This weekend I’ll be travelling to stay with some of my husband’s university friends for a two-day ‘party’ in their palatial new home. I’ve known these people for seven years and there are usually at least two of these events a year. Weekends filled with people (about 20 adults usually) and now an abundance of children too. Seven children in fact – and two ‘bumps’. It was only fairly recently that I managed to get through a whole weekend with them without crying, or feeling a desperate need to escape.

Since having my daughter I’ve started to relax a bit more. I feel a little more like I belong with them, and I’ve no idea why. Somehow, being a mother makes me more legitimately human. Do I associate being a mother with being normal? Before I was just myself, the Aspie of the group, the one who was not normal.

The more I consider it the more I think that motherhood has become the ultimate camouflage for me. I’m a wife and a mother, so I must be normal, right? That’s what I hope everyone thinks. But after seven years they must be getting used to me too. Perhaps my idiosyncracies blended away before I got as far as the pregnancy. Maybe it was only my perception that didn’t change, until now.