So I tell them that I’ve forgotten something at work and have to head back out, buying myself a little time, and instead I pull in at Tilley’s, you know I like it, and order a glass of wine, find a corner booth to slip into, and open the book.

But I feel guilty. I lied to the children. It’s not the first time. Won’t be the last. But as I sit and read this book about motherhood as a social construct I wonder how I’m failing at motherhood, generally, and in this very specific moment.

I look around the cafe and wonder if other women have these continual feelings of failure, of not being good enough, of being constantly conscious of the fact that every choice you make as a mother may have some horrible outcome for your children.

There are the obvious mothers here, ones with children in tow, do they feel guilty because they think they should be at home cooking a nutritious meal instead of eating out on a Tuesday? Is the woman at the table next to mine, I’m guessing in her late 60s, a woman who’s dining alone, a mother? Have her children grown up and left home, is she worried about them as adults, does she feel as though she did a good job? And Tilley Devine herself, that notorious crime boss and madam, often referred to as the “worst woman in Sydney”, did she, a mother of three, ever look back and think perhaps I should have mothered very differently?

There was so much in this book, and it’s not your typical motherhood book, not light and fluffy and condescending, with tips on how to make your own organic baby food and how important date night is, no. It’s a brutally frank academic treatise of issues such as social justice, the Family Court, raising children as a transgender parent, single motherhood, Indigenous mothers, raising children with a disability, there’s an essay too from Matt Beard on the contradictions of modern fatherhood. I could have sat there all night and read it through but I had children at home.

So I focussed on Maria Tumarkin’s essay on “momoirs”, about all us women who dare to write about our roles as mothers. She talks about the people who have done it well - Anne Enright, Rachel Cusk to name two - and the millions of women who do it poorly on blogs around the world. Perhaps I am one of those.

Tumarkin is torn between the idea of wanting women to write their stories and the idea that most mothers who are writers, in a sense, are spending way too many words being vapid - my words, not hers. She wants there to be more thinking, more exploration, reportage and cultural critique.

“I’m not against motherhood memoirs,” she writes. “But I am for fissures and de-fusion … I worry that books are not being published because they do not feel familiar enough, do not tick the boxes.”

Editor Camilla Nelson said she and Robertson wanted to break open the idea of mothering.

“One of the central ideas of the book is that this ideology of mothering is something that is not just affecting mothers, it’s affecting all women” she says.

“Because whether you are a mother or not a mother, you’re always judged against this invisible standard.”

She talks about stereotypes and statistics, about double standards and dads. I kind of wished, when I did the interview the next day, that she had been in the booth at Tilley’s with me. I wouldn’t have gone home early that night.

We talk about how we can’t remember our own mothers, or grandmothers, talking about mothering “as a verb”.

“It’s very much a product of the late 20th century,” says Nelson, who is an associate professor in media, writing and journalism, in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney.

“The whole idea of intensive mothering grew up alongside feminism and the kinds of gains that women were making in the workforce.

“There's an intensity of scrutiny that is very much driven by fear and panic and also partly by women experiencing a lot more pressure and crisis when they did go back to work.”

I get that pressure and panic. Not functioning completely in one role or the other. Doing it all, never having it all, not really wanting it all, and feeling ashamed to say that out aloud. Sometimes wondering what life would be like if I weren’t a mother. We've all thought it. I finished my wine and headed home with the question of whether or not I was a dangerous mother with dangerous ideas swirling about in my head.

But then I got home and the kids didn’t mention me being late, we ate dinner, talked about our day, laughed and made plans, hugged before bed. I felt love and loved.

Dangerous Ideas about Mothers is about how the increased cultural obsession with mothering turns out to be just another way to judge all women, and find them wanting.

Maybe we need to stop doing that to ourselves?

Dangerous Ideas about Mothers, edited by Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson, UWA Press, $29.99.

Event: October 28, Nelson and Robertson will be in conversation with ANU gender and culture expert Helen Keane. 3pm, $12 includes a complimentary wine or juice. Bookings at musecanberra.com.au