Mr Husband Material gallantly offered co-habiting a month after we met. He had a gorgeous house in a leafy London suburb. I gallantly refused.

I was not put off by the whitewashed Victorian dwelling, sprawled along a dainty half-moon front garden and sandwiched between equally respectable, middle class-owned properties; nor by the balconies protruding into the back garden and reaching out to claim cherry trees and breezy summer evenings.

I just strongly felt the impending doom of domesticity, highlighted by the existence of his two Suitcase-children.

Suitcase-children are a breed apart. They may be suitably happy and chatty, superficially easy-going and ready to unpack their weekend clothes wherever the parent without full custody happens to live, but Suitcase-children are sometimes masters of disguise.

I happened to spot a place in their hearts as soon as it was practical to be introduced. They had gappy smiles and lanky limbs; and in the greedy way children always want more love than they can possibly have, they readily showed the unfillable hole.

The intensity was brutal; used, as I was, to being either ignored or lightly abused by the egocentric Mr Bastard, I revelled in becoming as needed as I was needy.

The only protection I had to the exposure to my second-hand family was to avoid sharing the living space on a permanent basis.

Soon, though, Little Miss would be asking for more; 'Emma, shall we go shopping? I need new school shoes.' There is much to be said about receiving daily doses of affection through the yawn of familiarity. The steady flow of routine and little errands can be highly addictive to a single girl whose experience of shoes did not expand beyond the wedge and high heel variety.

Little Master would communicate by appealing to the secret tomboy in me. 'Emma, let's go out: you drive. When we go across the humped bridge, you accelerate so that we become airborne.'

The engine undertray of my lovely sportscar got quite a few bashings, but my soul had stopped receiving them. We were all happy, bar my acute and secret dislike for belonging to a world from which I could not see an escape route.

For, no matter how much I cared for Little Miss and Little Master, recognising in them the same needs I had been struggling with, they were not my children, and they could never own me completely.

Fathers' new girlfriends may have an allure, a taste of the exotic about them; as far as Suitcase-children were concerned, I only wore g-strings on the beach and my hair was always immaculate by the time they saw me at the weekend. My rustling up unknown, and thence rather interesting supper - instead of the usual sandwiches - certainly scored brownie points.

Fathers' new girlfriends also do not indulge in arguing well into the night, using each other's disappointment in domestic life as weapons; instead, they smell of perfume and patience, and they are very happy to read another bedtime story.

This charming behaviour is only possible because Fathers' new girlfriends KNOW that there will come a time when the Suitcase-children are either in bed and out of the way, or sent back to their natural mother, not to be seen or endured for another week.

It is easy to feel sweet and lovely for short bursts of time, especially when there is an impression to be created and polished, and little emotional involvement.

I suppose that my early-days' pedestal was as much of my doing as of Mr Husband Material's. It is hard to keep up the appearances with my own, dearly loved boys; ironically, the deeper the love, the uglier the cuts.

So, today, as I wait and hope that Mr Vroom will find, within himself, the generosity to let me dream a little from this side of the fence, I attack the weeds festooning the hedges at the very bottom of the garden and wonder whether my own children will have good memories of me when I go, something other then the continuous ticking-off, shouting and punishing I seem to bestow on their rebellious heads.

And like them, the less loved I feel, the naughtier I get.