"I walked in on my kids playing 'mums and dads'."

I was not prepared. Not prepared at all.

Every parent knows that when things go quiet behind a bedroom door, nothing good is happening.

And every parent is familiar with the small dilemma of whether to interfere. They’re playing together, they’re not killing each other. Why would you mess with that?

But then, inevitably, shouting broke out.

My daughter, who’s five, my two-and-a-half-year-old son, and our friends’ daughter, three, were all in the bedroom.

I opened the door. “What are you doing in there?”

My daughter was standing at the end of twin beds. In one, my son, in the other, our friend’s daughter, both pretending to be asleep. My daughter had her arms folded, and a fierce look on her face.

“STAY ASLEEP.” She commanded, in her most serious voice.

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My boy opened his eyes and beamed at her. “GO BACK TO SLEEP!” My daughter screamed at him. He sat up, and laughed, and my girl put her hands to her head, her face going pink with frustration. “FOR GOD’S SAKE,” she screamed.

“YOU’RE REALLY STRESSING ME OUT!!”

Then she stomped past me, out of the room, trying to slam the door. She pounded down the hall, turned and balled her fists by her side. “”I LOVE YOU. BUT GOOO TOOOO SLEEEEP!” She yelled, then stomped back towards the door.

Watching her, I realised. She was being me.

I asked her what they were playing. “We’re playing mums and dads,” she told me, with an eyeroll. She’s five, and eyerolls are coming thick and fast.

I’m so screwed.

And what does that involve?

“Well, I try to get the babies to go sleep,” she says. “And they keep waking up, and I get very, very cross.”

Yes. She was being me.

The facial expression, the exasperated tone. The YELLING. She was being me, putting the kids to bed, after a “difficult” day.

It was like catching yourself in the mirror from an angle you try to avoid. Or seeing yourself in a photo you didn’t know was being taken. I was seeing myself through my kids’ eyes.

Apparently, when my kids are playing up at bedtime, this is who I am. Apparently, I stomp. I yell.

I tell them they are causing me stress. I come and go, sighing heavily. I mix my messages.

She is not wrong. I am grumpy at bedtime. Semi-deliberately, because once a certain time ticks over, I don’t want my kids to think that if they don’t go to bed when they’re told to, they’ll just get to stay up and have more fun – reading books, playing games, having midnight feasts. No, grumpy mum is no fun at all. You might as well go to sleep, kids, as hang around with this b*tch.

But I had never seen Grumpy Mum from the outside before.

“Just give me ONE MINUTE of peace, by myself,” demanded my daughter, parroting something I hadn’t even realised I must have said to her so often it didn’t seem in the least bit remarkable.

And then, hands back on hips, “DON’T make me grumpy.”

My son pretended to cry, loudly.

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It was, as Oprah would say, an a-ha moment.

So what did I do? Did I put grumpy mum away, adopt the ‘no shouting’ school of motherhood and become a zen parent?

No. I yelled.

“I DO NOT SOUND LIKE THAT!” I shouted at my daughter.

And she laughed at me. Time to reconsider.

So I stopped shouting. I tip-toed in and out of rooms, I sssh-ed and I cajoled and I read one more book.

In the next few days, I tried to be happy and calm at bedtime. I tried really hard, after a day of drop-offs and busy-work and pick-ups and dinner and bath and jamis and books, not to be impatient for the kids to go to bed.

I lasted two days. And then one night my son refused to eat his dinner and then did a poo in the bath. My daughter screamed through her hairwash, at bedtime there was mattress-bouncing when there should have been story-reading. And there were up-and-down-the-hall relay races when there was meant to be pyjama-donning.

And I lost it. “YOU KIDS ARE STRESSING ME OUT,” may have been the nicest, most-PG-rated thing that came out of my mouth that night.

And you know what? I’m okay with that. Because seeing that they make their mum angry is not the worst thing in the world. Yelling at my kids is not the worst thing I can do.

And even when my daughter was ‘being me’, rude and grumpy, angry and yelling, I still thought she was adorable.

So maybe, maybe my kids might think the same thing about me. I can live in hope.

And for the record, I never say, as my daughter did, “I LOVE YOU, but GOOOO TOOO SLEEP.”

I say, “I would love you kids SO MUCH MORE if you would just go the hell to sleep.”

Conditional love. So much better.

Have you ever seen yourself through your kids’ eyes?