The perfect man

For much of adult life I have been a truly crab-like Cancerian, retreating into my shell at the first hint of emotional trouble, storing a little nest egg of self-reliance against a rainy day and a broken heart. But on the afternoon of Friday, January 31, 2003, three weeks before the first bombs fell on Baghdad, I met my match.

A nice man in green scrubs who had cycled through Hyde Park in the rain to reach me, handed me a passport to the rest of my life and I thanked him — the video records — 13 times.

Alexander was golden from the start; having avoided squashing and bruising in the birth canal, he emerged ready for Mario Testino and an advertising contract: fine-featured, long-limbed, both delicate and reassuringly solid, the man I had wanted with a wanting that eclipsed all others. My mythically beautiful boy would soon turn his modern-minded mother into a heroine of romantic fiction (Mills & Boon more than the Brontes, alas), marooned on a shore of hopeless devotion. When our eyes first met I didn't make vows about his future, promise him the moon: I just knew the game was up, all pretence at running life on my own terms over. The powerlessness of it made me laugh (they thought it was the morphine), and I was gone, lost, intoxicated. Weirdly, it was a sort of relief.

Since then our relationship has mimicked and mocked hearts-and-flowers courtship: we are either smooching or driving each other demented. I'm in love with the boy, his daddy tells me. Indeed, how quickly did the jokes start about the future girlfriends — chancers and strumpets all! — who would be turned away from our door. Alex flirts for England; he is shameless; it's like living with a junior gigolo. "Can I haff video, Mummy?" he asks most mornings with a coy smile from beneath sweeping butterfly lashes. He tries a compliment and then a kiss ("Mwaaa!!!" he puckers up like vintage Valentino). "Now can I haff video?" The ritual of cajoling and manipulating, the belief in his own seductiveness, is astonishing in one so young. Maybe I am teaching him that women can be bidden with enough charm and laughter and sweetness. If so, is that so bad?

Like any demon lover, he knows which tender points to twist for effect: his deadliest ammo is to invoke the name of the Other Woman, the love rival against whom I am powerless. This is the nanny it is now his good fortune to have and my grisly fate to be compared with and found wanting. "Don't want you, want Natalie." She is a paragon of calm, kind attentiveness, who's never been caught surreptitiously reading The Times while playing "Noddy snap". He knows I do this and uses it to his advantage. "You need to read a newspaper, Mummy," he suggests, so that he can continue his abstract mural on the sitting-room magnolia. Distraction, as his uncle said last night, is such a great tactic for dealing with tired adults.

In a garden in summer he picks up a tennis ball and brings it over to me before he will throw it. "Clean it, Mummy." Without thinking, I do; everyone laughs and we imagine him in the men's finals at Wimbledon, asking Mummy to dust down the ball before he serves. At his grandparents' house a few weeks later I push him around the lawn in a wheelbarrow; after 10 or so circuits I am tired and want to stop. "No!" he commands in the way no tyrannical boss or lover would ever dare, and I must please him until I am dizzy with fatigue. Do people really feel that way about their husbands and partners? I sense mine watching me, happy at my devotion, if feeling at times a little shut out by me and the new man; but also thinking coolly, rationally, that I am letting the little prince get away with murder. "You've gone mum," he says, and there is a rueful quality to his smile. In 15 years' time will I still be defending Alex's every move? "Oh, leave him alone . . . it's only crack cocaine." The brutal march of time — inexorable change that I don't want — is turning him from the needy baby whose sleeplessness made my eyelids weep and crust with fatigue, to master of his own three-bedroom universe in which I am the favoured servant, good for a batch of fairy cakes and anointing sore bottoms with Sudocrem, being the one he threatens to "put in a pie" when the mood takes him.

Motherhood has left me breathless at my own capacity for both drudgery and thermonuclear pride: for the first six months of Alex's life I was incredulous if strangers didn't remark on his uncommon beauty; I would leave gaps in the conversation to facilitate their homage. Other people's babies — for so long the object of my longing and envy — were suddenly nonstarters compared to my divine specimen, and the adoring has rubbed off. "I'm a very handsome boy," he says to his reflection on trying on some new Christmas jumper. Crikey! Am I making him physically confident, or creating a narcissist, a baby Beckham?

I'm bad at discipline: the potty-training's going nowhere. He's too charming, or too stubborn; I can't resist. I put up with behaviour I wouldn't tolerate for a minute from his father. The back-seat driving is appalling: a bossy voice from the baby seat saying, "Too fast, silly Mummy," "You gonna crash," or a smoothly patronising "Well done" when I park without wasting too much of his time. No matter: 10 minutes later I am serenading him with Etta James's heartbreaking torch song At Last! ("you smile/ Oh and then the spell was castÉ") while he spoons yogurt messily into his mouth and eventually sighs as I reach my soulful crescendo. "Don't sing, Mummy. Horrible." (He prefers the theme tune to Bob the Builder, you see.)

