I thought I could be a ‘cool mum’ – just strap my baby to me and keep living life as usual. I was so wrong | Tara Kenny

I've discovered new ways to be cool: rhyme time is my cocktail hour, the park my catwalk and I have a nappy bag that's chicer than a Fendi Baguette

When I was six months pregnant, against all odds, I hosted a house party. An intense plus-one, herself a mother, cornered me to deliver an ominous, drunken warning: You can't be cool and be a mum." This struck me as something that someone who had never been cool, with or without children, would say.

Don't blame your innocent spawn for your lack of rizz, I thought ruefully. Plus, I knew it wasn't true, because I had grown up idolising my primary school friends' chic and powerful mothers. They had covetable wardrobes, rock dog exes and misspent youths in far-flung locales such as Prague and Berlin. While we played in the courtyards of their St Kilda apartments, enjoying a luxuriously long leash, they smoked cigarettes and gossiped, unburdened by anxieties about their capacity to measure up to arbitrary standards of coolness.