that you feed them, what you do to pay for it or the particular brand of subterfuge you use to trick them into going to sleep, and I know this partly because of all of the judging I myself have done over the years. These days, you can’t even announce your offspring’s SAT scores over a carelessly unattended playground Tannoy system without running the risk of being called “boastful”. But I am not sorry.

(And yes, I know: I am the first to say that constantly testing children isn’t helpful, so please don’t leave a grotty comment below. But the fact is that I got a D in my maths GCSE, retook it, and got an E, so you’ll have to excuse me if I spend the rest of my life amazed at my children’s fearless approach to numbers too big to count on one toe.)

The summer holidays are now upon us, and mums are going to bear the brunt of the grumpalumps who find the presence of children annoying and aren’t shy of letting us know. I’m looking in particular in the direction of London here – a city where people are habitually and unapologetically rude to each other, safe in the knowledge that they’re unlikely to run into the target of their fleeting rage ever again. So they loudly curse the young mothers, with their bus-hogging buggies and their inexplicable need to take their little nurslings into coffee shops and chat to other mums, rather than quietly descending into a pit of ragged solitude at home. “But I don’t wanna have babies screaming in my ear at hot drink time!” wail the child-haters, ironically sounding like overgrown toddlers themselves, baffled and angry at the thought of other people having different needs to them. Behave yourselves or I will confiscate your washed Nicaraguan ristretto.

This summer, if you see a mum struggling with noisy children in tow, please don’t scowl and look down on her. Give her a smile. Better still, buy her a coffee. These women are among the most catatonically exhausted members of our community and they are, for the most part, doing their very best.

And please don’t judge them like a woman on a train once did to me. My daughter was a newborn, I hadn’t slept for days, and my son, then six, was acting up a bit on the journey home from Devon. I would love to tell you that I cooingly reprimanded him with a gentle “now my darling, mummy’s quite tired, and when you jump up and down and throw peanuts in my face, it makes me feel sad”. But I became middle-class later on in life and cannot keep those sensibilities up in times of stress, so in reality, I grabbed my boy’s arm and growled “don’t be so rude!”, like an angry and sleep-deprived bear. A very well-rested woman in front of us turned around and said, “I think you are the one who’s being rude, actually – he’s just being a child and you’re being horrible to him.”

My son and I looked at each other and started giggling, so perhaps I should be thankful that her intervention shook us back into a playful mood. But it’s an easy assumption to make, when a mother is vile to her kids, that she is always like that. Most often, she is not. Later on that day, she will have them on her lap, and will be covering them with kisses and stuffing her momentary loss of control into the small but well-stocked mental compartment marked: “Things to punish myself with for the rest of my life.”

On another day and another train, my daughter vomited all the way from London to Newcastle. She was only three years old, and after every chunder, she would get swept up in a noisy post-puke high, which her brother loved and joined in with. A moody-looking teenager soon got up and left the carriage – fed up, I assumed. That is, until he came back a moment later with a can of Coke and some chocolate. “Coke’s good for when you’re sick innit.” He handed the chocolate bar to my son and said: “Be good for your mum, little man,” and then he sat back down and put his earplugs in, while I choked back tears of gratitude. He could so easily have been irritated, but instead, he chose to care.

So, this summer holiday, I would like to make a modest plea to the tutters, the peace-and-quieters, and the control-your-kidsers, to give your empathy glands a gentle prod. Try to put yourselves in the shoes of these worn-out mums, who are doing their best to stay out of your way, but whose offspring might nevertheless occasionally assault your eardrums with a sudden yelp or your forehead with a stray peanut. Be kind and, before you scowl, remember that your own mother was once in exactly the same spot.