It’s 7.02 p.m. and I’m standing outside my house by the bins smoking a fag. Upstairs, I can hear that my six-year-old is awake but I’m choosing to ignore her. How repellent, I hear you murmur. And it is repellent, in many ways. I am a smoker and a mother, hardly the Madonna and child. How can these two realities ever be reconciled? They jam against each other all day long, uncomfortably.

Smoking is bloody great. If you’re a smoker that is. Otherwise it’s just disgusting

It’s OK, I tell myself, every single day. I never smoke in front of them. Instead, I smoke when they’re in bed, when the day is done, and the bedroom doors are firmly shut. Often, I smoke during the day too. This is harder to conceal but I’ve got quite good at it: an episode of Alvin here, a nap there; I take my chances stealthily, silently. My hands are red raw from washing them obsessively, my pockets are jammed with mints.

God knows what the neighbours must think. Do they see smoke curling up from behind the bins and shake their heads? Do I even care what they think? Mostly not. I would, however, care deeply if my daughter came downstairs and busted me smoking because how could I ever explain such overtly self-destructive behaviour to her? Each drag is underwritten by shame. And relief. Don’t forget the relief: smoking is bloody great. If you’re a smoker that is. Otherwise, it’s just disgusting.

I want to understand when exactly I became a bin-dwelling anachronism. I want to understand when smoking turned from something totally acceptable into something so reviled, something so shameful that, as a fellow smoking mother says, ‘puts you one up from a pederast, or, as a woman, perhaps Myra Hindley’. Obviously, there was the smoking ban in July 2007 that outlawed smoking in enclosed public spaces. But that didn’t really stop us true smokers; we soon adapted to the sub-zero temperatures outside. If, however, Rishi Sunak’s proposal  to make it illegal for anyone turning 15 or younger this year to ever buy tobacco products succeeds, then it’s official: smoking is truly a mad outpost of the past like caning children or binding their feet. Boris says the proposals are ‘nuts’ but the tide is turning.

When I became a mother, smoking became harder to justify. It became tantamount to child abuse because my crazy relationship to risk took in more people, innocent children to boot. I try not to look at the facts, but they are these: children exposed to second-hand smoke are more susceptible to respiratory infections, ear infections and asthma attacks.

Amazingly, to me at least, I managed not to smoke through both pregnancies. This had little to do with the intense bombardment of NHS messaging on the risks of smoking and pregnancy – still a major concern as 9.1 per cent of pregnant women smoke – but rather some hormonal trap door had swung open in my head, and I found the smell quite nauseating. It is the only time in nearly 20 years of smoking when I have seen the issue from the other side of the tracks.

Of course, it didn’t last. Call it postnatal depression, call it being totally demented by the sound of a baby crying in an empty basement flat after less than three hours of sleep, but I soon took it up again. I felt bad, but not bad enough to stop. Smoking helped me to grieve my former life by kidding myself that it wasn’t over. Unlike other drugs, it also didn’t affect my ability to change a nappy, administer a bottle of formula or drive. If anything, smoking makes me do those things faster. One friend, a mother of five with a full-time job and no domestic help, describes her fag break as a ‘necessary cessation of manual labour’.

Clearly, there is some link between smoking and the unforgiving landscape of modern motherhood. Hit by astronomical childcare costs, a lack of community and the asymmetric burdens of parenting that mean women pick up the slack, is it any wonder that they need the odd fag to cope? In a study published in the medical journal Addiction in 2015, it emerged that 31 per cent of mothers who had stopped during pregnancy had resumed smoking in the first year of their child’s life. Nine years on, what would a study of smoking and motherhood tell us now? Would it reveal a shift in maternal attitudes towards not just the health of their children but their own health? Judging by the number of mothers I know who smoke in secret and/or vape when they can, I’m not sure.

There is a photograph of my mother holding me when I was probably two years old. She looks at the camera and smiles, cigarette in one hand, child in the other. A totally normal tableau. For me, at least. My parents smoked freely around me when I was an infant and later a child; in the car, in the house, near the pram. There’s nothing wrong with me! Or is there? A study carried out by Columbia University in 2015 found that ‘daughters were almost four times more likely to be nicotine-dependent when their mother was’. Poor mummy, another stick to beat her with, although I’m pretty sure that her mother smoked too.

Will my daughters smoke because of me? Possibly, although it seems that the chances of them ever being able to get hold of a packet of fags are now pretty slim. Looks like I’ll be behind the bins on my own, then.