Tomorrow the pubs and restaurants of Britain will be busy with family parties treating those very important people - mothers.

The Mother's Day card racks in the shops will have been emptied. Millions of flowers will have been bought at inflated prices. The nation will be spending the day paying tribute to its matriarchs.

And quite right too. Mothers are very special people. Most of us only ever get the one - though some have two or three, of the "step" or "foster" variety. They're to be cherished.

Theirs is the most important job in the world. They carry us inside them for nine months and give birth to us. They love us and fret over us. They weep for us if we go astray. They glow with pride for us when we get things right.

They never stop worrying about us, however old we grow. That's a mother's burden. Ask Peggy Mitchell or Rosa di Marco of EastEnders, each lumbered with a brace of troublesome adult sons. A father's burden too, of course, though perhaps not to the same intense degree.

But although the essence of motherhood remains, the role of many mothers is changing. Once, they were almost always there for their children.

When I was five, and a timid new boy at school, an older boy teased me. So at playtime I went home (we lived just across the road from the school). There was my mother, in a kitchen filled with washday steam, to reassure me and send me back to face the rest of the day.

That was where mums belonged in those days, in the home. It was a great comfort to know that while you were coping in the classroom and playground, she would be back there in your place of safety doing all those routine mumsy things: washing, cleaning, sewing, cooking. That was the way things were.

Then the world changed. More and more mothers started to go out to work - sometimes because they wanted to, increasingly because they needed to as the cost of buying a family house rose ever more steeply, or because they found themselves raising their children single-handed.

The old certainties went, for both mothers and children. Instead of the mum in the home, often now there are complicated baby-sitting arrangements.

Pre-school infants see more of their child minders or nursery nurses than they do of their mothers. School-age youngsters find themselves being cared for by a range of friends and relatives during the holidays.

It's not ideal for the children. But nor is it ideal for the mothers, many of whom I'm sure would have things otherwise if it was possible.

So tomorrow let's raise a glass to all mums - to those of the older generations who were able to be there whenever their children needed them, and to those of the newer generations who would be there if they could.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.