When reprimanded for any naughtiness he makes a strange snort of defiance, like a baby wild boar preparing to charge, which makes me — then him — curl up in hysterics on the kitchen floor. It is hard to be cross, even when mortified with embarrassment, like the time he yelled at the top of his voice "Go away, man!" at the vicar. Fair enough, you might think; but not from the front row in the middle of Sunday Eucharist.

I have my limits, of course: I won't tolerate hitting; I'm not big on dinosaurs being hurled in a temper. I watch Supernanny; I can implement "time out" for the worst behaviour. When he ran out into the road I smacked him out of terror and panic, but we both know that whatever spats we might trade, there is no pretence at equality in the doting stakes. My devotion is unreserved; his can be measured in chocolate buttons, the number of times I agree to chase him down the hall shouting "Stop in the name of Plod!", or let him "work" at my computer (cost of replacing ripped-off space bar last year: £200). If enough such favours are granted, that beatific smile might be poured in my unworthy direction. "Who's the boss?" I asked him in the car yesterday. He giggled. "Not you, Mummy."

Is this love the real deal, the only perfect version of satin-hearted romance? Of course we take our lovers' sides in their battles with the world, empathise with their disasters and humiliations; but how much more outraged do we feel about the angel denied a speaking part in the nativity play? For the other side of motherly passion is protective fury. Don't get me started on the time he fractured his skull while in the care of a nanny. Shortly after the accident another mother approached me in Waitrose: she had witnessed the fall at a local playgroup. It wasn't that our nanny was unkind, apparently; more that she read the newspaper with a coffee while my baby boy stumbled and cracked his head on a concrete step. Maybe it wasn't the nanny's fault, but the tipping-off made me want to be sick, a far worse lurch of the stomach, I'd guess, than being told your husband's snogging his secretary.

I have yet to know the agony of Alex being rejected by any school, but there are the parties to which he isn't invited, the smiley stickers he doesn't win at nursery, the older kids in the park who (understandably) don't want to play with him. "Go away, baby," they shout, little beasts, but he stands his ground and stares, impassive as a Wild West gunslinger. Should I ever need to weep to order, I just have to imagine him in a playground without a friend. Slights cut deep because the sense of identification with one's child is complete, a melding of two into one that one is supposed to obtain in romantic love, but doesn't really. "I am Heathcliff," says Catherine in Wuthering Heights, but we know she's just being a drama queen.

It is not a totally one-sided infatuation. Alex's wooing of his mother is more poetic than any I have known: in the swimming pool it is always his job to rescue me in his inflatable arm bands: "Hold on, Mummy, I'm coming!" And at night, warm and sweet-smelling in his softest pastel-blue pyjamas and grown-up navy dressing gown, when we have read Little Red Train twice, and he looks at me and says with rapture, "You have fireworks in your eyes, Mummy," then I wonder what grown man could ever compete.

Who knows how things might have gone in this love affair if I'd had more children: less time to fuss and pander certainly. The only child, whatever else they lack, has the luxury of knowing they are the only game in town. And if I'd had a daughter? That might have been a tighter, tauter, more complicated intimacy as she grew into an improved version of myself. I always wanted a boy; I never understood the old-school feminists who worried about giving birth to males, as if it meant nurturing the enemy. What could be easier than loving a gorgeous boy?

At times the worrying overshadows the joy of him; he likes speed, heights, leaping and scaling. But living with fear is the essence of unconditional love. What if he goes off the rails in years to come, commits acts of outrageous illegality, is cruel or feckless? If one day — God forbid — he rapes or murders (or joins the BNP), I will never be able wash my hands and walk away as I might from a man or a job or a friendship that was making me wretched. Parenthood is a boot camp for former bolters and dilettantes, reform school for flakes and emotional cowards; for once, you do not have the option of moving on, as the politicians and therapists love to exhort us. Besides, what could you do but blame yourself?

Adult love prides itself on accepting us as we are; children demand we do better. Having one never turned my world fluffy or made the birds whistle Disney tunes; I never experienced the effusive, pervasive enchantment with all small, vulnerable things some women enjoy. My passion is as intense as the most fatal of attractions — it just happens to be a man 3ft tall with dubious bottom etiquette, no assets to speak of, and who ceremoniously hands me his bogeys as if they were priceless emeralds. I smile and act pleased. It doesn't get much more unconditional than that.