Now they are two, what shall we do?: When all your children can pull up their own trousers, you may find you undergo a period of mourning, writes Penny Hancock

My youngest daughter had her second birthday three weeks ago. Watching her pull her own trousers on or drink from a cup without it spilling, I am filled with relief that she has made it over the baby hurdles and is now on the brink of childhood. But having as good as decided that this is the last child we shall have I am also haunted by sadness that I shall never have a baby again.

The second birthday of a youngest child seems to herald a sort of mid-life crisis for many women. A mother has to confront the fact that unless she has another baby her role now has to shift.

A two-year-old is not a baby in the same way that an 18-month-old is. The physical closeness involved in carrying, feeding and maybe sleeping with a small child is lessening. You still have a needy infant to love and protect, but you have lost the baby.

Jane, mother of a six-year-old and a three-year-old, put it like this: 'Suddenly, when Josh got to two, I was no longer the centre of his universe. I couldn't sweep him up every time I wanted a cuddle. He had become his own person. I experienced a sense of loss - that I would never have that unique closeness again.'

The issue of age rears its head, too. Creating a life means being at the beginning of something, however old we may be when we do it, and that gives us hope for the future. Confronting the fact that we are never again to be the mother of very small children can feel like plunging towards middle age.

Now questions have to be faced about what purpose and meaning we are going to invest our lives with. This dilemma can hit women whether they continue to work or not.

'Once my last child reached two,' said a friend, 'I felt that there were no other great events to look forward to apart from death. This felt terrifying and the temptation was to fend it off by having more children, however impractical that would have been for us as a family. I felt a spiritual gulf that I had not had to confront while I was immersed in nurturing my babies.'

According to the Family Policy Studies Unit, conception of a second or third child occurs most commonly around the time of a previous child's second birthday. Two years after birth a woman's body is as near back to normal as it will ever be. It is a time when decisions about the other important things in life have to be faced.

Mothers who put their own needs last while their children were babies can find it difficult to reassert their individuality. Such pleasures as spending time choosing clothes in the morning have probably been long forgotten.

It takes courage to abandon a comfy image of ourselves as milk-stained mother and claim the right to dress up and face the world again. You cannot hide behind a two-year-old as you can behind a baby; in social situations it is no longer possible to evade serious conversation by bouncing a baby on your lap.

Male partners may find these feelings of loss hard to understand, since the combined role as parents doesn't alter just because a child has left babyhood. Indeed, the advantages may be more apparent than the losses. Life seems easier now my children can communicate verbally, find their own shoes, go to bed at an hour which makes babysitters a real possibility. Their demands no longer dominate every moment. For my partner, the joys of having more independent children are manifold and he expresses no regrets about leaving behind nappies and night-feeds.

But for women it may be necessary to go through a period of mourning. What the new 'pro-natalism' and current focus on fertility ignores is the fact that for all women life as a reproductive person must come to an end.

The rest of being a parent is about slowly letting our children go. When they reach two we may feel the ties loosen for the first time, but it is only one stage in the process of separation that will continue when they start nursery, school, leave home, become adults, and which began the day they were born.